Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and honourable committee members.
I speak on behalf of the Canadian Council on Food Sovereignty and Health. This is a group that serves the Canadian public.
Paramount in every trade agreement is the SPS clause, sanitary and phytosanitary standards, that cannot be overridden by any trade agreement. We have already been compromising that clause under NAFTA, and if TPP passes, this will be horrible for the Canadian public, Canadian food sovereignty, our farmers, and our farmers' jobs.
The first casualty will be the milk industry where, according to this agreement, we have already agreed to open 3.75% of our dairy industry to the United States. That means that BGH that was not approved in this country will now be coming liberally into this country. That will be the death of our dairy industry.
It's not only one product. There are five other products in our food supply. Those are other hormones, antibiotics, slaughterhouse waste, genetically modified organisms, and pesticides. I worked at Health Canada for 35 years. I was the one who got rBGH stopped. This book is called Corrupt to the Core: Memoirs of a Health Canada Whistleblower. It's available to the committee members on DVD to take home. A shorter version of that is called “The Five Pillars of Food Safety” that I'm talking about. That article is here also. I will submit it before I leave.
Now we come to the actual TPP. Government websites are declaring openly and repeatedly that Canadian food sovereignty, Canadian food safety, will never be compromised. We consider that to be an untrue and false statement, because we are continuing to approve these five products, these five sets of products, by Health Canada contrary to the Food and Drug Act and regulations. This should not be permitted.
Mr. Lametti and I spoke about it in Guelph together on the same panel, and it is recognized we have to fix our home turf first. We have to make sure our food safety standards are never compromised. They are already being compromised. Before we move into any further trade agreement, we have to sort that out.
I'll be available for further questions to elaborate on this matter as to exactly how that is happening. There could be public litigation on that matter.
Thank you, sir.