Health Committee on April 6th, 2017

[Colin Carrie, Conservative, Oshawa, ON]

—these patients, many of them, have cancer. They have AIDS. My concern is that the demand has increased exponentially in the last few years.

I don't want to give you a hard time because I know it's all about the priorities of the government and how much money.... I didn't notice in the estimates any extra money that you're given to do these inspections, but I think that if we're mandating Health Canada for the health and safety of Canadians and we know that this is being given to patients who have cancer, who have AIDS, and who are immunosuppressed, it behooves us to ensure that those products are being tested, and not just randomly. If they are, I'm just curious: how many times have you actually tested them?

[Simon Kennedy]

I would be very happy to provide the stats. I don't have them immediately available.

With regard to the issue of hydrogen cyanide, though, and the presence of that, just by way of illustration, the amount of hydrogen cyanide you get from burning and inhaling marijuana smoke—which is what there is if you're smoking it—is in the order of 500 to 1,000 times higher than the levels that were present as a result of the pesticide residue. When you look at what's the risk presented in terms of things like hydrogen cyanide, there is actually quite a bit more just from smoking marijuana than was actually in the residue.

We are concerned, as you and others are, about whether producers are complying with the rules, so we're doing this regime to get a better handle on whether this is a more systemic problem or an isolated incident, but we are very confident that in this case there has been limited evidence to date that it's anything more than an isolated incident. The risk to Canadians was extremely low. There were recalls initiated, we know, because the licensed producers have lists of clients. We were able to reach everybody.

From a material point of view, does this present a serious risk to Canadians? All of the evidence would suggest no. In terms of where we would put additional resources at this point, we want to start with the randomized testing to get a better handle on whether or not it's a broader problem.

[Colin Carrie, Conservative, Oshawa, ON]

I appreciate the answer, but the last time we asked Health Canada to get back to us, I think it took about six months or something, right?

[The Chair, Liberal, Bill Casey]

You're down to a minute. Do you want to share with Mr. Webber?

[An hon. member]

Go ahead.

[Colin Carrie, Conservative, Oshawa, ON]

My colleague wanted to know if it's going to be six months before we get those numbers.

[Simon Kennedy]

I'll certainly try to get back to you as quickly as possible. I can make that commitment now.

[Colin Carrie, Conservative, Oshawa, ON]

Yes, please, if you could.

With the couple of seconds I have left, for the funding used as a bargaining tool to encourage provinces to sign on to the health accord, I was wondering what the federal government does to ensure that the funds designated to support mental health and home care initiatives will not be used for other health care priorities.

We realize that this budget has totally moved things to the back end, but as we work with the provinces and territories, are there things you have in there that will ensure the funds designated for health care and home care get used for health care and home care?

[Simon Kennedy]

Certainly, the government has been pretty clear about that in its public statements and in what the minister has said publicly and with her colleagues, and certainly the instruction I would be operating under as an official is that this is the objective that we want to see achieved.

We have been talking to the provinces and territories around how they wish to spend the money in those priority areas, and then how we would account for that publicly: what kinds of indicators would we use to demonstrate that this was happening? That is certainly the objective, and we'll be trying to pursue that.

[Colin Carrie, Conservative, Oshawa, ON]

Okay.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bill Casey]

Time is up.

Mr. Davies.

[Don Davies, NDP, Vancouver Kingsway, BC]

In June 2016, Mr. Paul Mayers, the vice-president of policy and programs of CFIA, testified to this committee that CFIA inspectors are present every day and during every shift in federally regulated meat slaughter plants. He said, “CFIA inspectors visit those plants every day, every shift but they are not present 100% of the time. It is an inspection done every single shift.”

In June of 2016, Mr. Bob Kingston, president of the Agriculture Union, indicated to this committee that the statement made by Mr. Mayers was false. Now in response, CFIA clarified that:

...while its targets are not met in all cases 100% of the time, it operates at or close to target a significant majority of the time. The nature of CFIA's operations is impacted by fluctuations in demand for service, response to emergent events and occasional challenges in filling vacancies promptly.

Leaving aside the question of the discrepancy in testimony, in the 2017 departmental plan, CFIA indicates that it intends to reduce full-time-equivalent positions in the food safety program over the next three years. Given that it's recognized that inspection staff have already been scratched and are certainly not present in all shifts for meat inspections at slaughter plants, how do you anticipate this cut will affect the delivery of program direction?

[Paul Glover, President, Canadian Food Inspection Agency]

It's very important, and I appreciate the opportunity to follow up on my response to the committee and to provide further insight into this important issue. I have two parts to the answer if I may.

Inspector numbers do fluctuate. I'm happy to be more transparent about them. We intend to put those up on our website on a regular basis. Seasonal activities, summertime, are more intense. We'll have more seasonal inspectors for cash crops, those sorts of things. Most recently over the winter months with the bovine tuberculosis outbreak there was a need to reassign resources to deal with that emerging issue. So the numbers do move. That is part of the reality and an expectation of this committee that we are nimble and moving to where the risks are to best protect and serve Canadians. So we will do that absolutely moving forward in as transparent a way as we can to make sure that people are confident about what risks they are seeing and where we are deploying our resources.

With respect to adjustments to our budget, I can assure the committee that all of them are related to sunsetting programs, to time-limited initiatives like the introduction of electronic service delivery platforms. Where we used to manually do import and export certificates, those are now being automated, done online. People are able to self-serve so that we don't have to have people doing that. We have a number of resources dedicated to standing up of those sorts of infrastructure. There was also money to invest in our labs. The reductions are planned. They are related to sunsetting programming, and we are making every effort to preserve our inspection resources and prioritize them and not touch them with any of the reductions moving forward.

[Don Davies, NDP, Vancouver Kingsway, BC]

Mr. Glover, are you saying there will be no reductions in FTEs for meat inspectors?

[Paul Glover]

As I said earlier, those number will fluctuate. We do see retirements. In some instances there will be difficult-to-staff areas. We're happy to to be accountable, show you where those numbers are moving. Our objective is to prioritize and not reduce front-line inspection activities, absolutely.

[Don Davies, NDP, Vancouver Kingsway, BC]

Thank you.

Mr. Kennedy, I think you may be the right person to ask about the health accord. The minister made reference to several billion dollars of federal money being transferred to the provinces for mental health. Are there any conditions attached to ensure that the provinces will spend that money on mental health?

[Simon Kennedy]

That's the conversation we're having right now with the provinces and territories. In the announcement the government made as it reached funding agreements with each province and territory you would have seen, perhaps, a discussion about how the next step is to sit down and—this is my paraphrasing—figure out how we're going to spend the money, what the targets and indicators will be. The objective is to ensure that those funds go toward mental health and home care. We will be working on a multilateral agreement with the provinces and territories to put down how we would see reporting working collectively as governments and how we will set priorities. Then the objective is, with each jurisdiction, to have a kind of bilateral agreement, almost an annex to the broader, multilateral document that specifies, let's say in B.C., how B.C. is going to spend that money on home care, on mental health, and have that level of specificity.

[Don Davies, NDP, Vancouver Kingsway, BC]

Mr. Kennedy, it sounds as though the agreements are not done yet. What if you can't reach agreement on that? The minister has announced that we've come to an agreement with nine provinces, so we've done the agreement; we get the fanfare and the media, and here's the amount of money that we're giving to them. But if one of the provinces says it's not committing to spending that money for mental health or mental health necessarily, what happens to the agreement?

[Simon Kennedy]

What I can say is that to date, frankly, there has been very good collaboration with the provinces and territories. I can speak only as an official, but at the level of deputy minister and senior officials, there have been lots of conversations over the last 14 or 15 months. Indeed, we've had great suggestions and great discussions with the provinces and territories about what they'd like to see, for example, in the area of mental health.

Focusing on youth is something the provinces and territories actually said was a big priority for them.

[Don Davies, NDP, Vancouver Kingsway, BC]

Could you envision them coming to an agreement?

[Simon Kennedy]

I think so. Yes. Obviously, there is more water to go under the bridge, but we've had great discussions to date. I think every signal was that the provinces and territories were anxious to get moving.

[Don Davies, NDP, Vancouver Kingsway, BC]

Are there actually written documents, written agreements with each province, that exist now? Is there anything that has been signed by each province as a condition of signing on to the health accord? Also, could we get a copy of those?

[Simon Kennedy]

There are the announcements that have been made jointly with the various provinces and territories on the funding issue, which is an agreement on the funding levels.

We are now working on what you might call the documents related to the content. For example, just to take things province by province, our objective is that we will have a signed agreement with B.C., an annex to the kind of broader framework that would say, “here's what we're going to do in B.C.” We're working on that.

I'm not going directly from here to a meeting with B.C., but we've been working on that all along, and the objective would be that in the next short order we would have those signed.

[Don Davies, NDP, Vancouver Kingsway, BC]

Have any been completed between the federal government and any province to date?

[Simon Kennedy]

None have been yet, and that's been a function of the discussions that have been ongoing about the money, leading up to the budget. We've been waiting until the budget step was done. We're now actively going back and having that conversation.