Health committee  The training aspect of our workforce is a very important aspect of CFIA work, as you can imagine. I'm going to ask Dr. Paul Mayers just to address training for a minute.

Health committee  The compliance verification system is an absolutely essential part of the agency, and Sheila Weatherill quite properly spent a fair bit of time on it in her report. I'd like to talk about a couple of things we have done. The PricewaterhouseCoopers report was an independent look at the calculation CFIA had done of inspection resources needed to deliver CVS.

Health committee  Thank you, Madam Chair. Yes, absolutely we did. I believe what you're referring to is an audit that we posted, which was done of the CFIA's import policy. The audit covered the period from 2005 to 2008 and it identified shortcomings. We have, in fact, had a very clear look at the shortcomings and are implementing a number of measures, which have dealt with what might be shortcomings.

Health committee  We post on our website updates to our management plan for the audit. That is one way we do hold ourselves accountable and are very public in terms of what we do. And we will do a more formal audit in a couple of years as we continue to spend the money from the food and consumer safety action plan.

Health committee  No. You can access our website. We can report to you more fully on the results of our audit and our management action plan for implementing the findings of the audit. But we will continue to audit our activities. That's one of the ways we in fact make sure we are achieving results, and we will continue to audit.

Health committee  Again, I don't have in front of me what the Agriculture Union has released.

Health committee  We have more than 220 inspectors working on meat today. In fact, most of our inspectors work on meat. A large part of the time of many inspectors is spent on CVS. We don't have inspectors who do only CVS. CVS is a part of what meat inspectors do. I can tell you we have more inspection capacity on CVS now than we did prior to the outbreak.

Health committee  I'm saying that we have more inspection capacity on CVS at this time than we did prior to the outbreak.

Health committee  Madam Chair, I'd be pleased to answer that question. The CFIA takes the compliance verification system very seriously. It is one of the essential aspects of ensuring that we have safe food. Following Sheila Weatherill's recommendations, we took a very hard look at our compliance verification system.

Health committee  Thank you, Madam Chair. I have not seen the statement from the Agriculture Union this morning, but I can tell you we know we had over 3,000 inspectors in March of 2010. The number of inspectors in CFIA has been increasing steadily. In fact, the government has added 538 new inspectors since March of 2006.

Health committee  I believe what the Agriculture Union is referring to is the document that was tabled along with the progress report, which confirmed the CFIA's assessment of inspector time needed on CVS. CVS of course is our compliance verification system. It is true that we have more inspectors now working on compliance verification than we had before, and we are hiring 170 new inspectors.

Health committee  Thank you, Madam Chair. I appreciate the opportunity to share with you the progress that has been made by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency on the recommendations made by Sheila Weatherill. We are working closely with all the players in the food safety system, including producers, processors, other levels of government, and consumers, to improve food safety for Canadians.

Agriculture committee  Thanks, Minister. Let me just ask Cam to comment on the issue of inspectors, in particular the with regard to how many inspectors are on the ground.

Agriculture committee  Thank you. Good afternoon, Mr. Chair and committee members. As noted, I will have to leave at 4:45 p.m. However, Dr. Brian Evans, who is the executive vice-president of the CFIA, and other senior officials are here to answer the committee's questions as long as you would like to have them here.

Subcommittee on Food Safety committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. The federal government and the CFIA focus their efforts on those plants that either ship across provincial borders or internationally. However, I think it's fair to say that the concept of a common national standard is one that has quite a bit of appeal. We have been working at the officials level, with our colleagues in provinces and territories, to advance this to a level where we might in fact be able to make some progress.