Subcommittee on Food Safety committee  Of course.

Subcommittee on Food Safety committee  I think there's a world of difference between a poultry barn with 60,000 birds in it, in terms of the health of the whole operation and what it requires to maintain that health in terms of sanitation and the quality of the product, and whether that applies to pork, for example, and poultry as well....

Subcommittee on Food Safety committee  The question of where these diseases originate and how they are spread is very closely related to the size of the operation. Look at any of the situations around the world--

Subcommittee on Food Safety committee  I will send it to you.

Subcommittee on Food Safety committee  I would want to caution, because it's coming out now—and I think you referred to that just now—that to attach something as scientific or peer reviewed may not really give it too much standing, depending on who the reviewers were and who their employers were and whose contracts they were working on.

Subcommittee on Food Safety committee  I wasn't quite saying that. I was saying, where do these diseases arise? They arise in the large operations, in confinement, where there is a hothouse environment to nurture all kinds of pathogens. They may be safe, but what is required to make those buildings and those operations safe?

Subcommittee on Food Safety committee  I'm afraid I don't have that before me. I was asked to fill in, and I'm not a staff person. I don't work--

Subcommittee on Food Safety committee  No, I don't. I will get that information supplied to you.

Subcommittee on Food Safety committee  I realize that when we started I had neglected to bring an introduction, and my apologies for that.

Subcommittee on Food Safety committee  Well, I would say there are many varieties of farmers. There certainly isn't “a farmer” or a single type of farmer. I think you're implying that there is a class of farmers who have the big, highly capitalized, large-scale farms that have to employ labour on a significant scale, who usually carry a substantial debt—and may forever—and are very tightly integrated into the kind of system Mr.

Subcommittee on Food Safety committee  It's amazing. They've discovered, as we all know, that cancer is an environmental disease. And what better place to start than with healthy food. But you can't have healthy food if you contaminate it all with agro-toxins and genetic engineering. It's right across the board. I'm sorry, it's not a simple answer.

Subcommittee on Food Safety committee  Thank you for your question. It's very much to the point. I should say that my wife and I have farmed for 15 years. We raised our children on the farm. We raised sheep and lambs for the market. Very early on--we started with no experience--I got the local agriculture representative to come out and I asked him what we should do.

Subcommittee on Food Safety committee  Thank you very much for the opportunity to be here and to address you on behalf of the Canadian Health Coalition. I won't say very much about the coalition. It's national, largely voluntary, has a small staff, and is very active in several provinces, particularly Ontario and British Columbia, in addressing issues of public health in the broadest sense.