Thank you, Mr. Chair. My friend Mr. Shipley raised the issue about a witness who was here earlier this week, Mr. Charlebois, who used the analogy of the hospital and an abattoir—I think erroneously so, to be honest. I think he does a disservice by doing that, because the assumption is that somehow food safety should be considered less than a hospital stay.
I don't agree with that, because ultimately a hospital is about sanitation and looking after those who are chronically ill. They're unfortunate to be in that situation, but it's still about sanitation. Why should we suggest that somehow the food system should be less sanitized than the hospital situation? More folks died last year than died in the average hospital, when you think about it. Ultimately when we're thinking of sanitation, I think to use the analogy sets up, as Mr. Wilcott said, this sense in people's minds that you are inferring that it's harder to run an abattoir than it is to run a hospital. Well, first of all, an abattoir doesn't have surgeries. We don't confine the hogs or cows to a ward. It's a processing plant. So I think that analogy was flawed from the get-go.
Nonetheless it raises an interesting point when people repeat it, because it assumes we should think about food safety differently than we do about the health care system, and somehow that's here and this is here. I don't think that's true when it comes to sanitation. It should be on par. One of the things we did learn and that I'm hearing from all of the witnesses is that the system needs to be, from producer to fork, safe. One of the things that does happen all the way through the system is handling. Everyone's handling the product all the way along.
Whether it be the farmer, who is doing an excellent job, whether it's the trucker or the stocker of the shelves, whether it's in the abattoir or in the poultry processing plant, everything's being handled. So why aren't we saying that their sanitation standards should be equal to the standards for those who are handling patients? They're simply transmitting different types of pathogens one way or the other. I think we do a disservice when we do that. I'm not suggesting, Mr. Dungate, that you did that. You didn't, just to make that clear.
You talked about the regulations and the burden. I would suggest to you that there are producers in this world who are looking at us and saying that we raised the bar and kept them out. We're saying to them, “You raised the bar some other place and kept us out.” But here's what the industry has said to us so far during this committee. Whether it was Michael McCain or some of the other bigger producers, they are saying in testimony that the voluntary standards in their plant are higher than what the CFIA requires.
I may be wrong. Maybe I'm hearing it wrong, Mr. Dungate, that somehow the CFIA's standards are higher than what the plants feel they should be doing. Was I being misled when I heard that? Was it spin or is it factual?