Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman, for the opportunity to join you here today.
My name is David McKeown and I'm the medical officer of health for the city of Toronto. For context, Toronto Public Health—the organization that I lead—provides public health services to the 2.6 million people in the city. Our responsibilities include surveillance for food-borne illness, delivering local food safety programs, and of course, responding to outbreaks. We're the largest organization of our type at the local level in Canada.
In April of this year, I issued two reports on food-borne illness and on food safety in Toronto. In these reports, I made a number of recommendations for improving food safety. Those recommendations were adopted by the Toronto Board of Health and they have been sent to the organizations and governments to whom they are directed. I have copies of the reports here for you today that I hope you will find helpful.
In my time here today, I'd like to talk about the issues and recommendations that I raised in these reports, which pertain to the food safety role of the federal government and its agencies. But first, let me very briefly outline the burden of food-borne illness in Toronto, which I think is broadly representative—