In fact, it's the opposite. We're worried about the ones that we have built over the last few years and that are closing down because they're not competitive.
For a long time, we have been an advocate of regulatory harmonization. Regulatory harmonization is not all about food safety. A lot of it is about competitiveness. What would top my list would be the enhanced feed ban, the SRM removals. Canada needed to enhance our feed ban and we did it. I think we went a little far on it, in that we've basically oversold it.
The Americans are starting to catch up. They're implementing their enhanced feed ban. In fact, they have technically implemented it. It is in force, but they're not enforcing it for another six months, I believe, and even when it is fully enforced, they don't have to remove all the materials that we do, and they can still use them in fertilizer.
One of the requests that we have made is for the minister to work towards harmonizing with the U.S. and to give us the ability for fertilizer to come back. We're not convinced that there's going to be a lot of transmission from people who are spreading the fertilizer they buy at Home Depot on their backyards in Toronto. It would be very valuable to have that back.
There are issues related to veterinary drug approvals. I think one of the witnesses talked about veterinary drugs that can be used in other countries, but not necessarily here. There are a lot of veterinary drug companies that don't bother to apply for approvals in Canada because of the length of time and the cost to get them approved in Canada. For the size of the market that Canada is, it's sometimes not even worth the bother of applying.
It doesn't mean that those products aren't safe. Our competitors are using them. If we had a regulatory system that could facilitate or streamline that approval process without sacrificing.... I'm not talking about making any concessions or doing anything to jeopardize safety. But if other countries have approved certain products, maybe we don't have to start at square one all the time.
Another issue is user fees, for example, to have food safety officials in Canadian slaughter facilities. They're providing a public service to do that food safety inspection, and those slaughter facilities in Canada pay the cost of those food safety inspectors back to the government, whereas in the U.S. that is deemed as a public service and the U.S. government provides that service. So again we have a cost imbalance.