Agriculture committee  That's the hardest thing of all, Mr. Chairman.

Agriculture committee  For the committee's record, I've also been the industry co-chair of the Agriculture Canada value chain round table for food processing in Canada. I'm going to address some of these remarks from a national perspective, and I will tie them together in terms of Growing Forward 1 an

Agriculture committee  You have been, and I thank you very kindly for that. I suspect that in the questions I'll be able to finish it, so I can wrap it up there, if you wish.

Agriculture committee  To begin with the first part—about what we encompass—in the case of my particular provincial association, our membership goes from the people who wash the dirt off a carrot and put it in a bag right through to that full meal preparation you were talking about, whether it's fresh-

Agriculture committee  WD is not one that the companies themselves would particularly go after. As an association we will work with WD in some of the programs, usually in partnership with the provincial government. We had one that developed a program to try to expand on private label development in wes

Agriculture committee  Coming back to the context of small and medium-sized businesses, the largest number of companies in this country are the small and the medium-sized ones. The tax cuts are not the biggest issue to them. The biggest issue is being able to get dollars up front to do the thing in the

Agriculture committee  Thank you for the lead-in to the action plan, because that topic of concentration is addressed specifically in that industry-government action plan. It says “retail concentration”, but you have a worse concentration in food service. One-third is food service. The two major compan

Agriculture committee  I took part of it in my presentation.

Agriculture committee  It comes back to this whole discussion about the cost of food in terms of what goes on. In this country the percentage of our disposable income that we spend on food is way lower than pretty much everywhere else in the world, particularly relative to Europe. Food is relatively in

Agriculture committee  Do you mean for producers or for processors?

Agriculture committee  In terms of food safety innovation, basically all these standards, as I said, are going on all over the place. We've got the global food safety initiative, we've got ISO 22000, we've got SQF, we've got BRC, we've FSEP. We don't have to do anything. We've got more stuff coming at

Agriculture committee  I think you've hit the nail right on the head. There is a cost attached, and the retail environment in Canada does not believe that the Canadian consumer will absorb that type of cost. Prices have gone up about 6% over the last year, and they're getting some push-back on that.

Agriculture committee  Yes. It's something we've requested in the action plan. There are a number of areas in CFIA where there has been no appeal. One is the level playing field relative to imports and domestics. Some action has taken place there, but we have example after example of overstepping CFIA

Agriculture committee  He would report to someone probably in the regional office, who would report to the western Canada director, who would then report to one of the vice-presidents here in Ottawa. It's quite a long process, depending on how far down the ladder that individual was.

Agriculture committee  Well, you forgot one. There are three layers. How about local health? Any one of them can walk into your plant. Even if you're a federally inspected plant, some local health inspector who may have been out of school for three weeks could walk in and shut you down.