Health Canada, which is not us, plays an important role in certain food products and allowing them in certain processes that are allowed onto the market.
For our part, the CFIA doesn't do pre-approvals of food products or technologies, per se. What we do rely on are the international standards, and we're moving more to those standards in terms of what sorts of controls companies put in place. We're also moving more and more at looking to companies under our new proposed regulations—again, this is an internationally based way of doing it—leaving it to the companies to be more innovative and not stifle them. If they come up with new technologies or new methods of doing something, they can use these products if they've been appropriately scientifically validated.
In the past we have, and still have, examples of that in our regulations until the new regulations come in. We did approve certain things before they could do it and we put it in our manual. An example is the material that a dairy plant would have to be made from. It had to be stainless steel. That was limiting in terms of innovation. We would routinely get requests saying another country is able to use other material that has been demonstrated to be just as safe, but in Canada they couldn't.