Mr. Speaker, my colleague is absolutely right. We do meet with the Canadian Food Inspection Agency many times at committee. The minister earlier, in response to my similar question, said there are resources in the budget to cover added personnel for the Canadian Food Inspection Agency.
That is a positive thing if the added personnel are there to be able to do the job adequately. But as my colleague notes, it is not just a matter of having more personnel to do the inspections, it is a matter of the extra cost burden that Canadian farmers have in order to pay some of the cost recovery fees for these inspectors that our fellow farmers in the United States do not have. They cover their costs for food, health and safety for their farm community. We put a cost recovery fee on Canadian farmers that puts them at an unfair disadvantage.
We tabled an all party committee report in December and we asked the government, in terms of the beef and hog crisis, to take on some of these costs and to take them on seriously. It failed to respond in that regard. I would put on the record that we believe we need to re-align Canada's regulatory inspection fees and cost recovery rates such as those applied to border measures, to traceability, to food inspections, but to be competitive and on a par with our major trading partners, including the United States.
We also need to work with the CFIA and other industry groups to improve approvals for new medications, et cetera. We cannot have a higher cost regime in Canada than elsewhere for our primary producers because they put on grocery store shelves the best food that can be found in the world. They should not have to pay a burden of cost that is different from other competing farmers in other countries in order to do that.