Thank you, Mr. Chair.
It's a pleasure to be here. I'd like to thank the committee for inviting us. It's not our first submission, but it was our first time asking to come before you.
The coalition was formed 16 years ago. Our membership is composed of 32 national, provincial, and regional associations that represent businesses at every link in the supply chain, from input suppliers, primary producers, transportation, processing, manufacturing, distribution, and importing, to final marketers in export, retail, and food service. Our vision is that Canada’s agriculture, aquatic, and food industry will have a world-class reputation for producing and selling safe food. In brief, our mission is to facilitate the development and implementation of a national coordinated approach to food safety.
For this presentation, our members have two objectives. The first one is to ask the government to set out a five-year funding plan for its own food safety initiatives and for incentives to the private sector to invest in theirs. The second one is to ask the government to develop a comprehensive national food safety strategy in collaboration with the provincial and territorial governments, with industry, and with other stakeholders. Before I go into detail about these requests, I'd like to set out some of the broad context.
Canada is in the midst of modernizing its food safety legislative and regulatory systems, so as to catch up to our major trading partners and to assure comparability and equivalence in the future. The first step of this initiative was completed in 2012 with the passage of the Safe Food for Canadians Act. It replaces four acts and 13 sets of regulations with one act and one regulation. It dramatically expands CFIA's active surveillance to thousands of currently unregistered farms, manufacturers, importers, and exporters. It replaces a prescriptive regulatory approach with one that's focused on outcomes, prevention, and shared responsibility.
We expect to see the first official version of the new regulation within a few months and for it to come into force within the next year. This will complete the second step.
The third step is implementing this new food safety regime, which will require significant investments by both government and industry over the next three to five years.
To complete modernization, officials in industry have identified a fourth step for further changes. These include adding segments of the supply chain excluded from the current proposals, amending section 4(1)(a) of the Food and Drugs Act to bring it into compliance with the food and drugs act in the U.S., and consolidating the Safe Food for Canadians Act and the food components of the Food and Drugs Act within one statute.
Since our foundation, the coalition has been a strong supporter of food safety modernization, but we remain disappointed that over the past 16 years no federal government has articulated a clear national food safety strategy. The coalition firmly believes that Canadians, no matter where they reside or purchase their food, are entitled to the same level of assurances about its safety. In July, the provincial and territorial ministers of agriculture pledged co-operation in implementing the new regulations as part of the next agricultural framework. The time appears to be ripe to develop a comprehensive national food safety strategy.
As noted earlier, implementation will require significant new investments. The next budget presents a timely opportunity to make these investments possible. Our submission provides considerable detail, but I'll just cite a few examples. For food businesses, they're going to have to develop, implement, and update new preventive control plans; they're going to have to train their employees on the new requirements; they're going to have to establish traceability systems to facilitate recall; and there are going to be, in some cases, new capital investments required. For CFIA, they have to retrain their inspectors, recruit new staff with new competencies, ensure the regulations are uniformly applied, establish a monitoring program to assess effectiveness, and establish capacity to assist thousands of newly regulated businesses, particularly small and medium-sized enterprises. Health Canada has requirements to maintain its strong scientific capacity. The Public Health Agency also has requirements that we've set out in the document.