Mr. Chair, I want to begin by congratulating the minister on his appointment two months ago. We all recognize that he has been thrown in at the deep end with this second case of mad cow.
It needs to be pointed out that the tenor of the debate tonight is in part a reflection of the number of emergency and special debates that we have had in the House of Commons over the last seven years dealing with agriculture. We seem to come back to it time and time again because we do not seem to get the resolutions to the problem. I appreciate that BSE is a separate issue but I think it is a reality, whether it was the AIDA program, CFIP, or some of the other problems we have been going through, drought and other things, we talk about it but we do not ever seem to come up with a solution that would satisfy people and allow us to move on.
What has happened obviously has amounted to an annus horribilis . We had one Canadian cow last May and then just at a time when it looked like the border might be on the verge of reopening to live exports, there was the cow in Washington state that also had a Canadian connection.
There is some optimism. The minister reflected it again tonight in his remarks about the peer review panel in the United States. Many farmers believe that it will not be until after the election in the United States in November that the border will reopen to live cattle exports.
Someone who is very knowledgeable on the mad cow issue said to me earlier this week that BSE is a disease that has had little effect on animals and little effect on human health, in fact none that we are aware of in this country, but has had a massive negative effect on the economic health of rural Canada. That is why we are here tonight. We are talking about the devastating results, the $2 billion hit and counting. The young cattle over winter which have been referred to by others, calves are selling for 50¢ a pound and cull cattle are perhaps fetching 7¢ a pound.
We have seen hundreds of millions of dollars from the federal government and other provinces pour in to try to fix this. We acknowledge and recognize that precious little of that money has actually reached the people who need it most. My colleague from Acadie—Bathurst referred to the smaller farmers, the cow calf operators, the people who background and finish the cattle, seem not to have received the money whereas the packers appear to be laughing all the way to the bank.
Last June the federal government agreed to step up the testing. That was one of the recommendations from the international panel of experts. Brian Evans of the Canadian Food Inspection Agency talked about inspecting between 60,000 and 80,000 head of cattle. While we are moving in that direction, we are certainly not going to be anywhere close to it. In fact three or four years from now, we may be at 30,000 as I look at the statistics.
There are some different ideas about what kind of testing for mad cow we are going to use. Currently we are using what is referred to as the gold standard. There are some that take up to a week and for the industry, that appears to be too long. The Swiss rapid test is also being considered which reduces the time significantly. As I understand it, the CFIA is committed not to do testing at the slaughterhouse; it wants to do surveillance testing and that should start with older cattle and obviously downer cows.
More and more people are saying that we should follow the Japanese and test every animal. Perhaps they are right, although I tend to think that we do not need to test animals that are younger than 24 months, perhaps 30 months. The U.K. test at 24 months; France and a number of other European countries test every animal over 30 months of age.
The National Farmers Union has forecast that BSE testing of all animals would actually add less than 1¢ per pound to the price of a hamburger and insisted that is a small price to pay to be assured of safe food. Who could argue with that, given the hit that has been taken by the industry.
In addition to more testing, the international panel of experts also called for a ban on specified risk materials which was implemented promptly by the government. It also recommended banning all animal to animal feed. As everybody here is aware, the ban on animal to ruminants came into effect in August 1997. It is interesting to note that both of the cows that tested positive for BSE were born in 1997 but prior to the August date.
As was noted earlier, the Americans did ban the blood protein to cattle along with poultry litter and table scraps. The latter two were banned by Canada sometime ago. We have not yet followed up on the blood protein but I gather that our scientists are looking at that issue.
Let me turn for a moment to the integration of the North American cattle industry. I think that Canadian cattle producers are fond of saying that it is a North American herd but I am not sure that a lot of American ranchers feel that it is a North American herd. I would supplement that argument by referencing what Senator Tom Daschle said which was read into the record earlier, and that is why I think we are going to have some difficulty seeing the border open before the U.S. presidential election in November.
It seemed to me last summer in the early rush after the first mad cow was discovered that our farmers and ranchers did not want the Canadian government to do anything that would put them out of step in any way with what was being done in the American beef industry. The Canadian Cattlemen's Association and others are quite happy to go in lockstep with whatever the Americans are doing. They would not want, for example, to eliminate the bovine growth hormone or test a lot more cattle or ban all animal to animal feed.
In summary, I think that the industry is far too integrated for its own good or probably for this country's own good.
The agriculture minister once removed used to brag about Canadian products being the safest in the world. Most of us believed that and perhaps we still do. While Canadians still have tremendous confidence in food safety as evidenced by the rise in beef consumption following May 20, I do not think we are bragging about it the way that we used to. We recognize that there are some difficulties. Time does not permit me to make reference to the Vancouver Sun access to information on the conditions of many of our meat packing plants but it should be required reading because it is very sobering material.
We in this party have been very concerned for a long time about the reduction in meat inspections and inspectors and the trend to more self-regulation. A lot of members on the agriculture committee are here tonight and they know better than I do about the HACCP program that is coming in. That would result in actually fewer federal meat inspectors doing less frontline work and more auditing of the work being done by the companies' own inspectors. In the wake of this issue and the impact that it has had, we need to think very carefully about whether we should be reducing frontline meat inspectors who are employed by the government at this time.
In defence of the employees who work for CFIA and the department, by any objective standard our response to the discovery of mad cow last spring was head and shoulders above what happened in the United States in terms of identifying the other animals in those herds, in terms of ear tags and other things. It is important for that to be on the record.
What we need is money going to the industry from the Government of Canada to assist at this time of crisis so that the industry can go forward. We need to do that very promptly.