Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
My name is Terry Pugh. I'm the executive secretary of the National Farmers Union, based out of Saskatoon. I want to thank you very much for the opportunity to participate here.
A lot of our elected officials are still out seeding, unfortunately. I apologize for not having a written presentation in French. There will be a document. It has been circulated to the clerk and you will get that in a few days.
The NFU welcomes this opportunity to present its views on the issue of food safety to this committee. The NFU is a non-partisan nationwide democratic organization made up of thousands of farm families from across Canada, who produce a wide variety of commodities. Our mandate is to work for policies designed to raise net farm incomes from the marketplace and promote a food system that is built on a foundation of financially viable family farms that produce high-quality, healthy, safe food. We encourage environmentally sensitive practices that protect our precious soil, water, and other natural resources, and we promote social and economic justice for food producers and all citizens.
As family farmers, of course we are committed to a food system that provides safe and healthy food to people in this country and abroad. Food production is more than a business to us. We strive to ensure that the agronomic practices we use are safe and sustainable, and we welcome regulations that are designed to assist us in achieving those objectives. In fact, the vast majority of our members voluntarily exceed regulatory expectations in their efforts to produce safe food. Farmers are prepared, of course, to accept a reasonable cost, but it's important to ensure that costs are not unfairly downloaded to farmers. Food safety costs should be fairly shared by government and private industry as food safety and health is a social concern.
Farmers, of course, are one link in the food chain. Products of our labour and our land are destined to pass through many hands before they end up on consumers' dinner tables. The potential for problems, therefore, in the food system increases with each step along that journey. The trend toward large-scale highly centralized processing and distribution of foodstuffs over long distances has accelerated the probability that when food-borne contamination is not detected at its source, the results are disastrous and widespread. Of course, the tragic listeriosis outbreak, which occurred in 2008 as a result of unsafe processing facilities at the Maple Leaf plant in Toronto, profoundly shook the trust Canadians had, until that time, in their food system.
The NFU is a strong advocate of regulatory measures that put protection of the public at the top of the priority list. The NFU is strongly opposed to self-policing by food processing companies. Our policy, which is fairly long-standing, says food must be adequately tested, regulated, and inspected. These critical tasks must be performed by a sufficient number of adequately funded, independent, publicly paid inspectors.
At the most recent NFU national convention, which was held last November, a resolution was passed that called on the NFU to lobby the federal Department of Agriculture and Agri-Food and the CFIA, requesting first that plant inspection and testing be carried out by qualified CFIA inspectors and that the original number of paid government inspectors at meat packing and processing plants be also reinstated.
The Canadian public, of course, does not want industry to police itself. The poll conducted recently by Nanos, which was released on May 20, showed that 70% of Canadians believe Ottawa should invest more resources and be more hands-on in policing the safety of food. I think this tells us Canadians believe that the CFIA, in fact, should be the agency responsible for ensuring food safety and that the Government of Canada is where the buck stops. It's not necessarily the industry. We acknowledge the fact that the industry did take steps to move on the contamination when it was discovered. But really the buck doesn't stop with industry; it stops with the regulator.
The collapse, of course, of the financial system showed what the consequences of deregulation are. The financial system collapse, of course, devastated the economies of most of the world and destroyed the faith of many people in the so-called benefits of the free market and deregulation.
So the listeriosis tragedy fundamentally shattered the notion that food processing companies will always put the interests of their customers ahead of their bottom line. The process of deregulating Canada's food inspection and moving to a system of self-policing by food processing companies has clearly placed consumers at risk. Over the years there has been a gradual handing off of food safety oversight to the processing companies themselves, and the role and authority of the inspectors employed by the CFIA have been reduced dramatically. The testimony by Bob Kingston, I think, pointed that out very well.
The CFIA has had its budget cut over the years, and public food inspectors have seen their workload increase. Last year we saw the move to deregulate provincial meat inspection at slaughterhouses in Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and B.C. Before 2008, of course, federally registered meat establishments were required to comply with an annual mandatory full systems audit conducted by the CFIA. However, we've seen that a shortage of inspectors at the CFIA qualified to conduct these audits meant that this did not happen as often as required.
The Harper government further changed that in April 2008 by moving to the compliance verification system. As we heard from Bob Kingston's testimony, the compliance verification system itself would work in theory, but we do need resources behind that at the CFIA in order to make that actually happen properly. What has happened, of course, is that the compliance verification system has shifted the CFIA inspector's role increasingly off the plant floor and toward auditing paperwork. The Maple Leaf plant was not subject to a full systems audit for at least a year prior to the outbreak. I think that does speak to the importance of these audits.
We have over 800 federally inspected meat plants across Canada and only 1,100 fully qualified processed food inspectors and 230 meat hygiene vets currently on staff. So CFIA inspectors are stretched to the point where it's impossible for them to adequately monitor the facilities that they're responsible for. We've heard before that the inspector at that plant in Toronto was responsible for seven facilities at the time of the outbreak. This really points out that there are problems in trying to ensure that the system actually works as planned, or as it's supposed to. The union has shown that the staffing levels are well below the minimum levels required to properly conduct those meat inspections. There is, in fact, a critical shortage of those inspectors.
I think it would be a grave error to continue with the policy of industry self-policing. The reality is that it's necessary to increase the staffing levels and authority of CFIA inspectors to ensure compliance by private companies with those safety rules. In order to verify that companies like Maple Leaf are not cutting corners at the expense of Canadian consumers, the CFIA does need inspectors on the plant floor doing visual inspections of conditions that may lead to contamination and physically confirming that all the safety protocols and requirements are being respected. Under the current system of simply having CFIA inspectors rely on documents, that tells them, of course, that the company knows how to complete paperwork, but it doesn't really do an adequate job.
We've seen this process of deregulation also pop up in other areas that directly affect farmers. For example, in the Canadian Grain Commission we've seen grain inspections being shifted over to the private sector. We've seen the gradual cutbacks at the Canadian Grain Commission. We've actually seen the same process happen with the CFIA, where every year the amount of money that's set aside for the Canadian Grain Commission to properly inspect is always cut back, just like it is at the CFIA. That directly impacts on farmers, because it increases the potential liability for those farmers if there is contamination of grain in the bulk handling system.
We've also seen, just recently, that situation...the CGC, of course, is aggravated by another recent move to further reduce farmers' access to on-site inspection services. Earlier this spring it was announced that the CGC service centres in Brandon, Moose Jaw, and Melville, which all offered on-site inspections, will be closed. So this is a very important aspect of the food system as well.
We've also seen changes to the seed variety registration system that give increased decision-making power to seed and chemical companies, which basically control the genes that are going into many of the genetically modified seed varieties that are coming on the market. The system would allow them to put those varieties into the market a lot faster, without the same sort of testing and the same sort of insurance that the seed varieties would be equal to or better than existing varieties that are out there.
In conclusion, we really believe that the deregulation of the food inspection system jeopardizes the health and safety of consumers in Canada and abroad. We recommend the recommendations put forward by the food safety first campaign to hire additional inspectors, to put in a moratorium on industry self-policing policies, and to remove the obstacles preventing CFIA inspectors and veterinarians from taking immediate action on shop floors when they see violations at the processing plants. And we really think we should restore the system of public audit reports that was cancelled under pressure from the meat industry.
Thank you very much for that.