Agriculture committee  Good day and thank you. The Canadian Horticultural Council is a national association that has been committed to promoting the interests of its members since 1922. We are committed to advancing the growth and economic viability of horticulture by encouraging cooperation and unde

Agriculture committee  I agree with you. If we go with voluntary standards, then nothing will really change. We must all work together to come up with a mandatory labelling system that works.

Agriculture committee  The “Product of Canada” designation should be strictly reserved for products that were in fact produced in Canada.

Agriculture committee  Markets are indeed very integrated, but I really do not think we need to adopt a labelling system for the North American market at his point in time, especially given the current situation. I really don't. I would just like to mention too that as we heard in terms of monitoring—

Subcommittee on Food Safety committee  No. I'll be making a presentation as well.

Subcommittee on Food Safety committee  On behalf of Steve Levasseur, my president and an apple producer from Frelighsburg, Quebec, I thank you for the invitation. Being an apple producer, and with the temperature as it is today, he is out in the fields. The Canadian Horticultural Council is the national association

Subcommittee on Food Safety committee  Well, I think there are clearly costs for producers, and these are incremental. There is no market premium for that; I think it's implicit to the consumer that food be safe regardless of how that happens. Again, there is no market premium, and food safety as a condition of access

Subcommittee on Food Safety committee  Certainly on imported products, that's something that's key to us. We want a level playing field and we want things to be competitive. Certainly in the communications that the major Canadian retailer I referred to has issued to vendors, they are indicating they need to be on th

Subcommittee on Food Safety committee  I can't give you the complete details on that right here and now, but I will follow up with you.

Subcommittee on Food Safety committee  The group we went with, QMI-SAI Global, was the group that was internationally accredited to the existing standards, whether it's ISO.... Again, I don't know the proper terminology, but that is in part why we went with that group, because they were the one group that did have tho

Subcommittee on Food Safety committee  With respect to country-of-origin labelling, no, because the trade and commerce piece is under CFIA and the CAP Act--prescribed labelling, grade standards, and those types of things. So for fresh products that has not been an issue for us. It tends to be more in the value-added p

Subcommittee on Food Safety committee  Yes, of course. We follow closely.

Subcommittee on Food Safety committee  In terms of our food safety program and where we're going with benchmarking against GlobalGAP and the GFSI, the global food safety initiative, what we have now in Canada is that some of our apple producers—I'll speak about them because I know firsthand, in Ontario and B.C. in par

Subcommittee on Food Safety committee  It's going to increase. I don't want to get into the semantics of terminology, but actually that number is far greater. When we look at the number of potato producers in Canada who are supplying the processors, McCain Foods in particular, they've had it in their acceptance criter

Agriculture committee  Thank you very much. Good day. It is always a pleasure and a privilege to present our ideas to you. The Canadian Horticultural Council is the national association that represents packers, producers, and storage intermediaries of over 120 different fresh fruit and vegetable crop