Thank you, Chair, and thank you to all of the witnesses for being here today.
It was interesting in the spring when we went over the commissioner's report with her and started looking at some of the fine details in it. The one troubling thing that I saw, which was cause to have you in for this meeting today, was the two departments' responses to the recommendation.
The recommendation is, “Fisheries and Oceans Canada and the Canadian Food Inspection Agency should clarify their roles and responsibilities for managing emerging disease risks to mitigate potential impacts of salmon farming on wild fish”.
I have to make sure I get the responses right because they contradict each other.
This is from DFO: “Agreed. Fisheries and Oceans Canada will continue to work collaboratively with the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, the federal lead for managing diseases of both farmed and wild fish....” Note that DFO identifies CFIA as the federal lead. CFIA's response is that CFIA “will work with Fisheries and Oceans Canada to develop and document a formal process to discuss and evaluate emerging diseases of concern to either government entity and decide which entity will assume which role or responsibility with regard to such diseases in order to protect wild fish.”
Fisheries and Oceans has said that CFIA is the lead role and then CFIA says you have to get together and sort that out still. Why is there the discrepancy in the response? Has there been progress made towards sorting out that discrepancy?