Agriculture committee  No.

Agriculture committee  My grandfather bought our current business in 1970.

Agriculture committee  I think it would be a low number. We have challenges with contractors who can build to a food standard. We're in rural Ontario. We're not in the downtown GTA. That creates challenges. There are always overages and there are always delays in finding people who could develop these rails in rural Ontario.

Agriculture committee  I'm not sure, but if it were for personal consumption, I'm assuming they could take it home, because we can buy meat from across borders. We don't have that level of inspection. If it was for commerce, for a farmer's market or something like that, I think that would be a problem.

Agriculture committee  Are you talking about our own retail business, direct-to-consumer sales?

Agriculture committee  Do you mean for retail sales?

Agriculture committee  Custom slaughter has been huge and has built a lot of plants. When my grandfather bought our current plant, all it did was custom slaughter. Things like livestock prices certainly have an impact. Now when we have very high livestock prices, especially for beef, custom slaughter isn't something that's in very high demand, because they get a very good dollar selling at auction, for instance.

Agriculture committee  Our business has certainly changed over the past number of years. There was an event in Ontario that painted the provincial industry with sort of a negative tint. There were federal charges on a provincial plant for what they were doing in their plant. That painted our entire industry with a pretty negative stigma.

Agriculture committee  No, that would be changes to structure and equipment.

Agriculture committee  There are things like rail height. The rail we land the animal on would have to be six inches higher than we currently have it. That's a prescriptive example. It was built some years ago, and it's a mild steel rail, so that would have to be changed to stainless steel. We don't slaughter two species at the same time.

Agriculture committee  At this point, yes, if we moved forward with federal registration we would have access to more markets. We would be allowed to try to sell to interprovincial markets. Where we are in Ontario, we found that the investment we looked at making would decrease our competitiveness, because we would have more capital invested to do the exact same work.

Agriculture committee  Well, I think the point I'd make is that the provincial meat inspection standard is an outcome-based system already. When I say that, what I mean is that the outcome of food safety is achieved in our system as well as in the federal system. So I'm not sure I agree with the comment that we'd have to train them all to be federal inspectors.

Agriculture committee  In our plant, we slaughter as well as process meat. An inspector is available for every single day that we slaughter animals, that we harvest animals. They view the animals in an ante-mortem state, so they look at them before we slaughter them, and then they evaluate every carcass during the slaughter process.

Agriculture committee  With regard to the interprovincial pilot project, which our family business participated in, we had looked at originally being part of that project as provincially inspected plants that would trade interprovincially. That was the original intent of the project. The project intent changed to evaluating what limits there were on provincial plants from registering federally afterwards.

Agriculture committee  The Ontario Ministry of Agriculture's Meat Regulation 31/05 is an outcomes-based meat regulation, as I understand the federal regulation strives to be. I think we need to be serious about understanding the outcomes that are required to meet those regulations. I think that's how CFIA could help us—for instance, help us understand why we need to spend...to essentially double our kill floor to slaughter both hogs and beef when we're doing it perfectly safely within an outcomes-based regulation in Ontario.