I believe you're referring to the studies that were conducted by non-governmental organizations such as SeaChoice and Oceana. Is that correct?
It's certainly understandable that there may be questions with respect to the differences in the amount of misrepresentation or non-compliance that's seen in both studies. First, I would like to point out that it's important to keep in mind the methodology that was used for both studies. While I don't have information on how those studies were conducted, what their sampling size was or what their overall target was, these are very important parameters to keep in mind. How the sampling was designed can influence the results.
The CFIA understands that the samples collected by Oceana and others were taken from restaurants as well as retail, whereas the CFIA samples were collected from retail stores as well as at the domestic processing and importing levels. We focused our work in the upstream part of the supply chain, while Oceana and others focused their efforts at the other end of the supply chain, so you can see there could also be some differences there.
How they also determined non-compliance needs to be understood. While I don't have that information, from the CFIA's perspective, the non-compliance was based on our regulatory requirements in comparison to our guidance in the fish list. There may have also been different testing used. We don't know what testing methods were used in all of those studies, though the use of DNA testing is currently the gold star that many use. It's important, from a regulatory perspective, to ensure we're comparing apples to apples.