Agriculture committee  Yes, briefly, we can use sensors. For example, we use microchips in boots essentially. If people do not change their boots when they need to go from one zone to another zone, in the anteroom that will be detected. If they do not activate the Purell dispenser to clean their hands,

Agriculture committee  I mentioned technology at the farm per se, but we already have companies that can use sensors and they have geofencing around sites. People have an application on their phone, and when they get in, we know who they are, when they're coming in, the risks they may represent and all

Agriculture committee  The first thing is that the people with backyard flocks tend not to look at the commercial operations as being necessarily friendly, because they look at them often as the bad guys. There's a place here for provincial and possibly federal governments—even municipal governments—to

Agriculture committee  In Quebec, we created a situation that made people with pig farms stop production, but they still wanted to make use of their buildings, which is understandable. However, there aren't any rules around how that's done, so we realized there was a problem because it created too much

Agriculture committee  Yes, Canada-wide would be great, but not for all diseases. We'd have to select the important diseases for each type of livestock.

Agriculture committee  There are some things going on, depending on the species, but essentially.... For example, in Quebec right now, we've had several swine farms that have been transformed into duck farms. That's been done by whomever has the means of doing it, and there is no consideration for whet

Agriculture committee  Yes, absolutely, we have data. Look at how Italy does it. Italy had huge avian flu problems in early 1999-2000, so now it requires four or five risk factors to be considered when anyone wants to build a new facility or start up a new farm somewhere. One of those factors is dist

Agriculture committee  Essentially, federal authorities need to be able to work with each province, or at least with the provincial lab system to digitize information so it can be accessed quickly. Then a computer system has to be set up. Vets would benefit from access to databases of the viral genome

Agriculture committee  Variants of the H5N1 virus that's in Canada now do have zoonotic potential. It hasn't really happened yet, but it could. As long as the virus isn't zoonotic, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency is responsible for working with livestock producers. If at some point it looks like th

Agriculture committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. I will make my presentation in French, but I will answer questions in English when they come to me in that second language. First of all, I would like to make a comment on backyard farms. It was said that backyard farms were a problem because they were a r

Agriculture committee  These people don't agree with the very idea of pork production. Even if the farming is done in the best possible conditions and by the book, they want to condemn it. The witnesses from the pork industry who spoke to us today rightly said that they have ways to address the situat

Agriculture committee  We'll never be prepared enough. This is a positive step because that virus is a very resilient virus. It would be easy to bring it in voluntarily or not. It doesn't have to be on a big farm to create a national issue. We have a lot of traffic with the U.S., for example. Everythin

Agriculture committee  The point is that a person who breaks in must be an individual who knows about the standards. The person decides not to comply with the standards by breaking in. That's how I read it. The important thing is that these people aren't authorized to enter the farm and don't have a wa

Agriculture committee  Well, yes and no. Here's the deal. First of all, we do have biosecurity measures. Sometimes we have a compliance issue, whether it's in swine, poultry or elsewhere. It's not unusual to have somebody not do exactly what should be done, but employers have means to deal with that. T

Agriculture committee  CFIA already does something. I worked on that. We have established some guidelines. I think this should be left not only at the provincial level, but also quite a bit at the company farm level. Each farm is different. We need to custom design these biosecurity measures and we n