Thank you, Mr. Chairman, members and Mr. Bellavance.
First let me make two quick comments. Certainly we will respond in a very timely and earnest way to provide the level of detail that you have sought from the CFIA with respect to inspection numbers. I believe in a previous appearance before this committee, last fall, the CFIA was very clear in confirming that in terms of our hiring of personnel involved in food safety inspections, we have seen net growth, in line with what has been publicly reported. I believe it's important in all of these discussions, when we have a debate around numbers, that we're all talking about the same numbers.
We fully respect the efforts of Mr. Kingston to represent his membership. As we said at that time, a number of classification groups are involved in food safety protection in Canada. We have veterinarians, we have chemists and analysts in the laboratory, we have people with master's degrees in food processing and thermal processing, who in fact are represented by an alternate union to that of Mr. Kingston. In Mr. Kingston's union, we have very important inspection personnel as well who play a very critical role in food safety in Canada.
So we are very pleased to present to the committee the total number of hires that exist in the agency, over whatever specified time you would seek to have them, by classification, by the work they carry out.
Again, food safety, as we've also previously committed to, is not something that is achieved at one point in the inspection system. Canada benefits from the fact that we have a food safety system--in fact, we are envied around the world--that is a continuum of monitoring, from the point of production at the farm through to slaughter. It includes all the inputs in terms of seed and fertilizer and biologics approvals. We look at risk as a continuum of risk as opposed to any one point. Inspection takes place at slaughter, it takes place at processing, and it takes place in the marketplace in response to certain circumstances.
So we think it's important, when we talk about the investments that we at CFIA are making in food safety, that we look at where do we make a difference in food safety, who are the people making a difference in food safety, and how do they complement each other's work in terms of providing the integrity that Canadians deserve and expect and that we intend to try to deliver to our highest ability? The same goes for our international markets.
With respect to the roughly 100 per year, we have just completed our forward-and-back analysis on HR trends. We do that on an annual basis. It has not yet been published, but it will be published shortly. We will share that with you as well. It looks at five-year trends in all the classification groups in the agency and the work that they do.
I can tell you that with respect to one branch alone, the front line operations branch, we have done an initial assessment. Between the period of April and January, there was in fact a net growth of 84 food safety inspection staff. That applies in meat hygiene, it applies in meat processing, it applies in fresh fruit and vegetable inspections. It deals with import inspections. It deals with recall assessment and recall verification checks. We have that number, and we are more than pleased to share with you that justification.
You made reference to strategic review and privatization. I would reiterate the comments we have made before as CFIA. Like all federal departments and agencies, we are obliged to go through a four-year cycle of assessment of our programming and to make proposals to government. With respect to our CFIA programming, five initiatives were adopted and approved by the government for us to progress on, which we have been doing. We itemized those in a previous appearance, and we would be glad to review those with you once again. There are no other initiatives for which we have been given permission to proceed.
The moneys...in the CFIA perspective, in identifying the 5% base, in fact those moneys were returned to CFIA for investment in higher priorities. So there was no cut to our capacity but rather a reallocation to higher food safety priorities.
Again, on the issue of reallocation, when we talk about the absolute numbers of inspectors, the CFIA is a regulatory agency. We do recognize that from time to time in executing our food safety mandate we are obliged to remove the licence of plants to operate where we feel they are not meeting their food safety obligation, and that happens on an annual basis. It has happened over the past several years. In the current economic downturn, some companies in fact have opted to go out of production in food areas.
I can tell this committee that as part of that effort, while that may have impacted about 150 of our staff, we were able to redeploy and refocus 129 of those 150. We were able to accommodate and reassign them to broaden the capacity in other areas where we felt priority in food safety was necessary.
So there is growth in the organization overall--net hires minus net departures, which is our net growth figure--but in addition we have reallocation within the department in response to a changing marketplace that allows us also to move inspectors into areas of significant capacity challenge.
You made specific reference, Monsieur Bellevance to the poultry rejection project that was raised by, again, one of the other union-represented groups in their concerns. Again, this is before the courts and I can't comment on it in detail. But what I can say about that particular program on the poultry rejection pilot projects is that these are pilot projects. This program has not been instituted nationally. We are still going through data assessment and we are committed to a full review of that data and international peer review of that data before we would make any changes in our programs. The program inspection has to be science-based.
But this program does not deal with food safety. What this program deals with is those carcasses that have already been diverted from the food supply line. They've already been discarded away from food supply, and the purpose of the rejection project is to classify the basis for the defects: Is it bruising? Is it broken legs? Is it broken wings? Are there other complications associated with that? And our intent, in undertaking that program, was to say the veterinarians are better able to stay on the food safety line where their skills and inspection attributes are more value-added to Canadians for food safety purposes.
So we see that veterinary role as very important to food safety, as opposed to playing that arbitration role between a producer and a processor, where a producer may say “I submitted x number of birds and I only got paid for y number of birds”. They were rejected for a reason. So we don't think it's the best use of the veterinarian's time to be doing a technical “this one was rejected for a broken wing, that one for bruising” type role. We would prefer the veterinarian be focused further up the line on those products that are entering the food supply.
But again, as we stated, this is a pilot. It is before the courts in terms of a judicial review, and we will certainly abide by the outcome of that process.