Agriculture committee  The challenges that we're having with the suspension of the Olymel plant in Red Deer and with the plant in Quebec remain in place. They have not been resolved. The plants themselves have put in some corrective measures, and now those measures have been brought back to Chinese off

Agriculture committee  Maybe I can start. You've opened the door to a very large question. African swine fever, globally, has clearly been within the purview of the OIE, the world animal health organization, forever. A number of us are going with Dr. Komal to the OIE's annual general assembly in Paris

Agriculture committee  Mr. Longfield, I would offer that we probably have enough regulatory authority across the federal and provincial jurisdictions. There might be spaces here and there that are questionable that I can't think of off of the top of my head. Our challenge will be to be able to exercise

Agriculture committee  I did live through the BSE run. We actually found out that we could come very quickly into the game once the crisis hit—

Agriculture committee  —but we'd like to get there ahead of time.

Agriculture committee  Maybe I could start. Quite frankly, it is largely a bilateral issue simply because of the volume of trade. We export 70,000 to 80,000 pigs a week into the United States. We export a billion dollars' worth of pork. All of that is checked off by our colleagues in the U.S. at the N

Agriculture committee  Oh, sorry.

Agriculture committee  I would just finish the idea that in terms of objections, we can't find any in the United States. When we speak with our colleagues down there, they look at us with kind of raised eyebrows as to why this wouldn't move forward in short order, simply because for probably 30 years w

Agriculture committee  The pork value chain round table actually started in 2003. There aren't many things you can think about where industry and government have met for 25 years.

Agriculture committee  I co-chair the pork value chain round table. It has been meeting routinely. It generally meets twice a year.

Agriculture committee  Yes. Obviously, we did see the Canadian Food Inspection Agency bring forward the international ASF forum here. We meet fairly routinely, or at least we have in the past—we got a little sidetracked during the NAFTA discussions—with our colleagues in Mexico and the United States.

Agriculture committee  I would add to René's two comments that the other challenge is that if we do get a disease among the wild population—not only ASF, because they are vectors for other diseases—how do you get it out? If we get it in the commercial population, we're reasonably convinced that we're g

Agriculture committee  In terms of disease surveillance of the wild pig population, one of the files we're working on with the Canadian Food Inspection Agency is in on how we do that, and how we do it in a very systematic, coordinated fashion so that first, we do the job properly— there is no sense in

Agriculture committee  I just want to add that the amount of production capacity that China has lost exceeds total global pork exports. The loss is so vast that it couldn't be made up by all global exporters combined.

Agriculture committee  Our relationship is absolutely incredible.