Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Let me just quote back to you what the Auditor General said in 2000, Mr. McCain, about CFIA, in particular, and about HACCP, since you've just raised it. This is the CFIA they're talking about: “...the Agency did not maintain sufficient dialogue with stakeholders, particularly Parliament and the public”, including on the implementation of the hazard analysis critical control points, or HACCP, food safety systems. And there has always been considerable debate about the role being left to the private sector, in particular with respect to implementation of HACCP systems.
So as you talked about the HACCP system, the part of that that I think the public has some concerns about—and they may or may not be entirely justified, depending on where the situation and the plant is and who the operator is—is that the third-party inspector, CFIA, reduces its actual inspection role and allows, as you call them, the global best practices under HACCP to be done by the operators themselves. Sometimes there can be a disconnect between the public's faith in the operators, justified or not—and I'm saying this in a broad-based food process across North America, not at Maple Leaf in particular. So that becomes one of the points of contention, I think, around the HACCP issue: it's not so much that HACCP may indeed be more testing, because you can say, “Well, we only had one audit before, we may have multiple testing now during the year”, but it's who is actually doing the testing, who verifies it, who audits, and who does all those subsequent steps in the process. That's part of the question.
But let me go back to some of the things that I see in your opening remarks and the paper you put together. It talks about advocating, and I assume you mean by Maple Leaf, and I appreciate the leadership role that you're taking around this: “advocating and participating in industry-wide initiatives designed to raise”—and I emphasize the word “raise”—“the level of food safety practice among all companies”, and the leadership role you want to play in that. That's to be commended, and I think all of us want to see that happen right across all the food industries that provide us with food and manufacture it. But you go on to say that you're “not experts in government processes, and making policy is the responsibility of Parliament, but if these responsibilities”—one of which I just mentioned, and you have some others there as well—“require more resources for the CFIA, we would certainly support that”, which brings me to the nub, if you will, of the whole situation.
You talk about third-party inspection and audits that help your company. I'm not so sure if you meant CFIA, around a third party. You mentioned that someone does a third-party audit for you. I didn't know if that was in addition to CFIA, an outside party as well. But it seems to me that one of the things in all of this that we could get to, which actually takes some ownership away from the corporation, in the sense of inspection duty, and gives confidence back to the public, is this whole sense of third-party audit.
Now it may be unfair for the public to sometimes think that companies don't necessarily do it the way they're supposed to. There is a certain element of faith in a third-party audit, which says we don't have any distinct gain to be made by saying whatever about an inspection, whereas a company obviously has, around certain issues it produces. Whether that be in the auto sector or in the food sector, it doesn't really matter the sector, a company has an intrinsic value in saying, “We're the best at whatever”, whereas when we're inspecting something as delicate as food—and I use the word “delicate” in the sense of a car won't poison you, necessarily, but food can—we engage in a process....
I think what you're saying to us here, and I may be mistaken, when you talk about companies coming together to share their knowledge and to truly get global best practices—and I hope this country can be a leader in this, to be truthful—is that the only way you get trust back with the public is really through third-party verification at the beginning and at the end of that process, not somewhere in between, sort of taking snapshot samples here or there as the process goes by.
But I'm not so sure, even with your leadership, Mr. McCain, that your competitors may necessarily all come to this table of food safety and want to share all their best practices. Policy, through government, can indeed make them do that, whereas you don't have the ability, sir. And I know you probably wish you could, but you don't actually have that authority, as you mentioned earlier, but we do.
I know that's sort of a wide-ranging topic. If you could make some comments, I'd appreciate it.