I would like to come back to the issue of public confidence.
Like the vast majority of people, I have confidence in the quality of our food, fortunately. I do not know what people would do if they lost this confidence. However, with what happened last summer, we see that it does not take much to shake this confidence.
It is also a question of perception. We can accept that unfortunately accidents do happen, in the hope that no one dies as a result. Fortunately, that is not something that happens here very often. But we do see that it can happen here. We often hear that imported products are dangerous, and can cause disease and death. But it turned out that this was not true, that bad things can happen here as well.
Fortunately, people retained their confidence in our food, and of course I am very pleased about that. However, as I was saying, it does not take much to shake our confidence in our food products.
People talk about imported food all the time, not just since the establishment of this committee, but since I have been on the Agriculture Committee, since 2005. You just talked about it. Mr. de Valk said that inspections were carried out at the borders, and so on. That is true. You said, Mr. Doyle, that we could not inspect everything that comes into the country. That is true also.
However, I would say that both for our domestic products, and for our imported products, there is room for improvement. I hope you would agree with me on that, but you are entitled to disagree.
Mr. Doyle, I'm thinking particularly of a producer who told me that chocolate milk or a chocolate drink from China was being sold by Walmart. What is this product? Is it milk, and if so, is it of the same quality as the milk we have in Canada? It may be a different type of product. We saw what happened in China, where melamine was added to the milk, and so there are grounds for concern.
There are safety standards in China at the moment. The problem lies with the way they are enforced. It is possible that it may be more difficult to enforce these rules in some regions, and we have also seen that there are problems. Nonetheless, why is it that these products are ending up on our grocery store shelves? Tests were probably done and validated, but would it be possible to get a better idea of what this product is and to ensure it meets proper standards, because that is supposed to be what happens.
The fact is that I still have a great deal of concern about products of this type. I'm talking about China, but maybe questionable products from other places as well. They may even come from the United States, our neighbours, who also have rules, but who did manufacture food for animals that poisoned pets. I know pets are not human beings, but we are talking about food, and this was not a pleasant situation either.
I think there is room for improvement, and we have to determine what should be done. When an agency employee tells us he heard in the media that the Canadian Food Inspection Agency's budget would be cut by $24 million over three years, and that increasingly, inspections would be done by the industry itself, I think about people's confidence, which I was talking about earlier. It is dangerous to shake people's confidence.
The cost of hiring more inspectors and ensuring that the work is done right and that there are more inspections carried out, particularly at the border, is not that high compared to the economic cost that would be paid by our producers and processors if there were a loss of public confidence in our food system.
That was a long preamble, but I would like to hear everyone's views on this.