Agriculture committee  Thanks, that's really helpful. It's about a partnership. Certainly we would like to have that conversation more openly around what is the breakdown between what NFACC members are going to be contributing and the value of their contributions. There are tremendous contributions by

Agriculture committee  It's so fundamental to what the National Farm Animal Care Council is about. I refer to NFACC as being like a conflict resolution forum. There was a question earlier which I never got to answer as to why it is taking so long to update these codes. In fact, it's only been in plac

Agriculture committee  The National Farm Animal Care Council really focuses on non-regulatory approaches to improving animal welfare. Most people want to do the right thing. In fact, there's science to show that education and good information extension is the number one way of ensuring that good animal

Agriculture committee  Absolutely. Research is fundamental to what we do. It's fundamental to the conversations we have around the table with the different viewpoints there are in animal welfare. If your value in animal welfare is on health, or your value is on natural behaviour, you can use science to

Agriculture committee  It's important to recognize that our codes are developed through project funding. Project funding is what it is. You have to put forward a project application. Our current project funding will end in December 2013. The two poultry codes will be in suspense while we wait to see wh

Agriculture committee  The organizations contribute. We keep track of probably the tip of the iceberg of what the organizations contribute in terms of human resources. In the last count we had more than 20,000 hours of human resources going into the code development. There's cash that comes from govern

Agriculture committee  It's going to be released. It's had its public comment period. It will be final and released in June.

Agriculture committee  Yes. It's from 1999, I believe.

Agriculture committee  We have a coalition of SPCAs that are responsible for animal welfare enforcement in Canada. Collectively those three have come together to share a membership on NFACC. Certainly it's within their realm to expand their coalition if they so desire, but at this point it's those thre

Agriculture committee  Two more questions are unanswered. Does someone else want to ask them?

Agriculture committee  Do I have his five minutes to do it?

Agriculture committee  All right. Around the National Farm Animal Care Council table we very purposely have had this conversation about whether codes are voluntary any longer. If you look at the modern codes, codes that have been developed through the National Farm Animal Care Council, you don't see t

Agriculture committee  I will be first and Edouard will finish the presentation. Good morning, everyone. My name is Jackie Wepruk. I am the general manager of the National Farm Animal Care Council. Thank you very much for the invitation today to provide the committee and other interested parties wit