The CQM itself is really a national system. It primarily involves Agriculture Canada and CFIA for that particular program. There is on-farm inspection at the provincial level in most provinces, and that continues. There is federal inspection as well, with regard to feed and other issues. The plants, whether you're registered or not registered, will have different inspection systems. So it's kind of a dual jurisdiction.
In your reference to listeria, that's not relevant to CQM; more so is the situation that has occurred with the cheese situation in Quebec. You had provincial interaction with the distributors and the manufacturers in particular. About a month and a half ago, with regard to imported raw milk cheese, which is under federal jurisdiction at that level because it's imported, they found on the market a number of imported cheese products with listeria. That became a bit of a media event--i.e., are the inspectors at CFIA more rigorous than the provincial government in Quebec has been in that particular case?
If you're asking my view on this, I'll be quite honest: you cannot inspect every single load. As much as I can support that we need more inspectors and we need to ensure that we have sufficient resources to carry the workload and the regulations that we have, it would not be realistic to think that every lot and every import of every product is tested, whether it's produced domestically or whether it's produced internationally. You have to do it through good random sampling, intelligent sampling. Obviously you're going to test more the problem cases that you've had in the past, and so on.
That's what I understand the agency is doing on imports. They test far more raw milk cheese than they would test maybe an old cheddar or an old cheese, for the reasons Réjean was talking about. The biological process would have pretty much taken care of most microbiological pathogens in any case.
Resources are scarce everywhere. It's scarce in the industry, it's scarce in the government. We all understand that. It's a question of being able to do the right job with what we have.