It is also important to recognize the context in which we talk here in Canada. There are about 750,000 to 800,000 colonies in Canada, but the real bulk of the beekeeping industry resides in the prairie provinces. They operate over 550,000 colonies. British Columbia and eastern Canada operate a total of about 220,000 colonies. I'm not trying to minimize that. I'm not trying to sound dismissive toward B.C. beekeepers or eastern Canadian beekeepers at all, but you have to see it within the context of what drives this industry at the national level.
As my esteemed colleagues have already mentioned, there is a whole host of causes that have led to these high losses, and there are certainly remedial actions we can take in order to minimize them. Among them—and I'm not shying away from them—are some of the industrial management practices that large commercial beekeepers employ. They certainly place great stresses on these bees and, therefore, jeopardize their survivability on a year-to-year basis.
However, as it was mentioned earlier, there are some serious difficulties in addressing the losses and having them replaced. Clearly, the United States seemed to be offering an opportunity for the commercial sector to address these shortages on an annual basis.
In May 2015—eight years ago—the Senate released its report, “The Importance of Bee Health to Sustainable Food Production in Canada.”. Its first recommendation was to have Health Canada and the Canadian Food Inspection Agency amend the honeybee importation prohibition regulations in order to allow the import of bee packages from the United States. Unfortunately, nothing has happened since that time.
I can only say that I urge the CFIA to revisit this issue. As it was reported earlier, the last risk assessment was done 2018, and it would be appropriate for another risk assessment to be done 10 years later—this year or perhaps next year—so that we can at least have a pragmatic, professionally based or scientifically based assessment on the risks associated with the resumption of packages from the United States.
I think that just about concludes my comments.