Thank you very much for the question.
I think there are a number of positive things the agency is proud of. Over the last number of years there have been significant investments in the area of food safety, launches of enhanced oversight programs to deal with fresh fruits and vegetables, the creation of inspection verification teams that ensure the high level of integrity within our system, and the adoption of a science-based approach to how we conduct our work and do our evaluations.
As the minister mentioned, we were very pleased to find that the report from the Conference Board of Canada, ranking us against the 17 other OECD countries, placed us in the number one position. There are always opportunities for improvement. We're always looking for ways to continue to strengthen our systems. As the minister mentioned, there was a significant investment to ensure that various food safety laboratories across the country, provincial and federal, are linked together so we can have real-time data sharing.
I know this committee primarily deals on the health space, but I do want to mention a very successful management of outbreak of avian influenza in Canada that occurred at the end of the last calender year. We've had some cases show up again in Ontario this year. Through good cooperation with the provinces and the excellent biosecurity programs that the government has invested in, as well as good cooperation with various producer groups, if you look at that particular challenge, it's had much greater success in Canada than our colleagues in the U.S. have had. In fact, they've sent in folks from the U.S.A. to look at our systems, to understand them and see how we can help them improve their own system. I think there has been a lot of things to talk about.
The final comment is in terms of our staff. Every year the Government of Canada does a public employee survey. We had participation in excess of 82%, which is the highest of any large federal department or agency. Around 90% of our staff indicated that they were proud of the work that they did at CFIA, and 95% said they were prepared to go the extra mile. To me, those are all indicators of a strong staff that does excellent work every day.
Thank you for the opportunity to talk about them.