Thanks, Mr. Chairman.
Good afternoon, members of the committee and my fellow witnesses. Thanks for the invitation to appear today. This is an incredibly important issue for our industry.
I'm the executive vice-president of the Canadian Cattle Association. I've been working on regulatory issues for many decades, and it is one of those competitiveness issues that we are constantly focusing on. This past year, I'm proud to say, thanks to very strong market conditions, that we're back to being the largest source of farm cash receipts in Canada. That has a lot to do with our market access and our ability to market our product as the highest-quality grain-fed beef in the world.
I want to talk particularly about the Canadian Food Inspection Agency. They're our regulator, and they're charged with many parts of compliance for our industry—everything from meat inspection to some of the oversight on grading to process verification. I could go on on that. From our view, it's imperative that there's either a culture shift or a structural change to how those services are delivered.
While we're hearing about some of the reforms—and they're welcome, as we do work closely with the agency—when you apply the lens of an enforcement regulator to a quality assessment or working on a process verification, you actually need different skill sets for each of those if you're going to do it efficiently.
We're very interested in potentially looking at some restructuring. If you look at the United States, they have the AMS, the Agricultural Marketing Service, under the USDA. For the number of the approvals and their work on quality assessment, we've seen large numbers of approvals occur in months, whereas in Canada it takes years to get that done, and time is money when you're in the process of competing in these various markets that we're looking at.
As we have a look at this regulatory process, we approach it with a competitiveness lens as well. We truly believe Canada has some of the greatest potential in the world to increase our high-quality agriculture exports and will be one of the leading food producers in the world. We think it will actually drive some of the important competitive growth in our economy.
There are a few examples I want to point to, but I'll preface those with this. Last year, we exported 7 billion dollars' worth of beef and live cattle, and $6 billion of that goes to the United States. It just stresses the importance not only of that market itself, but also of regulatory alignment with that market.
We heard earlier about the movement on the specified risk material. We actually helped fund and worked closely with the agency on the risk assessment, but that's the easy part. Now we get into the regulatory change. How many years is that going to take if we don't put the right lens on getting that done when it certainly has a negative impact on our industry? We're confident that with the risk assessment we can move forward with those changes and still maintain our full market access around the world.
Regarding the “product of Canada” labelling, right now we have a requirement that the animals have to be in Canada for 60 days, just as an example. On the other hand, we just worked hard, going around the world to confirm that actual slaughter conveys origin. That's the basis on which we are arguing to get rid of the mandatory country of origin labelling requirements in the U.S. It's about getting consistency with the international requirements.
We heard about the harmonization of regulations on drug registrations with the U.S. Again, even when you get to generics, you're actually behind when the generics become available, and it becomes even more significant. We've seen good progress there, but we need to continue working actively on this.
I have mentioned the need for structural change. That is something we'd like to focus more on, but we can do that with some examples later in the question period.
At this time, I want to thank you for the chance to raise these issues, and I look forward to the conversation.