Good evening. My name is Bob Kingston. I am the national president of the Agriculture Union.
Before going on a leave of absence to serve as an elected union officer, I spent 25 years as a CFIA and Agriculture Canada inspector, including 15 years as a multi-commodity supervisor.
For the Agriculture Union, two themes emerge from the amendments to the Seeds Act and the Health of Animals Act proposed in Bill C-38.
The first can best be summed up by quoting the British statesman and philosopher, Edmund Burke, who once said that those who don't know history are destined to repeat it. Let me explain.
Bill C-38 would amend the Seeds Act to privatize the seeds program, including inspection. The CFIA president will issue and revoke licences for private companies to whom this responsibility is handed off. This presumes that the CFIA will be in a position to set standards for these companies, and enforce those standards through oversight, except as in this case, CFIA often designs systems without considering the resources required to properly monitor the systems they put in place.
For example, we can look at the Maple Leaf Foods listeriosis outbreak in the late summer of 2008. The Prime Minister appointed Sheila Weatherill to find out why the outbreak occurred and to recommend ways to prevent another.
Just before the outbreak, the CFIA had implemented a new inspection system called the compliance verification system, or CVS, a fact that was central in Sheila Weatherill's report. Let me quote what she had to say about CVS. The CVS was “implemented without a detailed assessment of the resources available to take on these new tasks”. She also found that the CVS was flawed and in need of “critical improvements related to its design, planning and implementation”.
Ms. Weatherill recommended that the CFIA make sure that its resources and inspection processes are in alignment; in other words, make sure you know how many inspectors and other resources you need to make your systems work properly.
With all of the positions being cut at CFIA, they simply do not have the resources to take on the oversight required by the proposals in Bill C-38, especially when you consider the other new systems the agency is currently developing, also without regard for available resources.
For example, the agency is putting in place a new regulation to license all food importers. This may or may not result in safer imported food, but without additional resources to monitor compliance and enforce standards, we'll never know. Regulations without enforcement capacity are worse than no regulations, and the new licence system may become little more than an unattended paper exercise.
As Mr. Burke would advise, remember the lessons of the Maple Leaf outbreak when considering new systems at the CFIA. There are many examples like this, but none more serious than what happened at Maple Leaf, which was pretty serious.
However, time is short, so I'll move to the second theme, which is the secrecy around the decisions related to the budget.
Changes at the CFIA arising from the budget were decided in secret. This was unfortunate because many senior managers at the agency have little expertise or experience in the industry they regulate, meaning that the wisdom, knowledge, and experience of their front-line experts would have been invaluable in making those decisions. Without that expertise, decisions were made that could have serious consequences. Let me give you an example.
Because of budget cuts, the agency has decided to close its plant quarantine facility at Saanich on Vancouver Island and move the operation to Summerland, in the heart of the wine and fruit industry in the B.C. interior. If made in the open, this decision would have raised red flags among those involved with plant health or fruit production in B.C. Even the expert industry-government advisory group, the British Columbia Plant Protection Advisory Council, was not consulted, and still hasn't been.
This is a post-entry quarantine station where plants are grown for years while being checked for diseases before being released into the regular production environment. South Vancouver Island is a good place for it because of its natural isolation characteristics. This decision will put potentially diseased plants in the middle of one of Canada's richest agricultural regions.
In addition, the Summerland facility will have to be expanded and land purchased, costs that will offset potential savings. As well, the current site cannot be sold by the government as it is locked up in aboriginal title.
We have other concerns about the proposed amendments to the Health of Animals Act, as well as several other things going on right now in the agency, but time is short, so I guess I'll have to hope there's a question.