Thank you for the question.
In my opening address, I mentioned two of the major challenges we face. The first is the matter of scientific names compared to common names. Many of our suppliers tend not to use the Latin scientific name. The use of common names can lead to confusion, because some can refer to as many as 40 species. Not only that, but the Canadian Food Inspection Agency's fish list is difficult to update. And the CFIA list doesn't always match the lists of other countries. This is an everyday challenge for us.
Similarly, one can talk about the geographical origin rather than country of origin; there's a lot of confusion between the two. That's something we struggle with every day.
You also mentioned small suppliers, for whom traceability would require more time and money than expected. They have farther to go. Documenting these things could be more difficult for them.
Generally speaking, the industry would benefit from the introduction of an awareness program on scientific names or the difference between geographical origin and country of origin. More support is needed in this area.
Another factor that presents challenges every day is the need to systematically document the supply chain from boat-to-plate. We are unable to do this with the systems we currently have. We test our suppliers randomly. For a given product, we asked them to go from boat-to-plate in the supply chain and require them to tell us what the stages are, from the boat to the port, from the port to the processor and from the distributor to our own warehouse.
That means a lot of verification work for us. For the supplier, it requires a lot of documentation effort. It needs to be done systematically for all orders, all products and all catches. The systems we have at the moment simply don't allow us to do that.