Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you, Minister, and welcome to those from CFIA.
Mr. Minister, I'd like to touch on the CFIA website. It is actually their mission statement that says, and I quote, “Dedicated to safeguarding food, animals and plants, which enhances the health and well-being of Canada's people, environment and economy.” Under “Who Are We”, it says CFIA will “protect consumers through a fair and effective food, animal and plant regulatory regime that supports competitive domestic and international markets”. Those are quotations from CFIA's website.
Under testimony earlier at the committee, Mr. Minister, Ms. Swan had talked about the government's responsibility for setting strong standards to monitor the industry and holding them to account, and that the industry is really responsible for safe food in this country. That was her testimony at this committee.
Dr. Evans, on the other hand, said in a letter to the editor on April 29, 2009, that protecting the health and safety of Canadian families is the number one priority for the CFIA.
So let me frame it this way, through an expert panel report commissioned by the CFIA, as well as Health Canada, from the Royal Society of Canada. It says:
If the same government agency that is charged with the responsibility to protect the public health and environmental safety from risks posed by technologies also is charged with the promotion of that same technology and if its safety assessments are, by official policy, balanced against the economic interests of the industries that develop them, this represents, from the point of view of both the public and the industrial stakeholders, a significant conflict of interest.
Mr. Minister, I think none of us would disagree here that most Canadians actually believe that food safety is the ultimate responsibility of CFIA--not quite what it says as its mandate.
What I guess Canadians are looking to us, the ministry, and the CFIA for is that not only do they have the technical ability and the competence and the people and the resources to do the job, but indeed that's its sole mandate. But clearly--and I'm talking about the Canadian public--the CFIA mandate is a dual purpose one. At its core it says public safety and economic viability for the stakeholders.
If you could, comment on that sense of how we balance the two. How do we on one hand have the same group look after our safety, and at the same time, the same group--not different people--goes out and promotes the industry as a whole to make sure that it actually can prosper? Is that really the way we should be doing it when it comes to public safety?