Agriculture committee  That number, 630, is for veterinarians employed by CFIA.

Agriculture committee  Basically that's the case. There are two.... Some of them are permanent; some of them are term, so they'd be hired for a year.

Agriculture committee  We do on occasion. When veterinarians in charge of isolated plants go on holidays, we have retired CFIA veterinarians who are available to come in to work.

Agriculture committee  Yes.

Agriculture committee  Thank you for the question. It's a very good one. The federal requirements are based on interprovincial trade and on foreign country requirements. So there are some things in those federal plants that are done because it's a requirement of the U.S., or Japan, or so on. When it

Agriculture committee  In leading up to the implementation of the feed ban on July 12, we developed an audit policy and an enforcement and compliance policy, and we consulted broadly with the industry so that everyone understood exactly what the rules of the road would be in terms of compliance. A few

Agriculture committee  I can comment on the B.C. situation. That was a provincial initiative. They did tighten up the standards, there's no question, which meant that some on-farm slaughter is no longer permitted. It does mean that there will be some additional plants coming under inspection. In fact i

Agriculture committee  I must confess I'm not an expert on the issue; I am aware of it. My understanding was there had been some consultations around that change, and yes, I'm aware that there was some concern in the industry. I believe it wasn't necessarily done as a cost-saving measure but in the in

Agriculture committee  Yes, I'll try to answer as well. As you know, we work in pet foods. We continue to provide export certification and inspection of imports for pet food. It's an area that's under study at the agency. We were asked to go back and look at some of the applicants for pet food in the

Agriculture committee  I'll do questions one and three. On consistency and enforcement, I believe you're talking about humane transport regulations. That's what we enforce at CFIA, humane transport regulations. We do about 30,000 inspections a year at sales, barns, we do roadside blitzes in coopera

Agriculture committee  In clarification on the payment to the inspectors, this is entirely in the meat slaughter sector, so this is the largest inspection group that we have in the agency. Those are the inspectors who work on the line in the slaughter plants. They had been assigned a rating in the hier

Agriculture committee  In fairness to my colleague Sandra, she's only been with the agency a short period of time. Some of these things go back historically, and Gord and I have been around for a while. I think the agency is quite proud of what we've done in our fairly short history of ten years. You

Agriculture committee  We're very aware of the need to explain what we're doing, to communicate to our stakeholders, to help them to understand why we have to do certain things that may impact on them.

Agriculture committee  Thank you, Mr. Chairman, ladies and gentlemen. I appreciate the opportunity to appear before this committee. My name is Cameron Prince, I am the vice-president of operations at the Canadian Food Inspection Agency. Today I will be speaking about potato cyst nematodes, PCNs. There

Agriculture committee  No.