Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I have no idea what inspectors make wage-wise, but I'm sure you do. I heard from my colleagues across the way here about the amount of money their government has put into the system. So I've taken a gross approximation of what I think inspectors might make, doubled the 200, and said I'll give them 200 more to work in ready-to-eat facilities. And by my calculation, I come out with a number that's probably about 18% of the money they attributed to their new increase, if indeed we could quantify that. I'll take their word for it.
It seems to me, for 18% of the money they qualify for, we could have had a doubling of those inspectors inside ready-to-eat plants. The reason I concentrate on ready-to-eat plants is that one of the previous witnesses talked about food safety. In a sense, there's a difference between listeriosis in the ready-to-eat plant and listeriosis in other plants. You usually cook the other food. And according to those folks who have come before us, if you cook the other food thoroughly, you kill listeriosis. In terms of the ready-to-eat plant, clearly we don't necessarily cook the food after we receive it because it's cold meat, usually. So we're not cooking it again, unless we go back to the time we were poor university students and cooked the big slab of bologna we all used to have to eat.
Beyond that, for 18% of the money they come up with, it seems to me that's a pretty cheap fix for a food inspection system so we can tell Canadians to have faith in ready-to-eat food. I think it's incumbent upon us as government, as the CFIA as an arm of the government, to be able to tell Canadians that. As well, the professionals who work for the CFIA want to be able to say that. They want to be able to go home. They have neighbours, they have family, and they have friends who I'm sure say they know what they do for a living and ask whether they should buy this product.
Do you have comments about my sense of 18%, give or take a percentage or two?