There were two issues I wanted to speak to. The first has to do with the double standard.
I would reiterate what Dr. Usborne has said, but until we resolve this issue, I think there should be a single standard. We are going to always face problems in terms of imported products coming into Canada that meet the provincial but not the federal standard. If they're manufactured in Ontario, they can't be sold in Manitoba, but they could come from China and be sold from one end of this country to the other. That has to be straightened out, because we are signatories to the WHO agreements on sanitary and phytosanitary standards.
The second thing was that about 45% of the food in Canada is inspected by the federal government. Sorry, that number is reversed: it's 55% of the food is inspected by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency. Things like cereals, cooking oils and spices, are not inspected by anybody. If you guys think that inspection is going to be the be-all and end-all of food safety in this country, think again.
The third thing was to provide information with respect to food-borne illness surveillance programs that are currently in place. FoodNet is a program in the United States. It has ten sentinel sites and monitors the health of 45 million people, like Todd used to do in Canada. We have a fledgling system in Canada, operated by the Public Health Agency of Canada. It's monitoring the health of one million people in the Kitchener-Waterloo area, and they're moving forward to set up another sentinel site, which may come about this year in Alberta and/or British Columbia.