Mr. Speaker, I thank you for this opportunity to speak about what our government is doing to preserve the safety of Canada's food supply.
To answer some of the comments made by my colleague, the Subcommittee on Food Safety is going very well. We are working in co-operation. The committee is responsible for its own operations. This is the first I have heard of complaints regarding how often the committee is meeting. We are the ones who offered to extend committee meetings, and we have done so.
It was interesting to hear my colleague's comment. She only wants opposition witnesses invited. There are other witnesses other than opposition witnesses. We feel the subcommittee needs to hear from all Canadians, not just those from whom the opposition would wish to hear.
Our government is committed to keeping the food we eat safe and ensuring Canadians and consumers around the world have confidence in the products our farmers grow and in the food on our grocery store shelves. We are reinvesting in food safety after the Liberal spending cuts in the nineties. Under the Liberals, food safety funding was cut in 1994. It was cut again in 1995. If that were not bad enough, they cut it again in 2005.
Under our government, the CFIA budget has only increased and CFIA has more resources available to it than ever before. Food safety funding, which was cut by the previous Liberal government, has been increased now by $113 million.
Regarding listeriosis, we look forward to seeing the report from the independent investigator appointed by the Prime Minister. We want to improve on food safety where we can. We have already begun implementing changes to make our food safety system stronger.
Immediately following the 2008 listeriosis outbreak, the CFIA acted to assess and improve industry practices for the sanitation of equipment used to manufacture ready-to-eat meat and introduced new procedures for sanitation of plant areas where ready-to-eat meats were processed.
The CFIA has introduced new inspection procedures to ensure that all company microbiological results for listeria are reviewed by inspectors on a daily basis and any corrective actions are taken by the company if positive results are found.
This is part of our compliance verification system, or CVS. Some, including the Liberals, have criticized this system, but Bob Kingston, the president of the Agricultural Union which represents inspectors, told the following to the food safety committee, “I also want to make clear the compliance verification system as a system, we don't fault it...Having a checklist scheduled approach to verifying that the people you're regulating are doing what they say they are doing, we can't see that as a bad thing”.
The CFIA also undertook a review of its directives regarding the control of listeria and ready-to-eat meat production and this review resulted in new directives, which were published on February 27. The new directives require that industry implement environmental testing of food contact surfaces to complement the end product tests they now conduct. The CFIA has also increased the frequency of its own verification testing of finished product and complemented this with verification testing of food contact services.
When asked if it was a mistake to eliminate environmental testing, which the Liberals did, and whether that testing could have prevented the outbreak, CFIA inspection supervisor from the affected Maple Leaf plant, Mr. Don Irons, told the food safety subcommittee “we could have possibly”.
Food safety is the CFIA's highest priority and the requirements for food safety are more stringent now than ever before.