Agriculture committee  In setting those time frames we look at available science—as I said, the group tasked with this has reviewed over 300 different scientific articles and references—our own observations, and data obtained through our compliance verification system as to whether there's compliance o

Agriculture committee  No. These regulations focus on the humane transport of animals. They don't focus on the humane slaughter. That's actually a different regulation under CFIA.

Agriculture committee  We have 525 inspection staff who spend a portion of their time delivering transport inspections. That's certainly not all CFIA staff, but it's the number of staff who spend at least part of their time doing transport inspections. We also have an additional 1,100 meat inspection s

Agriculture committee  They're full-time CFIA staff. They may not be doing full-time animal humane transport inspections, but they're full-time CFIA staff, yes.

Agriculture committee  They had an opportunity to be involved at numerous phases along the way, and there were staff involved in putting the regulatory amendment together who did speak directly with transporters and transport companies. We've had their involvement through the voluntary transport standa

Agriculture committee  Basically, their comments were reflected in what went forward in the Canada Gazette, part I, and we will continue to incorporate and reflect the comments that were put forward in the official comment period between part I and part II of the Canada Gazette.

Agriculture committee  I think a lot of effort has gone into that training, on the part of the industry, on the part of provinces, and on the part of the federal government. The AAFC put a lot of effort towards the livestock certification program and the industry has had a lot of uptake in training tha

Agriculture committee  In the codes of practice, I know that a number of them have been renewed just recently, so there may have been some changes. I haven't seen one of the latest ones, but there may have been some changes between when these regs came out and when those were evolved. They were definit

Agriculture committee  Absolutely we look at other standards. We're very familiar with the standards in Australia, the U.K., the EU, New Zealand, and the United States particularly. We particularly look at the States and Australia, as they are countries of similar geography and size. We're also very fa

Agriculture committee  It's one of the things that makes this particular regulation extraordinarily difficult to make changes to and one of the reasons it has taken a considerable amount of time to get to this point and why we've engaged in quite extensive and exhaustive analysis and review. It's an

Agriculture committee  Yes, certainly the stress of loading and unloading has been addressed and some animals adapt to that more easily than others. Other species of animals can't be unloaded because they're in crates. Different species of animals definitely have different needs, and that has all been

Agriculture committee  Yes, part of the regulatory process is an economic cost-benefit analysis. As part of the regulatory impact analysis statement, they did have to outline that economic analysis and they did display the incremental costs. They show the incremental costs to producers based on the inf

Agriculture committee  That's a business decision the industry makes. That's not a decision CFIA dictates.

Agriculture committee  CFIA looks at those factors on a number of fronts. Certainly, in establishing the time frames, one of the things that were taken into account was known traffic patterns. The number of times animals might need to be loaded or unloaded did factor into some of those time frames that

Agriculture committee  I'm not sure we've looked into that aspect of it. I will take note of that and we can put some thought into it.