Mr. Bellavance, I think you're quite right, that we have a very uneven system in terms of food safety across the country and in terms of traceability at this point as well.
What the coalition is seeking is opportunities for governments and industry and other stakeholders to come to a consensus about where we should be trying to get to in the future. It may be that the best practices are currently enshrined in a provincial program in a particular province, or they may be best practices at the federal level already, or they may be best practices in what industry is already doing, which is ahead of federal, provincial, or territorial governments.
So we'd like to see that consensus-building, decision-making process, but you also have to understand that many food businesses function across provincial boundaries, and what they find themselves faced with is different sets of requirements in different provinces. Some may be industry-leading, some may be lagging behind, and others may be quite different. They may achieve the same objective, but they may require the company to do quite different things in order to get there, which means that those companies have to retool and redesign their food safety management practices in order to meet these different jurisdictions.
And it's not just an issue between provinces and the federal system. It can also be a matter of concern within provinces, where at some levels, in some provinces, jurisdiction has been devolved down to local regional authorities and you can, so I'm told by some of my members, without actually leaving greater Toronto, cross between food safety requirements on one side of a street that are different from those on the next side of the street.
So our desire, from an industry perspective—and this goes from the farm level all the way through to the final marketers—is to have as close to a consensus as we can on what those standards should be and the opportunity to meet them on an equal playing field across the country.