Thank you, Mr. Chairman and members.
Thank you for inviting the Canadian Supply Chain Food Safety Coalition to appear during your hearings on this important subject.
The coalition was formed in December 2000 and incorporated in 2007 to act as a single, strong voice for industry along the food chain, together with the public and government, on industry-wide food safety issues. Our membership is composed of the national, provincial, and regional associations involved in the agrifood industry and the individual companies that provide services to that industry.
As you can see from the membership list attached to our submission, we represent organizations whose members encompass every link in the supply chain, from input suppliers through to primary producers, transporters, processors, manufacturers, importers, and final marketers at the export, retail, and food service stages.
Our mission is to facilitate, through dialogue within the food industry and with all levels of government, the development and implementation of a national coordinated approach to food safety to ensure credibility in the domestic and international marketplaces.
Over the past eight years we have been actively involved in consultations with ministers and officials at all levels, and in intra-industry discussions, about the future shape of Canada’s food safety system. We see the work of your subcommittee as a valuable opportunity to continue this work and to realize our vision: that Canada's agriculture, aquatic, and food industry will have a world-class reputation for producing and selling safe food.
In March of this year the coalition completed a year-long project to develop a national strategy for industry-led food safety programs. Copies in French and English have been circulated to you prior to this meeting.
The participating organizations, members, and non-members of the coalition who worked on this strategy determined that it should be grounded in a set of four guiding principles.
The first principle is that food safety is a shared responsibility of all participants in the supply chain, all levels of government, and consumers.
Our second principle is that governments at all levels, the agrifood industry, and other stakeholders should foster and facilitate the development of an integrated and coordinated and national approach to food safety policy and regulation, based on sound scientific risk assessment and risk management principles and international standards.
Our third principle is that industry and government food safety initiatives should encourage the implementation of HACCP and/or HACCP-based food safety systems by businesses all along the supply chain.
Finally, our fourth principle is that food businesses, governments, and other stakeholders have a responsibility to adequately resource and proactively manage, update, maintain, and continually improve their individual and collaborative food safety systems and food safety initiatives.
I'll touch on each of these principles in brief.
Businesses involved along the agrifood supply chain clearly recognize that they have a responsibility for food safety, which they share with governments and consumers. This is not a recent recognition or awareness; Canadian agrifood businesses and their associations have consistently and continually advocated this approach, especially over the past two decades of rapid change in the Canadian and global approaches to food safety. We ask you to endorse this principle of shared responsibility in your final recommendations.
We fully recognize that under our constitution, the jurisdiction for food safety is divided amongst the senior levels of government, and in some cases is delegated to the municipalities or other agencies within provinces and territories. However, our members and the agrifood businesses they represent firmly believe that Canada should have one national approach to food safety. Canadians, no matter where they reside or purchase their food, are entitled to the same level of assurances about its safety—assurances that should be based on common standards and expectations.
A corollary of this statement is that agrifood businesses within each link of the supply chain should be asked to operate according to common standards and expectations within and amongst the responsible jurisdictions. Our expectation of imported food products should, as a matter of course, be the same as our expectation of our national system.
Our national strategy sets out some very clear goals with respect to this principle. They include the need to revise the federal-provincial-territorial vision of a national approach to food safety, last looked at in 1994, based on an agreed set of principles. There is a need to establish a national decision-making mechanism for food safety policy and regulation in Canada. We need to clarify the role and the scope of national codes, industry-led food safety programs, food safety objectives, and other food safety requirements, and integrate food-safety-related discussions across departments within each government. We also need to open the lines of communication between government and industry groups in order to encourage collaboration on the future evolution of food safety policy, objectives, systems, etc.
We are aware that the federal, provincial, and territorial officials have been discussing the development of a national food safety strategy since at least 2003. In February of this year the agriculture ministers requested a food safety action plan. We are also aware that this national approach has been taken in Australia and within the European Union, and it is now under very active discussion in the United States. Models and best practices exist within federal systems with joint jurisdiction. These can be studied and perhaps adapted to our needs.
Therefore, we ask the subcommittee to strongly endorse this principle, the establishment of a national coordinated approach to food safety, in your report and make clear recommendations about the process by which it could be achieved.
Starting in the early 1990s, Canadian agrifood businesses and their national associations have cooperated with governments to develop and implement HACCP and HACCP-based food safety systems. You are aware that Canada was a pioneer in the field of HACCP and a major contributor to the development of the international approach through the Codex Alimentarius Commission. HACCP food safety systems have been implemented in federally registered establishments, in some provincial registered establishments, and in larger, more complex non-registered establishments. Canada has also been a pioneer in the development of HACCP-based food safety systems for micro, small, and medium-sized businesses that do not have the resources to develop and implement a site-specific HACCP food system.
Over the past 15 or so years we have seen the members of the coalition and other industry associations work closely with the federal, provincial, and territorial governments to develop and implement national HACCP-based food safety programs for almost every segment of the supply chain. For example, we now have 22 national HACCP-based, commodity-specific, on-farm food safety programs covering approximately 99% of primary production. For other segments of the supply chain, industry associations have developed or are in the process of developing and implementing at least 14 national programs.
The development of these initiatives has involved significant investments by individual agrifood businesses, by their industry associations, and by the federal government. So successful has this collaboration been that governments have renewed their funding initiatives under Growing Forward and the recently announced Canadian integrated food safety initiative for some of the key components of that collaboration.
Industry-led HACCP and HACCP-based food safety systems are now an integral part of Canada’s food safety approach. They are a necessary complement to the capacity of governments at all levels to engage in direct inspection and audit activities.
Our strategic document strongly endorses continued investment by agrifood businesses, their associations, and governments in both the implementation of these systems and in their continuous improvement. We ask you to endorse this concept--the implementation of HACCP and HACCP-based programs by businesses all along the supply chain--in your report.
Establishing principles is a first step. Developing the tools that are needed for a coordinated national approach is clearly a challenge, but a manageable one. But ensuring that these systems are adequately resourced, proactively managed, updated, maintained, and improved will be the real test of the Canadian approach to food safety.
Our national strategy sets out a number of goals and actions for industry, for other stakeholders, and for governments in this area. They include promoting awareness of the Canadian food safety programs; strengthening Canada’s food safety training and auditing infrastructure; increasing the pool of qualified food safety personnel; establishing quality consistency across food safety specialists, including consultants, trainers, etc.; and strengthening federal, provincial, and territorial support for industry-led food safety initiatives. We ask the subcommittee to endorse this principle as well and include recommendations concerning the resourcing of government food safety initiatives and concerning the development of the infrastructure needed to ensure that industry's activities can be updated, maintained, and improved.
In conclusion, the Canadian Supply Chain Food Safety Coalition would like to thank the subcommittee for asking it to make this submission. Your inquiry into food safety comes at an important time in the evolution of the Canadian system. As we have discussed, governments--federal, provincial, and territorial--are actively considering new food safety initiatives. As parliamentarians you are expecting amendments to the Food and Drugs Act to be introduced, I assume, in this session. Your recommendations will have a major impact.
We ask that you carefully consider our recommendations and the detailed contents of the national strategy for industry-led food safety programs, which we have tabled with you. They represent a strong consensus on the part of the agrifood supply chain and of our members about the future direction of Canada's food safety system.
As a final point, we would like to say on behalf of our members that the coalition is ready to engage further with this subcommittee or with other committees of the House as changes are made to the Canadian food safety system.
Thank you very much.