Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Regrettably, the Prime Minister didn't appoint me as president of the CFIA last week, so I really can't provide you with a good answer on your initial question about the relocation of a CFIA office.
To get to the broader question, Canada has a really good reputation for producing safe food. Over the past two decades, the world has changed. The expectations as to what governments should be doing and what industry—from the farm all the way to the processing sector and beyond—should be doing to assure consumers of food safety have changed significantly. We are trying to catch up now with where the Europeans, the Americans, the Australians, and the New Zealanders have gone, where our major competitors in the export market already are. We are now trying to catch up in both regulation and industry activity.
We have an industry that has been strong. There are just under 7,000 food companies registered with FDA as exporters of food. That's more than we have in Stats Canada's last survey of where the food processors really are in Canada, but when you look at it from another perspective, fewer than 50 of those firms have 500 or more employees, and only 450 or so have between 100 and 500 employees. All the rest are medium, small, or micro-sized firms, and they are going to be playing catch-up in order to preserve their access to the retail markets, to the food service markets, and to the global or continental market.
There is going to be significant change, which industry supports. It goes right down to your potato growers in P.E.I. and all the way up through the chain. We are looking for some investment by the government to ensure that we are going to have an inspectorate that is competent and in sufficient numbers to handle these significantly larger numbers of companies that are going to be involved. We are looking at some opportunities, especially for small enterprises, the ones with 1 to 50 employees, to be able to upgrade their systems, put in the new regulatory requirements, and make the changes they need. We are looking for some incentives there.
If we don't do those things, we'll have trouble demonstrating comparability with the Americans or others in the global marketplace in terms of our regulatory system and inspection system, and we'll have trouble meeting the requirements from an industry perspective to meet those markets as well.