Absolutely.
As we've heard from both of the other witnesses, the European Union has legislated more granular data. Here in Canada, we use just a vague market name that can apply to many different species as the only labelling requirement. In the EU, they also require a species name to get to that level of granularity so that they can manage individual stocks. They require geographic origin and catch method. Here in Canada I am really despondent given the fact that our industry is already complying with the European Union regulations to be able to export our seafood to that market, and yet we, as Canadians, don't enjoy that same level of transparency. We are eating trash fish from international markets being dumped into Canada without this level of transparency, while our own industry is already complying with it if they are exporting to the European Union.
I'm really disappointed to see this kind of gap between what was presented previously by the CFIA policy branch and their own scientists, because we published a paper with them about their inspectors collecting seafood coming into the port of landing in Toronto, at wholesale and at retail. What we saw was that about 20% of the samples they collected and we tested at import were mislabelled; nearly 30% of the samples at wholesale and retail were mislabelled, and closer to 40% of the things at actual retail were mislabelled.
What we're seeing is this problem compounding at each step in the supply chain, because there is essentially no regulation here in Canada, other than to report a vague market name, which may not correspond to any kind of wild entity.