Agriculture committee  I think the biggest thing we can do to make the Canadian market more attractive in terms of bringing products here has to do with better aligning our regulatory requirements, for both new products and existing products, with those of the large markets, particularly the United States and the European Union.

Agriculture committee  Is that for PFAS? Okay. We share the concerns about environmental contamination and all of the issues that surround PFAS. What I think we're trying to be very cautious about is to build on the experience of other jurisdictions that have already gone down the road of doing a class-wide ban using an extremely broad definition of what a PFAS is.

Agriculture committee  I think the one we hear most often has to do with drugs that are currently on the market. Health Canada has performance standards that it needs to meet in reviewing current submissions for new drugs. The division of Health Canada that is responsible for that is the veterinary drugs directorate.

Agriculture committee  New drug submissions are one thing, and that's what the veterinary drugs directorate deals with. The other part that we face challenges with is keeping the drugs that we have registered on the market here, and that's what the regulatory operations enforcement branch deals with.

Agriculture committee  Do you mean expedited in terms of delays? It didn't help. We certainly saw backups in the veterinary supply chains, which we were also seeing on the human side of things. There's been a bit of a perfect storm of factors over the last five years that the pandemic certainly contributed to.

Agriculture committee  Certainly, I think there's a large push right now to look at the development of a foot-and-mouth disease vaccine bank, specifically one that is domestic to Canada and not just the one that is shared across North America. There are priorities around that and, I think, some work. However, to a certain extent, we're also dealing with it case by case.

Agriculture committee  To answer the first question, certainly the development of new vaccines is a large portion of what the private sector does in terms of research and innovation. That said, Canada is a market that depends pretty much exclusively on the development of vaccines in the larger markets, and their production in those larger markets is similar to what we found with COVID vaccines during the pandemic, whereby we don't have a lot of domestic production facilities.

Agriculture committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. Good afternoon, Mr. Chair and committee members. My name is Catherine Filejski. I am both a licensed veterinarian and the current president and CEO of the Canadian Animal Health Institute, or the CAHI. CAHI is the trade association that represents the developers, manufacturers and distributors of animal pharmaceuticals, biologics, feed additives, veterinary health products and animal pesticides.