Mr. Speaker, the issue we have before us today came about during question period when I talked about HVP, the additive to food. The additive is one that is procured from the United States. It is made in the United States and added to product.
However, during the period of time in question, product was being sold in this country with that additive. There were cases of salmonella and a product recall in the U.S. It had to be communicated to us because we did not test the material. The argument goes that it is made in the U.S. True enough, it is made in the U.S., but the difficulty I had with it was that, when the minister was questioned, he said it was acted upon immediately. The truth was that CFIA actually knew on February 26 and did nothing for at least four days. It did nothing about notifying the public until March 2. My difficulty with immediacy is that it is not quite immediate; it is more like a delay.
The problem is that we do not know where HVP is being used. We have numerous products on our shelves, for example, chicken-flour soup mixes, chicken-noodle flavoured soup mixes and chicken high-protein soup mixes, and the list went on. We had myriad products out there and no one was able to trace the HVP additive to the product, other than by what they heard from the FDA. We were relying on our counterparts in the U.S. to find out what was wrong with the product and notify us, and then we would notify the public. One of the notifications we got for the public and certainly we got some media coverage, but the minister's response was, “Check the web”.
For a lot of folks in this country, there is no checking the web. They do not have a computer. The difficulty of getting information out to people is also an issue that the CFIA and the minister's department clearly have, if the answer is, “Check the web”.
Really it boils down to this. When we have this many products that are globally sourced in the agricultural sector and now in the food sector, how will we assure Canadians, when those products come into this country to be consumed, since we are not testing them at the border, that the product is indeed safe for the consumers who we are obligated to protect as a food inspection agency? It is not the FDA that is responsible.
I would point out to the parliamentary secretary, who will answer, that the FDA inspectors are now going outside of their own borders. We know they come into this country. We now know they are going into China as well, and they will test product before it goes to the U.S. market.
Really, at the end of the day, what assurances can we get that these globally sourced products will meet the rigorous standards we need to have inside this country? Do we intend to test them to ensure they are safe? If we find out they are not safe, how do we intend to make sure immediacy is immediate, not days later?