Thank you, Mr. Chair. I will begin my presentation in French.
First of all, Mr. Chairman, I would like to introduce my colleague, Dr. Réjean Bouchard, Assistant Director of the Dairy Farmers of Canada. He is the person in charge of most issues having to do with food safety.
You have received a copy of my presentation and a PowerPoint presentation on the Canadian Quality Milk (CQM) Program.
Since we have so little time, I will focus mainly on the CQM Program. I will be making my presentation in English, but I will be pleased to answer questions in both official languages.
Mr. Chairman, the presentation in your hands also deals with other activities that Dairy Farmers of Canada is currently involved in related to food safety. These include traceability; the development of a biosecurity program for dairy farms; and in collaboration with other animal commodities, the elaboration of a national farmed animal health strategy, the publication of a code of practices for the care and handling of dairy animals, ensuring the absence of residues in milk, and assessing new metrics for the application of food safety measures through the whole food chain.
There are some words on those activities in my presentation, but as I said before, I will focus primarily on the Canadian quality milk program, which is the on-farm food safety program. Nonetheless, all of these activities are closely linked to food safety and demonstrate dairy producers' commitment to excellence in producing milk for Canadian consumers.
Over the last 10 years—or a little bit more than 10 years—DFC has collaborated with Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada and the Canadian Food Inspection Agency in the development of the Canadian quality milk program to provide producers with the necessary tools to address food safety and to demonstrate due diligence as an important element of food production.
CQM is an on-farm food safety program designed to help producers prevent, monitor, and reduce food safety risks on their farms. The program is based on the internationally accepted principles of HACCP—I'm sure you're familiar with the term—the hazard analysis critical control point, a science-based and proactive approach to food safety that focuses on preventing and minimizing the risk of food safety hazards. The CQM program identifies areas of critical risk and best management practices to help address those risks.
Producers in the CQM program strive to improve milk and meat safety on their farms by keeping permanent records to monitor critical control points and to address microbiological and chemical contamination, by following best management practices related to milk and meat safety, by developing standard operating procedures to identify tasks and responsibilities for each participant in producing and harvesting milk, and by developing corrective action plans to ensure that family and staff know what to do if something goes wrong.
Dairy producers in the CQM program closely monitor the following key areas of milk and meat safety: the milking of animals treated with veterinary drugs, dealing therefore with the prevention of residues in milk; effective cooling and storage of milk, thereby controlling microbiological growth; the shipping of animals, for the prevention of residues and physical hazards in meat; the use of livestock medicines and chemicals, again to prevent residues in milk; the rigorous sanitation of milking equipment, again for microbiological hygiene; and the assessment of wash water for microbiological parameters.
Producers also implement best management practices in other areas, such as manure management, feeding, animal identification, medicine and chemical storage, milking, as well as staff training.
The CQM program offers registration to producers who have implemented the program on their farms. Producers undergo an on-farm audit. Once they are registered, they are subject to regular audits to ensure they continue to meet requirements.
Led by Canadian Food Inspection Agency, the federal, provincial, and territorial governments have developed, through industry consultation, a recognition process: the on-farm food safety recognition program. The recognition program provides technical review of producer materials, technical review of management systems, implementation assessment, and ongoing monitoring. The CQM program achieved technical recognition of both its producer materials and its management system in 2006. It has also maintained its recognition status through ongoing monitoring by CFIA.
Dairy producers have recognized the value and strength offered by the CQM program to the industry as a whole and have set a national target of December 31, 2010, for all Canadian dairy producers to be registered with the program. Provinces are working toward the target, and the number of registered producers is growing quickly. Right now, 96% of all our dairy producers in this country have been trained in the program. Nationally, 10% of all producers have been registered or finalized in the process. In some provinces this number is over 90%. That would be in the smaller provinces, I'll admit. In other provinces this number is closer to zero because of the different steps required, particularly in Ontario and Quebec, which have introduced what we call TTR, a time temperature recording, on every single farm, and have gone through these steps. When they now start registering and validating producers and going through the whole process, you'll see these numbers going up fairly quickly.
Once this is achieved, Canada will be in a unique situation in the world by having all producers registered under a certified on-farm food safety program. Many of the countries around the world have it on a company basis, but using our collective system in Canada, I think it's going to be fairly unique to have mandatory on-farm food safety, with validation and audits and certification for all producers.
Due to its HACCP-base, the CQM program has the ability to respond to new science and new food safety demands. The program also has the flexibility to be integrated with programs developed by other food chain partners, such as truckers, processors, and retailers, to ensure that food safety is adequately addressed all along the food chain.
We have worked with the Dairy Processors Association of Canada. We recently organized a conference called “A New Approach to Food Safety”, which focused on the new metric systems of quantifying hazards for the whole food chain. The system is an extension of HACCP-based programs and addresses the entire dairy food chain.
This is where we are in terms of our industry in trying to merge all of the different food safety programs into one single program.
I will stop there, Mr. Chairman. I think my time is up, so I will be happy to answer any questions.