Mr. Speaker, certainly food safety is of key importance to Canadians. I thank the member for raising these issues because Canadians want to know that our Conservative government is committed to continuous improvement in order to protect the safety of our Canadian food supply.
Since 2006, CFIA's inspection staff has increased by a net total of 538. Last week in the House, the Minister of Agriculture tabled a memo he received from CFIA that demonstrates the progress that CFIA has made in hiring inspectors since we formed government. I would invite this member to read that. It is a hiring process that the opposition has tried its best to undermine by voting, time and time again, against our budgets and the additional funding we allocate for food safety.
This is a very important point. This member rises in the House today. He has gone to all this trouble to raise these questions tonight in the House, and what does he do when it comes time to allocate new money, new funding to food safety? He votes against it not once, but time and time again.
Our Conservative government is committed to implementing all 57 recommendations of the Weatherill report. I am happy to tell Canadians that many of the recommendations concerning the Canadian Food Inspection Agency have already been implemented. Actions taken to date have focused on prevention, surveillance, detection and better response.
These would include strengthening the CFIA directives regarding control of listeria and federally registered, ready-to-eat meat processing plants; equipping CFIA inspectors with better tools and technologies such as laptops, cell phones and better network connectivity; updating federal, provincial and territorial protocols for managing food-borne illness outbreaks and enhancing laboratory capacity and research into the development of rapid test methods.
The CFIA and Health Canada have developed a new screening method for listeria in meat that allows for a more rapid response during food safety investigations. Furthermore, we have launched a food safety portal on the web that is accessible to Canadians and provides Canadians with comprehensive food safety and food-borne illness information.
Ensuring that Canadians are not exposed to contaminated foods is the agency's top priority.
Canadians can rest assured that their food safety and public health networks are actively working on this. Canada is better able to target its actions because of the lessons we learned from the listeriosis outbreak in 2008.
What I have highlighted is that we have tougher food safety requirements than we have ever had before, but what we need and what Canadians need are members such as this one voting to support the measures that we take to improve food safety. As I mentioned at the beginning of my speech, each and every time we allocate additional funding and additional resources to CFIA, to Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada to implement the Weatherill report, this member and all of his colleagues vote against it.
This member has an opportunity to vote for these measures when we pass the supplementary estimates in the budget coming up. He has one minute to address this. I would like to know how he will vote. Will he vote yes to improving food safety in Canada?
