EVIDENCE

[Recorded by Electronic Apparatus]

Wednesday, November 20, 1996

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[English]

The Chairman: We will probably hear the bells start to ring in a minute or two. It's a 30-minute bell. We'll note the time and 25 minutes after it starts to ring we'll leave. I would ask the members to come back afterwards.

You have been given notice tomorrow morning's meeting is cancelled. There are a number of members who could not be here tomorrow for a clause-by-clause on Bill C-38.

If we do not finish Bill C-60 discussions this afternoon, we will notify everybody that we will finish those tomorrow morning. Next Tuesday we will go into clause-by-clause at 9 a.m. on Bill C-60 and we'll go back later next week to Bill C-38 clause-by-clause.

With us today is Ron Doering. Ron has a deck he is going to go through. Ron, you can introduce all the officials at the table with you.

What this does, ladies and gentlemen, is address some of the comments and concerns brought forward by the witnesses and by some of the members of Parliament. It also addresses the questions and comments coming out of the presentations we've had.

Mr. Ronald Doering (Executive Director, Office of Food Inspection Systems, Department Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada): Thank you, Mr. Chair. Merci encore une fois.

All these people are members of an organization called the Office of Food Inspection Systems. It is an interdepartmental group representing the three departments that came together to create the agency legislation. We have Tom Beaver with us. He has mainly been in charge of the accountability issues. In the area of roles and responsibilities, we have our lawyer, Peter Sylvester. Peter Brackenridge has had long experience in agriculture matters with us. Gerry Derouin is our finance team leader and Sylvia Pollock is the human resources team leader.

Thanks for the opportunity to come back to you. We will try to in a sense be bookends to this process and recapitule a little bit what we said at the outset. We will, at the same time, deal with what appears to be the ten major issues that have come up in the course of your hearings, providing as best as we can the explanation for some of this.

I'm looking now at the deck to speed us along. I'm conscious of your time constraints. Page 2 simply sets out the two-step process. You know about this already, the health people.... Agriculture were getting ready to take the 4,500 some people at Agriculture, which includes the Health Canada people. With the 400 people from Fisheries, they'll go together to create the new agency. We hope we can be up and running in early 1997.

I won't take you through the rationale for the agency again. Last time we talked about the benefits. As you can see, there are some really significant benefits. We'll be much more efficient. More to the point, we will be even more effective.

The accountability regime on page 5 has come up time and again. There is one thing I want to be absolutely clear on. A decision was made by the government that we could not change the existing accountability regime for food inspection. It is simply too important. No minister could ever say ``I'm sorry your daughter died of food poisoning, but go tell the president of the agency in that arms'-length organization.'' It's just not acceptable. No minister will be able to say this. The minister had to be held accountable, in the same way he is today, to members of Parliament, to Canadians.

So, we couldn't be any clearer in the legislation. Clause 4 says the minister is responsible for the agency. He is then, for all intents and purposes, like the minister for our department. From an accountability point of view, there is no real difference.

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It is important not only for health and safety reasons, but also for trade. Our trading partners, various countries in the world, do not allow us to have products come to them unless we can show equivalency in terms of how we do inspection. They want a minister on the hook. They want a ministerial system, a department system, showing for the most part the government has done this inspection.

The president and CEO simply reports to the minister like a deputy does to a minister. The ministerial advisory board will come back to this. There are possible opportunities for changes there. I'll deal with this as we come to the issues. But here, it was the conclusion of the government that if you were going to have clear accountability to the minister and the board of directors, which you need to have, it had to be in an advisory capacity. You couldn't confuse things. What if the minister decides something, but the board of directors need more time? What if they can't get a majority vote to do something and meanwhile people are dying? You have to have urgency and you have to have accountability here. The only way to do this is to have a really strong board of directors, but a board of directors acting as an advisory board rather than directing. So this is the accountability regime.

There is ongoing work establishing our relationship with existing departments. We're not getting rid of one silo and creating another. We will always work closely on a daily basis with the line departments. We're working this out now through interdepartmental memorandums of understanding.

As we'll demonstrate briefly when we come to the issue section, our reporting and accountability to Parliament is enhanced and in no way diminished by this. We'll explain this when we come to this issue.

Under the financial framework, we've had quite a lot of evidence we clearly didn't do a very good job of explaining this. This was clear listening to some of the witnesses, unless they didn't want to understand. As we come to the issue of cost recovery, there is no additional cost recovery as a result of the creation of this agency. There is none. There is ``zero'', to quote Bob Anderson the other day. We'll come back to this briefly and explain it a little more.

There are other things here. If you look at the second bullet, we'll have considerable flexibilities departments don't enjoy in terms of multi-year funding and simplified arrangements for getting our funding. We will have a lot of freedoms that minimize the bureaucratic costs and delays if you're in the regular departmental system.

The agency should also have the option of separate service providers. For example, we may not use this right away, but we could have our own buildings as opposed to using Public Works. We could have our own lawyers if we wanted to instead of using Justice lawyers, although it is our clear intention to be using Justice. It provides these kinds of flexibilities.

There are two areas where we might be able to save money and therefore not have to resort to other means. One would be to have something like payroll actually done by a bank or through the private sector rather than in a more conventional way. This is something we'd like to look at.

The last point on the financial framework is we had a streamlined fee-setting process. This is not to have more fees, but to make sure when we change the fee system we will be able to do it in a streamlined way. It'll always need to be refined. Hopefully in some cases it will be made lower. In other cases, it will be changed to accommodate industry's needs. We want to be able to do this in a streamlined way.

It seems impossible to believe, but people who've had experience with this tell me at the moment it takes between 12 and 16 months to change the fee system. This doesn't serve anybody's purpose, so we want to streamline it. Whether this actually affects the amount of fees is another issue I'll come back to.

If I had to do it over again, we would have taken you through the human resources framework on the first day with a little more detail. There was some misunderstanding there and for this I apologize. Let me explain now how we're organized for our HR regime.

There are three basic ways you can be an employee in the federal jurisdiction. One is the status quo now for all of us who work in the regular department system. Under this, you fall under two pieces of legislation. One is the Public Service Staff Relations Board and the Public Service Employment Act. It means Treasury Board rather than the department is the employer. It means for significant staffing purposes staffing is done by an independent body that actually reports to you. This is the Public Service Commission under the Public Service Employment Act.

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Mr. Easter (Malpeque): If I could just interrupt for a second, what was the second act? I didn't -

Mr. Doering: The Public Service Employment Act, Mr. Easter.

Mr. Easter: Thanks.

Mr. Doering: That's the status quo and that is how public servants are public servants in a regular government department now. In fact, more than half of federal public servants aren't covered under that act. If you're working in a lot of the crown corporations or in a variety of other organizations that are separate employers, you're not in this regime. If you're in a regular government department, you are.

That regime was designed thirty years ago, and it was not designed for the kind of organization that we envisage as the agency, where you would have revenues of $60 million a year at the very outset, where you need to be nimble, where you need to do things well and where you can tailor your human resource regime to meet your business needs.

So the human resources implementation group, which was composed of human resource specialists in the Government of Canada who worked on this for many months, including work with the unions and industry, concluded that we need to have a more flexible human resource regime. We need to be accountable for our own human resource management.

The way to do that is to stay within the Public Service Staff Relations Board legislation, the Public Service Staff Relations Act. If we stay within that, we're still public servants and are still getting the same government paycheque in the same way, but we're outside of the Public Service Employment Act. The employer is no longer the Treasury Board. We are our own employer and we do our staffing outside of the Public Service Commission.

We then become masters of our own fate. We would be able to sit down and negotiate our own collective agreements with our staff. We would be able to deal with the 7.5-hour and 8-hour problem that has bedevilled people for a long time and we would be able to deal with all of these other kinds of issues. We could be a little more entrepreneurial and a little more businesslike in how we deal with our staff. That's the point of the separate employer status.

To make sure that we're ready to do that and to make sure that we can protect all the protections that are associated with the Public Service Employment Act, we're going to defer actually implementing that for one full year. So the clause of the bill that says we're a separate employer - clause 12 - will come into effect immediately, but we will defer the clause that actually puts it into effect, which is clause 13, for one full year.

That will give us time to work with the Public Service Commission, the Treasury Board, the Auditor General and everybody to design a really proper system for us that on the one hand balances our need for flexibility and on the other hand balances our need to protect the rights of employees and protect reporting to Parliament.

The third option for employment purposes is the one that we heard about a little bit, but not vigorously, from the two union groups. That was the opportunity to be covered under the Canada Labour Code.

The Canada Labour Code is the third technique. It's the farthest away. It is usually the code that's been used for those public servants who have worked for the traditional commercial crown corporations, like Air Canada before it was privatized or like CN. This is at arm's length from government. These are the organizations associated with the government that are intended to make a profit, to be true commercial corporations.

First, as we've said, we are not going to be a corporation. Second, we are going to continue to be a strong regulatory body, and as far as we have been able to determine, there is no regulatory arm of government that actually falls under the Canada Labour Code, because it's really at arm's length from government. Thirdly, under the Canada Labour Code at the moment, there is no way that you can designate employees so that they cannot strike, whereas the separate employer status, the middle one that I've described that we've opted for under clause 12, does still allow you to designate people who are not allowed to strike.

And when the union says we could work that out, theoretically we could, but that is a time-consuming process. If and when they amend the Canada Labour Code we can accommodate that. Perhaps then we can look again at the Canada Labour Code as a means to organize our HR regime.

But we've opted for the middle one. It means everybody is still completely a public servant. It's just that after the end of one year the agency will be its own employer, not the Treasury Board. We'll be accountable for our own human resource decisions. We will negotiate our own collective agreements, under the general guidance and control of Treasury Board, of course, to really meet the efficiency and effect those gains that we're designed for, that we were set up to do. So that's what we talk about in the balanced approach.

I will turn turn now to page 9, which is about the federal-provincial opportunities. There are already quite a few federal-provincial arrangements.

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The fact is that food inspection is an area of shared jurisdiction, and it always will be. No one is going to amend the Constitution to change this. You couldn't do it. So there is a role for the municipalities, there is a role for the provinces, there is a role for the federal government.

If you like, in questions I can get into far more detail on this. This was fascinating to me as a lawyer to understand when I first came to this area, but I won't take up your time going through it unless you want me to. Take it from me, it's an area of shared jurisdiction and it will always be that way.

If a product is manufactured within a province and doesn't cross provincial boundaries, apart from some areas under the criminal law for the Food and Drugs Act, this is a provincial responsibility, not a federal one. If they cross provincial boundaries, if they cross international boundaries, then your product falls under federal jurisdiction.

The way the federal government has managed this for most commodities is to arrange for a registration system where you get your federally registered facilities. For example, about 400, 500, or 600 meat places are federally registered, and about 1,200 fish plants are federally registered. This is the federal registration system. These places have the federal inspectors in them. But not all of our product goes through them and not all commodities go through these federally registered facilities either. Not all kinds of commodities, bakeries and others, get registered, but they may fall under federal jurisdiction for other purposes.

So it's an area of shared jurisdiction. Again, it would take me more time than we have today just to go through it all, but the fact is that it is shared. The real problem, to solve this, is not to get the feds out of it - you couldn't if you wanted to - or to get the provinces out of it - you couldn't if you wanted to. The real solution to this problem is to get us to work together.

As you've said, Mr. Hoeppner, we desperately need harmonized standards. There's an initiative to do that called the Canadian Food Inspection System. It's a federal-provincial-municipal organization of some thirty officials. I'm the federal co-chair, and we're working on harmonized standards. If we can get harmonized standards, then we can move to harmonized inspection. If you have the same standard everywhere, it doesn't really matter who inspects to that standard. The advantage the agency has is that we will be far more flexible in trying to deal with these harmonized arrangements.

There are three ways we can do this. Under the legislation we can designate to have provincial people do federal stuff to the federal standard, or we could even designate private sector people to do inspection to a federal standard, for example private sector veterinarians. Or we could have the provinces designate federal people to do things for the federal government, if that was what made sense.

The cross-delegation designation opportunity is important to us. We do a bit of it now, but it will be much easier and simpler to do and it cannot be legally challenged under the agency.

Secondly, we will be able to work out a whole raft more of agreements where we can make deals with provinces where we can decide inspection not on the basis of what the Constitution says but on the basis of what makes sense. There are already a number of opportunities to do that. Every single province is in favour of this, formally on record in favour of it. The reason is that they know that in effect by doing this the federal government is getting its act together. We won't show up at meetings any more with one federal department saying one thing and another federal department saying something else; we will be the federal single-window focus to work with the provinces with these three additional powers we now have.

As we say in the deck, already a number of provinces have come forward with very kind letters complimenting the federal government for what it has done. Quebec has some very interesting proposals now where, for example - in fact, there are some federal people who do retail-level inspection - we could take some of that money, give it to the Province of Quebec, and they could do the retail-level inspection on our behalf by some contractual arrangement. Or, for example, in the case of some other provinces, they might decide that because of the economies of scale the federal agency has, we might be able to do federal inspection for them at a reasonable cost, cheaper than they can do it themselves. Those are the kinds of arrangements we could have.

We don't mean to be insulting. If there are issues other than the ones we've developed here, of course you're the definer of what you think the issues are. For our purposes, because we have sat in for all the witnesses and have reviewed the transcripts, and because we couldn't deal with an unlimited number, there appear to be ten broad issues that have come up in the presentations. I thought I now would devote the second half of my presentation to actually taking these in turn and trying to clear up some misunderstanding, or in some cases explain better why we've selected a certain option. Under many of these issues, of course, reasonable people can disagree, and we're happy to try to engage a discussion with you on some of these matters.

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The first issue, on page 10: Will food safety be compromised as a result of Bill C-60?

[Translation]

You have the same thing in French on page 10.

[English]

Mr. Landry (Lotbinière): Yes, no problem.

[Translation]

Thank you.

[English]

Mr. Doering: The answer is absolutely no. As you can imagine, no minister and no government would want to be party to making some change that compromised food safety in any way. All of the strengths of the existing system will be retained, but we will have a far more integrated approach. Instead of four departments doing inspections, as has been historically the case, we'll have one agency reporting to one minister doing it.

In fact, we are convinced, as the government is, that Bill C-60 significantly enhances food safety. It does it in many ways, but we've picked three here from the deck.

The first one is that the agency is absolutely committed - it's in our preamble, it's in our whole approach to this stuff - to try to begin to allocate resources according to risk. Right now, in a lot of the allocation of resources, if it's allocated according to risk, that doesn't seem to be the main criterion. It just grew up over the years. For different reasons, we do things in different ways.

If we can move to allocating resources according to risk, we can get a real bang for the buck. What it allows us to do, too, is move more quickly to change the role of government from being that of the carcass-by-carcass inspector, the bird-by-bird inspector, as Mr. Leng talked about it, to being the auditor of industry's risk assessment systems.

It will take a while; it won't happen overnight. But everybody agrees that's the way to go. In every other modern country in the world, in Europe, in the United States, this is the whole tendency in food inspection, to move to what is called HACCP - hazard analysis and critical control point - where the role of government is with a clipboard and a lab coat, so to speak, auditing that industry is doing a proper job, rather than looking, as we've heard in testimony, at 150 chickens going by a minute or actually poking and sniffing every beef carcass going by on a line. If we can move in that direction, we can save money and we can clearly enhance food safety.

But we can't do it really quickly. For example, as we've heard, we sell almost $3 billion worth of meat to the United States. If we want to keep on selling that meat, one of the things we have to do is have an equivalent system to them. If they continue to have a level of inspection that would not otherwise be warranted, say, by health and safety, we have to continue to do that if we want to continue to sell that.

That's why, for example, you heard the poultry council, the meat council, the fisheries council, the big users of our services, all in favour of this agency and all recognizing that we cannot limit the role of government here. This is not a case where industry is coming forward and saying we want less government. They want different kinds of ways of doing business, which is why all industry generally are in favour of this initiative, but they don't want us out of this. They need the Canada-approved stamp; they need the Canadian equivalency arrangements; they need to know that food safety in part turns on the fact that there has been some government audit or oversight of this activity. So we're not deregulating here.

The second advantage is that it makes a lot clearer the important role of Health Canada. The Minister of Health is responsible for the health of Canadians, and it will continue to be responsible for setting the high-level health and safety standards the agency will have to live up to. They're the ones with the PhDs and the expertise in setting health safety standards. They are the ones not collecting fees from industry. These are rules and standards made in a conventional way through the Minister of Health.

They will audit us, the agency, to make sure we're doing our job to make sure there has been no compromise with safety. This is the reason the Minister of Health is in favour of this initiative. The Minister of Health knows that while some of the inspection activities that were formerly done by Health Canada will be done by the agency, they can rest assured that they're still setting the standards and have a kind of audit function. This is not a big, time-consuming thing or necessarily involving a lot of people, but it's an important fail-safe mechanism to ensure yet again that we have safe food.

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The third reason we think it enhances food safety is because in many cases the real risk to food safety is not the product coming from the federally registered facilities. If you've been to a federally registered meat facility, you'll know that there's always a veterinarian there during the whole time the kill floor is in operation. In a typical meat plant there are four or five highly qualified, very experienced Agriculture Canada inspectors. This is a very close, hands-on, carcass-by-carcass inspection system that's existing in the federal meat plant. It's highly unlikely that you're going to get problems coming out of that plant; in fact, history proves that to be the case.

On the other hand, in many provinces you can have an abattoir kill the product, cut it up and sell it, and there may have been no inspection at all - none. That's where your safety problem is going to come from, these provincial operations. That's where there's more likely to be a problem. There's also likely to be a problem even in areas of federal jurisdiction if we do not have adequate, harmonized standards. One of the real strong advantages of this agency is that we'll be able to sit down, work with the provinces, work out harmonized standards, and then work out an inspection system to meet them.

An example right now is the national dairy code. If it's finalized by the end of next month and goes to ministers for approval.... At the moment, all provincial governments are strongly in favour of a national dairy code. Quebec has been actively involved in working it out, as they are now. The specialists have come up with it and are working on a few technical amendments. Once it's completed, by the end of this year or early in the new year, we'll have a single national dairy code standard for both fluid milk as well as the production and processing side of it. Then we can say there's mostly HACCP in the dairy industry. There we can say it doesn't matter really who inspects or who audits; we all have the same standard.

It will certainly make it much easier for our trade purposes, because, as some of you may know, there was the famous case of UHT milk where we lost a market for the sale of UHT milk to Puerto Rico because the Americans argued that we weren't meeting a standard equivalent to what the Americans had. Peter Brackenridge, in his former job as a director of the dairy branch, took nearly two years to resolve that, with Quebec, Canada and the Americans working together on an actual trade dispute panel. With a national dairy code we won't have that problem. We will have a much greater assurance of food safety because we're dealing with more harmonized standards.

The second issue is does Bill C-60 compromise the current rights of employees. The answer is clearly no. Employees for the agency will continue to be public servants. All their rights that are protected in legislation now will carry on. Their collective agreements will carry on. They will have collective agreements until we negotiate with them, and if they don't agree to their negotiated settlement.... There's no negotiated settlement even after the first-year transition period. Salaries, terms and conditions of employment, pensions, privacy legislation, all of these things continue to apply to these public servants who work for the new Canadian Food Inspection Agency.

One matter that was raised - if I can just stop for a moment - by Mr. Nelligan on behalf of the Professional Institute of the Public Service, PIPS, relates to an area where there may be inadequate protection for members by virtue of a very complex legal argument that was made by Mr. Nelligan. I won't take you through that again. I actually understand it now. It results really from legislation passed in 1993.

We've looked at that; the minister has looked at that. We believe that argument may have merit, and we will know shortly, having discussed this with others, whether or not it is necessary to make changes there and we will undertake to make that change. Minister Goodale is replying to Mr. Hindle in correspondence to this effect in the next few days. It may be that there is a minor, rather narrow area where it deserves merit that we will have to address. We'll have something more for you on that before Tuesday, when we come back for clause-by-clause, Mr. Chairman.

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In all other respects, though, the redress rights do in fact carry over. The other argument you heard, that they actually wanted to be under the Canada Labour Code or to change significantly the whole employment regime.... We can't do that in this bill. Our job here in Bill C-60 is to create a new Canadian Food Inspection Agency, not to change the public service HR regime for everyone. We will develop redress mechanisms in our work during the first year before we actually go outside the Public Service Employment Act.

I want to make it clear too that the approach we've taken on the separate employer status is not a new thing. There are already 23 separate employers in the federal government. We're just the 24th. This is not a dramatic new step. This is not a step into the dark off a cliff or something. There are already 23 of them. We're just the 24th. imilar approaches to work with their employees have been worked out at agencies such as the National Research Council, such as CSIS. We'll be like that. We're confident we can develop an HR regime that will fit the needs of our employees as well as the clients we serve and protect Canadians.

The third issue is whether Bill C-60 will increase the potential for further cost-recovery. The answer is absolutely no. The agency is committed to finding efficiencies through cost reduction and cost avoidance. This will be done, of course, with consultation of industry, as it always has been.

The second bullet - this has been approved by everyone. Believe me, it has been approved by everyone. There are no plans to introduce any new user fees before the year 2000.

What follows in brackets, to be fair and honest with you, is that existing and planned user fees will continue. So at Agriculture, for example, where they have the business alignment project, BAP, they have negotiated a three-year period with industry for certain recovery of fees expended by the Canadian taxpayer on behalf of these industries which they have agreed to negotiate and agree to. It happens that the third year of that business alignment project, Mr. Easter, is 1997-98. So some additional fees are coming into effect for 1997-98.

In the case of Mr. Weaver, you heard it's $2.4 million. That has nothing to do with the creation of this agency - nothing, zero. Those fees were negotiated in the past and would have come into effect whether there was an agency or not. This has nothing to do with Bill C-60. There are no new plans to introduce any additional user fees as a result of this agency.

Similarly, Fisheries and Oceans have negotiated some $4 million worth of cost recovery. There are no new plans to do any more cost recovery in the fisheries sector. This is not to say the existing ones they negotiated and the refinements they will have to negotiate will not come into effect, but this has nothing to do with the passage of this legislation - not a cent.

There's a second related question. We undertook to save in 1998-99, by virtue of this consolidation, $44 million, roughly 10% to 15% of the money that's now spent. The reason we say ``roughly 10% to 15%'' is that it's not exactly clear how to calculate the exact amount, because for example there are activities at Health Canada which some people say are really food inspection but such that others say no, it's research. It's not possible to have an exact number.

The number, when the work was being done by the Auditor General a couple of years ago, was around $400 million. The $44 million is somewhere in the order of 10% to 15%. Of course there have been reductions anyway because of program review and because of serious government cutbacks in the last two years. Now the number is smaller anyway. Not only do you not know what the numerator is, you don't know what the denominator is, for the exact calculation. So it's between 10% and 15%.

When the government was reviewing the decision whether to create this agency, the material that was developed for that did not project this $44 million coming from cost recovery. In fact, it specifically said it did not include additional cost recovery. Rather, there was an undertaking that if you had a single agency reporting to a single minister, rather than four departments reporting to four ministers, if you brought this together in a more integrated approach, surely you could save some money.

In fact, may I say, ladies and gentlemen, if we were saying today we're creating this new agency, it improves accountability, improves food safety, does all these wonderful things but doesn't save any money, my guess is many of you around this table would be saying this is ridiculous; if you have consolidated, integrated, and have a more streamlined approach, why the heck aren't you saving some money? The money we're saving is a reasonable amount, but not an impossible amount to meet.

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This isn't just a promise or a wishful hope either, this idea that we're just saying this now. We have already booked this - the verb in town is ``booked'' - against the three departments. The money for 1998-1999 in terms of the estimates being developed already take that $44 million out of there. We've lost it now. We will have to save that money in 1997-98 and the ranges for how to do that are being worked out. It's not easy. It's never easy to save money, but that's all the money we'll have. In 1998-99 we'll have the money that the three departments formerly had, less $44 million.

So we're saving the fiscal framework. We're saving the taxpayers of Canada $44 million by virtue of doing this. That's where the efficiency comes in. This is not coming from additional cost recovery.

Of course no government can bind another government. A new mandate, a new government, new arrangements...today no one can predict. There's no point in my kidding you. You're all experienced legislators. You know very well that no promise can be an absolute guarantee that nothing is going to happen in the foreseeable future. But for the people who are setting up the agency for this government with these ministers, there are no targeted.... The $44 million is not being targeted to come from cost recovery and there are no new user fees planned before the year 2000.

The executive management team and a new government, later on, after 1998-99, will sit down and work things out. It may be that the industry will come to the agency and say it has a thing it wants us to do. Maybe the industry will really want us to do it for trade reasons or health reasons. If that happens, it may be that the agency will say the industry will have to pay the agency to do so, because that's basically a private good.

And would there be more user fees as a result of that? Yes. Again, in that case it would of course be done in consultation with the industry, at the request of the industry, and it would be negotiated with the industry.

Finally, as we've said, there is a streamlined fee-setting system. Everybody wants this. It makes it sensible to do it in a timely and efficient way. An argument that this new streamlined fee system is somehow or other contradictory to the WTO or to NAFTA obligations has been made. This is not true. We have a legal opinion to this effect. We will in no way breach either of those two agreements by the wording of this bill, and we have our expert on this point with us here today if you want us to elaborate further. There is a considered legal opinion that is absolutely clear. It's not an equivocal legal opinion; this is a 100% clear legal opinion. What we're doing here in no way compromises the WTO and NAFTA provisions. Anyway, the provisions we have in here are the identical ones that have been in legislation for the Departments of Heritage, Industry and Health.

Issue number four is on page 13. Does Bill C-60 reduce ministerial accountability? This issue has come up many times. The answer is completely and utterly no. It couldn't be any clearer. The minister is accountable to Parliament for the agency. Bill C-60 clearly states that in clause 4. If anybody can think of words that make it clearer, we'll use them, but I can tell you that we haven't been able to find anything that makes it any clearer than it is in clause 4.

That does not mean - as we say at the third bullet on page 13 - that the minister can't designate his or her responsibilities to employees or to other qualified people. Sure, we want that and everybody wants that, but he of course retains the overall accountability for it. So if an inspector he's delegated this power to makes a mistake, the minister is held accountable. You can stand up in the House and ask the minister for the agency why the person he delegated this power to made this mistake. The minister is held accountable.

Mr. Easter, there is no taking any government out of governing here. This is exactly the arrangement.... If you had a new department for food inspection, the arrangement would be exactly the same as we have now. It would be done in the traditional ministerial accountability way. We are not at arm's length in the sense that we're out there, that we're some crown corporation that you can't control as much. We are not out there as an alternate service delivery model that is far removed from control of government. Our accountability regime is exactly like a department.

We hope to be a little more at arm's length for financial and other reasons so that we can be more entrepreneurial, save money and improve efficiency and effectiveness. But in terms of accountability, we are a government department. The relationship between Parliament and the minister is exactly what it is for a federal department. In the same way that you can call ministers before you today, you can call ministers before you when the agency is set up.

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In fact we've actually enhanced the reporting to Parliament through our business plan arrangements and through the unique and rather interesting role of the Auditor General in this. Conscious of the time, I won't go into that today unless you want to do it by way of questions. We will have a representative of the Auditor General with us here on Tuesday. If you want some elaboration from the Auditor General on the important new role it's going to play for us, its representative could come and be a witness and help us with the answers to those questions. You'll get it direct from the horse's mouth, so to speak - from the Auditor General, who is your agent.

The fifth issue is whether Bill C-60 will allow for increased patronage or nepotism. The answer is no. The president will be appointed up through a recommendation from the clerk to the Prime Minister, the same as what now exists for the appointment of deputy ministers. The executive vice-president will be analogous to an associate deputy minister in the appointment system. A staffing regime for the agency will keep all these core values of public service - non-partisan, professional, rights of appeal. All of that will be maintained.

The policy will develop in consultation with unions and staff. We will have an actual charter or code of conduct, a code of ethics as part of our business plan, which will be tabled with you by the Minister of Agriculture and Agri-Food, the minister responsible for the agency. You will be able to see it and hold the minister accountable for it. So if somebody tries to give a job to a non-qualified person who happens to be their cousin, you will have the same opportunity to stand up in the House and question that as you have today if that happened within the departmental system.

Moving along to issue six, we too were impressed by a number of remarks made by witnesses. Bill C-60 specifies that the board shall advise the minister on any matter within the responsibilities of the agency the minister submits to it.

The reason we did it that way, as you've heard, is that the lawyers advised us - you see, it's the lawyers' fault - that we wanted the minister responsible for the agenda of the board. This is the way to make it clear as an advisory board as to what they will do.

As we've heard from many witnesses and from many of you, frankly, perhaps that section unduly limits the scope of the advisory board. We may have to turn our attention to that again between now and Tuesday and deal with that. Of course all of these matters can't constrain your parliamentary committee, but we're also seeking some advice on that from the Privy Council Office and other places. Between now and Tuesday we will have done some more work on that. We too see the point there. We never really intended that the advisory board would be quite as restricted as the way people interpret that, and maybe we could have done a better job on that.

Issue seven is an interesting issue, whether Bill C-60 should designate the Minister of Agriculture and Agri-Food specifically. At the moment it says the minister shall be the person appointed by the Governor in Council for the purpose of this act. Again, it's the lawyers' fault. The wording in the bill reflects the standard in recent legislation. It facilitates, as we've said, the designation of a minister even if the department changes. But it would also mean that you could have a minister who was the minister for western diversification and the minister for the agency, or something like that - the way we've seen there have been changes. The Minister of Agriculture and Agri-Food hasn't always been the minister for the Wheat Board, for example. So it provides a greater degree of flexibility.

This is essentially a matter for the Prime Minister, but we concede that many industry groups came here and expressed a strong preference that the bill actually say that the Minister of Agriculture and Agri-Food is responsible for this. The fisheries people may not feel the same way, frankly, but we didn't have a lot of fisheries witnesses. This is a point to which there is no equivocal yes or no answer. It's really a question that we leave with you for your deliberations and considerations. We too are doing some inquiring about how other people would feel about this. There's no doubt, though, that if you actually designate it you would be compromising the range of freedom and flexibility the government now enjoys.

Issue eight is whether Bill C-60 should designate the national capital region as the headquarters for the agency. As you know, Bill C-60 says the agency's headquarters will be in the national capital region or in some other location the government may pick. We heard from several witnesses that this could be used for partisan purposes, not for strictly good policy reasons. It was raised by the Bloc Québécois at the outset and it has come up more than once on this matter.

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Again, this is really a discretionary matter. We as officials reporting back to you today don't have a strong view on this, and we understand that reasonable people can disagree on this point. It would restrict the scope of freedom of the government and we're seeking some advice on that as well, but for your purposes this is not a clear yes or no answer from our point of view. We have to deal with that issue.

On issue 9, you will remember that Sharon Ford was here. She made quite a persuasive and interesting presentation about aquaculture. She argued that two programs now not in the agency should be moved to it: the fish health program and the mollusc and shellfish water quality program. At the moment the fish health program is with the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, and the mollusc and shellfish water quality program is delivered by Environment Canada. She suggested that these two functions should be included in the agency.

Our answer, as officials who've studied this and looked at it hard is that we do not recommend it at this time. What the agency did was to take the inspection that was done by the Department of Agriculture and Agri-Food, the inspection that was done by the Department of Fisheries and Oceans and the inspection that was done by Health Canada, and put it in one place. Neither of these programs was dealt with by the inspection groups. It's the research group at Fisheries and Oceans that has responsibility for the fish health program, and the mollusc and shellfish program involves another department that we weren't even dealing with last fall when we came forward to the government and the Prime Minister reviewed this matter.

A lot of details would have to be worked out. In any event, it really turns on a more basic question that you may remember she asked, which is who should be responsible for aquaculture. That's a very interesting public policy question - not for decision, though, on Bill C-60. This is a sturdy debate that will have to occur over the next little while. We don't discourage the debate, but we can't figure it out in the next few weeks here, ladies and gentlemen. It's an interesting question and down the road there may be possible changes, but not at this time. When we do the comprehensive review of the twelve pieces of legislation we have responsibility for, we can look at it and perhaps at that time clear it up.

The last issue - and I did not badly here, Mr. Chair - is whether or not we enhance efficiency and effectiveness. I won't repeat this because we've already said there are a number of ways that we do. So actually, Mr. Chair, I did it on the spot -

The Chairman: Mr. Doering, you paced yourself very well.

We now have a triple bell, so we will adjourn the meeting until after the vote. I urge and ask the members to return here afterwards because a number have already indicated that they have questions or comments.

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The Chairman: We're on. Did you want to say any more on number 10, or are we going to questions?

Mr. Landry, and then Mr. Collins and Mr. Calder.

[Translation]

Mr. Landry: It is a pleasure to meet with you today because we are near the end of our review of Bill C-60. We will deal next week with the clause by clause review of the bill.

Here is my first question. Could you show us today a real business plan with a cost analysis and some realistic projections on the revenues of the new agency?

Second, what will be the budget of the agency for the first, second and third year?

Third, could you please explain to us in detail on what basis and according to what criteria the Canadian Food Inspection Agency will hire its employees.

Mr. Doering: Thank you for your questions. I will ask Mr. Derouin to answer you.

[English]

Mr. Gerry Derouin (Executive Adviser, Finance, Office of Food Inspection Systems, Department of Agriculture and Agri-Food): In relation to the budgets for the first three years of the agency, we don't have those numbers ready yet. They'll be ready once the agency is up and running.

For planning purposes, we're saying the budget of the agency will be $300 million in 1997. There are still a lot of negotiations to go on with the three departments on how much in corporate resources is to be transferred to the agency, where the laboratories end up, etc. There is still a lot of work to do, but the budget will be in the range of about $250 million to $300 million over the course of the next three years.

In terms of the revenue forecast, the number we're working with now is $60 million, and it's based on all the user fees that are in place now. So for purposes of planning, we're saying it's$60 million for the next three years, but the experience that the three departments together will have over the next two years will indicate exactly how much we anticipate. We can't be any more precise. We're not at that stage yet.

[Translation]

Mr. Landry: Can you answer my first question?

Mr. Doering: To answer your first question, I would say that we don't have a definite business plan.

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Mr. Landry: You don't have a business plan.

Mr. Doering: No, probably not before February of March.

The third question deals with staffing and I ask Sylvia to answer it.

[English]

Ms Sylvia Pollock (Executive Coordinator, Office of Food Inspection Systems, Human Resources, Department of Agriculture and Agri-Food): In terms of the criteria used to hire staff for the agency, we have working committees looking at this. These working committees are made up of unions, staff, management and human resources specialists, and they're looking at what the best ways are in terms of hiring staff. They are, however, keeping the basic fundamental criteria that we use right now in the public service. That includes such things as the following: the staff must be qualified; the treatment of staff must be equitable; the decisions that are taken must be subject to review; the process must be transparent. These are some of the elements they are building into the criteria for the hiring of staff for the agency. But certainly the primacy of qualified professional staff is one of the key elements being developed for our staffing.

[Translation]

Mr. Landry: Will some inspectors be laid-off? If so, when and how many?

[English]

Ms Pollock: At this point, we're not planning any major reductions in staff. With the planned savings of $44 million, we are looking at whether or not, and at how that will impact. We do have staff who have said they would like to take advantage of programs to leave if we make such programs available to them. Those would be similar to what the government has now with the programs it has for departures. So in terms of staff being laid off, there are no specific plans to do so; however, in the event that it does become necessary, we are looking at plans on how to deal with that.

[Translation]

Mr. Landry: Thank you.

[English]

The Chairman: Thank you, Monsieur Landry. Mr. Collins.

Mr. Collins (Souris - Moose Mountain): Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.

I commend you for bringing this together. I just talked to the mining association, and they're of the same opinion: when they get to Ottawa, there are so many layers of government that by the time they get to have anything implemented, they've moved into the next generation. There's a frustration there.

I heard from the Canadian Federation of Agriculture. They said that bureaucrats make all the decisions, and that the CFA just kind of bumbles along. I take strong umbrage to that kind of a viewpoint. As I said yesterday, I think we're working with you. It's not going to be easy, but the end result is that everybody is going to be better off because we're working for a harmonized system.

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With that in mind, how long do you think it's going to take before we might see national harmonization? I think we have to have some short-term and long-term goals. I'm sure you have them, but do you have some forecasts for us?

Mr. Doering: Yes, thanks for that. I think it came up on the first day.

I wish I could say we would have a truly national system in place a year from January or something like that, but because I really don't want to mislead you, sir, it really does depend on the commodity.

In the dairy area, if the national dairy code - there's a big meeting in Toronto on this between officials who work with us, the provinces, me and others - is completed by the end of the year, I think we will for all intents and purposes have a national dairy system for Canada, both on the processing side and the production side. The Dairy Farmers of Canada and the National Dairy Council have worked very well with all provinces. It was chaired for some time by the province of Quebec, and Quebec is still an active participant in that. Dairy is very important in the province of Quebec. So we will have a national dairy code, and we will have a national dairy system, for all intents and purposes.

In other commodities, such as meat, it will take a while. We have a national meat and poultry code group underway. Again, industry is actively involved on that, as are other provinces and the federal government. But this is tough going. Getting this kind of harmonized standard is really hard work, but some pretty good progress has been made. If we can get a national code, if we can have national standards, then we can move to national enforcement much more easily. Without a national code, that's hard to do.

In other commodities at the retail level, we should have some progress on our retail food establishment code in terms of food safety handling. There's some really good progress on that, but it will also take a while.

There is an interesting initiative to develop what would actually be a common legislative base whereby all provinces and the federal government would incorporate by reference the same food act, and then you'd have codes for various commodities. This is really tough slugging but, frankly, they've made more progress than I thought they would make.

One thing that will help toward having a more national system is that, as a priority matter when the agency is up and running in the spring, the federal government will certainly sit down to look at all eleven food inspection acts that we now have. If it works out, if industry agrees, and if it's for the interest of Canadians generally, hopefully we will have a single food inspection act to bring back to you a year from now.

Mr. Collins: Ron, with regard to a number of issues, I'll try to quickly go through them.

Where you are going to coordinate inspections, and where you have your personnel here and you have some Saskatchewan personnel - Saskatchewan is unique because we don't have meat inspection - are you going to work that within the framework of the legal agreement so that you won't have a distortion because they wouldn't have to be considered essential service in the case of a problem occurring? I could see that being a bit of a problem.

I like the idea.... Once you have this model up and running, hopefully we can use it as a model to take to other agencies of government to show them that you've been able to do it here. One of the things I heard yesterday, though - and I think it's rather significant - is that people feel the Minister of Agriculture should be identified. You talked about this too, and I'm sorry I don't have the quote that you mention. You made some reference to the idea that it may cause some problems. I wonder if you could just point out what the problems are, because these people feel very strongly that it should be a minister, and that this minister should be the Minister of Agriculture. What are the hang-ups? How do we do these inter-union kinds of relationships, provincial and federal?

Mr. Doering: On the federal-provincial matter in Saskatchewan, Saskatchewan doesn't have mandatory meat inspection, but arrangements are made to provide for inspection if you request it. Saskatchewan is a participant at CFIS, the Canadian Food Inspection System. If we can develop a national meat code, there would therefore have to be provisions to prove that there has been adequate compliance. This would be necessary so that in the case of our international competitors, for example, we would be able to prove that we've actually done what we said we'd do.

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Nova Scotia, for example, just introduced a new meat inspection act, so that province will already be in a position to bring itself up to some more harmonized approach here. I therefore remain hopeful, but I don't want to underestimate the difficulties of getting all Canadian provinces to agree on these things, sir.

On your point about the Minister of Agriculture, this came up yesterday at the Canadian Federation of Agriculture. It came up with the poultry position. And frankly, sir, while we only had here the three big industry groups that use food inspection - the fisheries council, the meat council and the poultry council, which I would guess represent 95% of the federal inspection - we received over 60 submissions from other smaller groups. Many of those groups also expressed the opinion that it should be the Minister of Agriculture and Agri-Food, particularly if they were an agriculture group. But there are two principal reasons I can think of for why it's worded this way, although I'll ask Tom to perhaps be thinking of another one while I'm doing these two.

It is the easiest way to draft it in the sense that it keeps it flexible, and it is the kind of standard that's been used in some recent legislation. But frankly, sir, I don't want to con you. We've also seen some recent legislation that doesn't do that either. The new Canadian Space Agency Act says that the minister will be the Minister of Industry, for example. But others, such as the National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy Act, which created the latest legislative agency - I was involved with that - says it would be a minister to be designated by the Governor in Council. So you can find precendents on both sides.

I guess the second argument was to maximize flexibility so that, depending on the Prime Minister's cabinet-making job - and that's more of an art than a science, as I understand it - they would maximize the flexibility for the government in terms of designating who'd be responsible for the agency. On the other side, that very flexibility is what worries people, particularly if they're in the agriculture sector. They want the assurance that they won't lose the kind of connection that they've had in the past.

As someone who has worked for various government departments, sir, I have to say that the sort of sense of connection is really remarkable. As much as they might complain about the Department of Agriculture, the agricultural community feels very strongly the connection they enjoy with the department now. They really don't want to lose it. And frankly, it's a similar thing with fisheries, which was one of the issues we had to overcome.

So those are the two issues that came up. Was there a third one, Tom?

Mr. Tom Beaver (Executive Coordinator, Accountability/Legislation, Office of Food Inspection Systems, Department of Agriculture and Agri-Food): No, that was basically it.

The Chairman: Mrs. Ur, then Mr. Hoeppner.

Mrs. Ur (Lambton - Middlesex): I have just a quick question. You were stating that you're going to delay clause 13 - I think that was it - -for a year. Why would that not be done now instead of delaying it for the year? What is your reason for delaying it?

Mr. Doering: Basically, it's a movement from the existing status quo in which people work for departments in the Public Service Commission arrangement. The change is wholly consistent with the kind of traditions of how we do government. These people are still public servants, but there are a lot of detailed things that had to be worked out in terms of having your own staffing regime, in terms of policies and a whole variety of things.

You've heard me say that I think this is an idea whose time has come. I believe it is, which is why the government has taken this initiative. But a good idea badly implemented is not a good thing, so the advice given to us by the human resource specialists was that if we took a full year to work out how we would move to exercise a separate employer status in this way, we could do a much better job of it. It really was to err on the side of caution, to make sure there was a high degree of comfort for the staff, and to make sure that we did this and did this well. As a manager, if we can make sure we do this implementation well by using this year to do it, then that really was why we considered it. It was really a management decision in terms of getting the right people at the right place.

Sylvia, I wonder if you could elaborate on that point.

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Ms Pollock: One thing I would add to that is that the unions also asked for us to do whatever we could to make the transition smoother and easier on staff. They felt with the amount of change they were facing, anything we could do to make things easier and smoother for the staff...this would be one way of doing it. So there was some pressure to maintain some of the existing approaches in the human resources area.

Mrs. Ur: Another quick question. This may be policy; I'm not sure. You stated no decisions have been made on staff reductions. In this particular paper I have it says the program review reductions will occur as planned and employees joining the agency have a two-year job guarantee. Is that status quo? Is that routine procedure?

Ms Pollock: No, in fact this is something they are gaining by moving to the separate employer status with the changes that were made in Bill C-31 this summer. There was provision for two-year job guarantees for employees moving from a regular government department to a separate employer. This is something other public servants in fact don't have.

Mrs. Ur: I wasn't aware of that. I just wondered about that.

The Chairman: Committee members, we're going to have to go in a couple of minutes and I still have four members who wish to ask some questions. The next vote should not take very long. Can we come back after that vote and finish our questions this afternoon? The only thing shy of that is to come back another day or reset a meeting tomorrow morning. I see some indication from our witnesses that they would like to come back this afternoon. We'll have to have a quorum. I believe the members should not stray too far away, because later on this evening, in another hour or so, there may very well be another vote, so we are going to have to be close at hand. If I hear no objection to that, that's what we will do.

Mr. Hoeppner.

Mr. Hoeppner (Lisgar - Marquette): Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I'm very glad we found out today all the problems we have around are because of lawyers. I can understand now why the Liberal government has so many problems.

I'm going back to page 10, about reinforcing the responsibility of the Minister of Health for establishing food safety policy and standards in assessing the food safety inspection activities of the agency. Does this give us an opportunity to have one department sabotage the other one if there is a conflict between departments? To me it looks fairly obvious it could happen.

Mr. Doering: The departments will still have to work really well together with this agency, and no piece of legislation can guarantee there won't be turf problems, guarantee that everybody will work together the way they need to to serve Canadians best, but this Bill C-60 really makes it a lot easier for them to work together, because it really makes clear who's responsible for what now. There isn't confusion about overlap, about you do that and we do a bit of this now, both of them doing inspections, some setting safety standards, some not. With it really being clear on who's doing what, it will be a lot easier for them to work together. That's the idea here. It's why industry and others are so much in favour of this.

The business about one department auditing another and that kind of thing, that's a real question, Mr. Hoeppner. I don't make light of it. But basically the Minister of Health is held accountable for these food safety standards. He or she needs some assurance that the agency, a little more arm's length in the way it does its work, is living up to these standards. A program that allows them to say ``we of course will want to satisfy ourselves that you're meeting this'' is actually a significant improvement in food safety. It's one of the reasons why the Consumers' Association and others like this vision.

Also, it's not so inconsistent with what we do now. Health Canada today has a kind of audit function relative to what the food inspection departments do to satisfy themselves from the health-and-safety point of view - are they living up to it? People felt that needed to be maintained and indeed even strengthened. This is not a big expenditure, though. I would estimate.... I don't know if it's fair to say this. We have people from Health Canada here today.

How many would we expect would be involved in the audit function?

A voice: Currently we have 25.

Mr. Doering: So 25 or fewer people would be engaged in this audit function. These people know the things that can be helpful in standard-setting. That won't be their exclusive job there. They do other things, I believe. And in addition, there's the audit. Health Canada still has an important role to play. We don't want to pretend that they don't.

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In fact submissions on this point came to us during the consultation, Mr. Hoeppner. Over and over, people.... For example, everybody on this committee likes Agriculture Canada, or they like their relationship to be maintained, although they may criticize it from time to time. I know that may have happened. There is a perception that the agriculture department's job is to promote agriculture.

Hang in there, Mr. Easter, please don't....

Some hon. members: Oh, oh!

The Chairman: Why do they always single you out?

Some hon. members: Oh, oh!

The Chairman: Gentlemen, if I could interrupt for a minute, we're now down to a triple bell for a minute already, so if you will hold your places - or close to them - we'll return as soon as the vote is complete.

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The Chairman: Mr. Hoeppner, you have another question.

Mr. Hoeppner: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

What I was wondering here, we had the big BST issue. Isn't it one example where we could really run into problems by Health Canada still overruling some of the people in this bill who are taking part in it?

Mr. Doering: Do you mean rBST, the biotech problems -

Mr. Hoeppner: Yes.

Mr. Doering: BSE, the -

Mr. Hoeppner: No, rBST.

What I'm concerned about, sir, is that the consumers will be lobbying on one side and the producers and the manufacturers or the processors on the other side. I can see us really getting into a dispute over some of these regulations.

Mr. Doering: Actually, Mr. Hoeppner, I have to admit that rBST is a good example, where the kind of thing you worry about is not a guaranteed solution.... Creating the agency doesn't make anything worse, though may I say that the problem we face with rBST and continue to face with biotech files continues to suffer from different jurisdictional responsibilities. The agency itself will continue to have some biotech capacity on the plant breeders side.

I guess the main assurance I can give you, sir, is that the creation of the independent agency does not make the situation worse, and it's going to require -

Mr. Hoeppner: Maybe not better either.

Mr. Doering: - a great deal of collaboration of these departments in the future that maybe can't be legislated.

Tom, could you give us anything or...?

Mr. Beaver: I could give you a general answer.

When we began the exercise last spring, one of the things we paid very careful attention to was defining each of the elements of the federal inspection system. We went through a very detailed process. All departments were involved. We identified 51 separate and distinct federal inspection-related activities in animal and plant health and food inspection. Then we went through a detailed process of defining who's doing what now and how that would change over the transition period into the agency.

At the end of that process, we had the ADMs of the three branches sign off on this document. So for the first time in thirty years, we finally have clarified all of the federal activities in this area, who's responsible for them, and how that will transfer into the agency.

So we have a better starting point now than we've ever had with respect to standards, enforcement and all of that. Hopefully that will serve us well. That process involved a good deal of to-ing and fro-ing and also a good deal of commitment on the parts of the departments for signing off at that level.

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Mr. Hoeppner: That raises another question. A lot of these issues are addressed by Order in Council now. Can those regulations be changed? You maybe have them defined right now, but will that be constant?

Mr. Beaver: At this point we are not touching the substantive legislation that regulates the food. The Feeds Act, Seeds Act, and Meat Inspection Act and the regulation-setting process remain exactly the same until we start the process of.... Ron referred to the single food act, for example, or the potential for amalgamating the federal legislation. At that time we'll be able to deal with regulation-making. Now we are not dealing with regulation-making per se, we're dealing with who is responsible for administration. There's a difference there.

Mr. Hoeppner: How far down the road will it come into effect where you deal with that?

Mr. Beaver: I can't prejudge the business plan at this point, but I'm quite sure the government would want to put that very much front and centre in the business plan. When we spoke to the industry groups recently, they said it's nice to get your housekeeping in order, but really the purpose of all this should be a substantive review of food regulation in Canada. That's the CFIA initiative too; that's exactly what CFIA is trying to deal with. So the business plan will likely put forward as a key strategy something to do with the regulation of the food industry.

Mr. Doering: We haven't done a really good job of answering your question, Mr. Hoeppner, I know that. One thing we can say for sure is that we've said publicly that a major first-step priority for the new agency, now that you have one agency, with these twelve pieces of legislation, will be to sit down and try to work through this. It's hard.

Mr. Hoeppner: If it took us thirty years to get this far, how long will it take to get to the next step?

Mr. Doering: Some of this legislation goes back a lot further even than thirty years. The Meat Inspection Act was relatively unchanged since the 1940s. There's a lot of work to be done there.

One of the reasons there hasn't been this comprehensive view is the fragmented jurisdiction across the four departments. So we made a strong commitment that this would be a major priority. It's in the agency's interest to try to get a good handle on that, but at the same time it's really important that we do the consultation right. If you talk to the Canadian Meat Council, they are big fans of this agency, but don't you touch the Meat Inspection Act until we've sat down and actually worked through what you're going to do and what you're not going to do.

Consistency is a good thing, but it's not the only virtue. Let me say this to you. I'll be really disappointed if there isn't a good start on it in the spring and something isn't going to the government in summer or fall, so we wouldn't have a legislative package ready for late next fall.

Mr. Hoeppner: My concern is that if we don't get the proper procedures in place now, how do you get the provinces on board later on? There's a big issue between provincial and federal meat inspection and between small processors and larger processors. I think you have to have this thing in order before we get further down the road or we're going to have more division than we're going to have harmonization.

Mr. Doering: I agree with you, Mr. Hoeppner.

We can do our part with the feds getting their own act together. This is a very significant step in this direction. All provinces agree with that. It's not often you get a federal initiative like this, where every single province has formally said yes, we're in favour of that. But I agree with you, there's a lot of work to be done there.

In some provinces there's really interesting progress, in other provinces not so much. You can't tell a province what to do in an area of its own jurisdiction. We have to respect that. But if every province except one has moved, it will put a lot of pressure on the province that's out, with these standards, to try to bring it up to par with others.

Mr. Hoeppner: This is why I think it's very important that the advisory board has some clout, so they can go to the minister and point out some of these problems before it comes from the minister. That's one thing that has to be changed in this bill, to make at least some progress.

Mr. Doering: Sir, the advisory board is one way to get that, but I can tell you there's no shortage of representation by other kinds of advisory bodies to do this. One of them is the annual meeting - quite often twice-annual meeting, but certainly annual meeting - of all the Ministers of Agriculture. I've been at each of those meetings in the last two years and they were a very big issue on each of the agendas. When we were in Newfoundland, when we were in Toronto, and last July when we were in Victoria, one of the primary issues on our agenda was the Canadian Food Inspection System and how we can get some harmonization going here.

The Canadian Food Inspection System initiative to do this harmonization - again, rare - has every province there, including Quebec, even though it's a federal-provincial matter. Quebec was an active participant at the Newfoundland meeting, the Toronto meeting, and this past July at the Victoria meeting, on the Canadian Food Inspection System. They are very active participants in this. Everybody wants it to be done.

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I think that in addition to the advisory board, the meeting of federal and provincial ministers of agriculture will make a big difference to keep the pressure on the bureaucrats to get this right.

Mr. Hoeppner: I appreciate those frank answers. I think you did a good job answering my questions.

The Chairman: This is just a point of clarification before I go to Mr. Calder.

Mr. Hoeppner, you raised the rBST issue. This is a food inspection agency. The issue with rBST now is whether it should be registered for use in Canada. The food inspection agency would not, in my understanding, have anything to do with the registration of a product. That would still be under Health Canada. That would have nothing to do with it.

The food inspection agency, if I might draw what might happen there, might be involved in inspection of whether a product that was being used was a legal product or an illegal product. But the issue that's still out there on the registration of rBST for use in Canada has nothing to do, and would have nothing to do, with the single food inspection agency. That would still be done by the Ministry of Health, as are all drug registrations of that type that take place.

Am I correct on that, Mr. Doering?

Mr. Doering: Yes. I was just taking it to the broader point and suggesting the problem rather than that particular -

The Chairman: I didn't want to have the impression left on the record that the food agency would deal with that type of issue. That's a registration issue, not an inspection issue. This is a food inspection agency.

Mr. Hoeppner: A point of clarification, Mr. Chairman. I was looking further ahead. When we get into the situation where they're using the product, I'm sure you'll get a lot of pressure that it be tested to see whether there is any harmful effect in the product itself. If you have dual labelling or anything like that, that's where I'm coming from.

The Chairman: Okay. Murray.

Mr. Calder (Wellington - Grey - Dufferin - Simcoe): I want to go back and deal with what you said on page 4 about the rationale for the creation of the agency. I want to go to the top bullet: ``Improves efficiency, saves $44 million yearly''.

I know the percentage of savings from this new agency has been kicked around as either 10% or 15%, but those two percentage points are pretty.... Okay, let's go for 10% for easy figuring. I'd like to flip it on its head. That means to say that this agency will be working on a budget of $440 million. Of course, this 10% savings comes in the second year of the budget, which means that in the 1997-98 year, when it's created, it will run on a $440 million budget. Then in the 1998-99 year, with a $44 million savings, it will be running on a budget of $396 million. I'd like your comments on that. And by the business alignment plan that was done, that means the ag industry will be paying$52.5 million, or an extra $13.6 million over and above the 1996-97 year. I'd like your comments on that.

As the last one, when we're working with federal and provincial agencies together, how are we going to get around the union contracts that are there? I cite the example of the OPSEU strike last year. Are we going to pit segments of the agricultural industry against each other? Say, for instance, that beef and pork are inspected under provincial meat inspectors, and poultry and fish are inspected under federal inspectors. We already know that the federal inspectors can't go on strike, but the provincial ones can. How do we get around those problems?

Mr. Doering: Let me deal with the last one first, if I could, Mr. Calder, and then I'll ask Gerry to give you the right numbers.

We should be so lucky as to have $440 million. We don't. It's actually $300 million, and I'll have Gerry explain where that comes from. You can't extrapolate up from the $44 million. When we started this work it was a little over $400 million in all, but of course some of the money Health Canada still has to do its job. The actual agency budget will be $300 million, and we'll explain that in a minute.

Let me deal with the business of pitting one part against the other. What happened in Ontario in the OPSEU strike was that the meat inspectors went on strike and the government moved to have them declared an essential service. That in no way affected the federally registered plants in Ontario. They carried on as they did.

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If you were a federally registered plant there was no pitting of one sector against another - the world carried on as it did. It's just that for those few plants that fell under the provincial system and the 40 to 80 inspectors they had there, when they went on strike the federally registered plants could no longer get the work done.

It's not based on a commodity. Those inspectors were working in federally registered abattoirs. It included all commodities, such as pork, pigs, sheep and beef. It just turned to whether you were a provincially registered facility or a federally registered facility. It wasn't one commodity or not, as we heard in a presentation the other day. I don't see how creating the agency would have any effect whatsoever of a negative kind in terms of what we now do. If a provincial employee working in Nova Scotia goes on strike, whether there is an agency or not, that person goes on strike. There is no difference in that.

In the case of the federal agency, all we're doing here is moving people who currently work in government departments and putting them in the agency, but they all remain under the same public service regime where they will be designated as people who are essential and cannot strike.

Mr. Calder: You wouldn't be leaving one segment of the industry high and dry.

Mr. Doering: No, there would be no change of the negative kind there.

In terms of the money, we're not trying to speak down to you and pretend it is too complicated to explain, but believe me these numbers are very complicated. You need a lot of time because it's a continually moving target.

What the Auditor General evaluated two and a half years ago was one figure, but of course there was a program review and cuts anyway, so it's gone down. On the other hand, the Auditor General didn't look at all costs. It looked at program costs and didn't include, for example, overhead costs that are a key part of the inspection system. There are a number of ways of including things: do you include all the money in the corporate services branch of Agriculture, or do you include just the money that's in FPI? It's very complicated, depending on what you actually count.

It's the Auditor General's fault this time, not the lawyers, Mr. Hoeppner, for some of that confusion.

At the same time, because Health Canada still has a food safety role, the money that continues to be in Health Canada's budget is not in the agency's budget but is still part of the food inspection system. That's a further complexity. Gerry will give you the exact numbers, but as an outsider when I got into it I was pretty confused with the numbers too.

The third complexity was that the targets for cost recovery differed from the actual amount of money that was raised. Therefore, more people had to be laid off than was originally planned because they didn't meet the cost-recovery targets.

This is what you include in food inspection - whether they actually met their targets and whether or not there are some calculations about the whole inspection system. All of these things make this more complex. I know that sounds like bureaucratic gobbledegook, but Gerry has the real numbers now.

Gerry, you've had time to prepare this. We'll all be confident that when Gerry's done we'll have an exact understanding of these numbers. Right, Gerry?

The Chairman: Is the pressure on yet, Gerry? Do you want the microphone turned on?

Mr. Doering: He may not want it.

Mr. Derouin: I'll just complement what Ron was saying.

In 1995 we estimated the cost of the system to be over $430 million. I believe that at the last meeting when I answered this question I gave some numbers and I believe the document has been circulated to members, but I'm not sure. For your purposes, I'll just give them to you verbally.

In 1995 we estimated that Agriculture's FPI budget was $219 million, Department of Fisheries and Oceans' budget was $30 million, and Health Canada's budget was approximately $50 million. We calculated overhead and support at $30 million to $60 million - $30 million within the three departments for corporate services, administration, personnel, financing for budgets in the departments, plus another $30 million worth of costs covered by other departments like Public Works for lease payments.

The Chairman: Gerry, just a minute. The members do have that if they brought it with them. It's this document here, which has been sent out by the committee. I see everybody madly writing numbers down. Excuse me, Gerry, but it has been circulated.

Mr. Derouin: Okay.

Mr. Doering: We have a couple other copies here to give them. Pursuant to our first day, people asked for this material. This was sent to the committee.

The Chairman: Yes, they have it. Gerry can proceed. They have it.

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Mr. Derouin: Working on that $430 million basis in 1995, a cut was determined to be$44 million, so we worked with the rule of thumb of 10%. We said the amount was about 10% of the $430 million.

As Ron said, there have been several cuts since then. There was the program review one, and other budget cuts went into effect in 1996 and 1997. So the budgets have been eroded somewhat over time.

The system today costs between $330 million and $360 million. Out of that amount, the agency will have a budget of about $300 million. As for the functions that stay in Health Canada - standard-setting, research, policy-making and audit - their budget for 1997 will be about $30 million. That's the starting point from which the savings of $44 million will be found.

Mr. Calder: Okay.

The Chairman: Mr. Easter and then Mr. Landry.

Mr. Easter: I appreciate the document you presented today. It answers quite a number of questions we've had through the course of the hearings and it offers some helpful changes. I'm especially pleased that the minister is accountable.

Probably we all still have a concern on cost recovery. I know what you said on cost recovery. I'll tell you, nothing sharpens the concentration like an election where your colleagues get the stuffing kicked out of them, as happened the other day, and cost recovery is a part of that, I'll tell you. There's a lot of concern about cost recovery.

You're under Agriculture, but I constantly worry about the fact that cost recovery often ends up the call of Treasury Board. We do have to find some way of looking at this big picture and the impact of cost recovery. I just lay that on the table.

I don't know that you can answer this now, but at some point in the future we do need an answer on it. When you say to farmers there's a $44 million saving, they want to see what it's made up of. There is absolutely no question about that. We're tactical people. We want to know where that bolt and that nut fit.

So we have to have an explanation of where that $44 million is coming from, and even some greater assurances that we're not going to get end-run here, with savings on one end and picking it up with cost recovery on the other.

I just lay that before you, Ron, as a problem. I don't whether you want to say anything on it or not.

There was a suggestion on this cost-recovery business by Ron Bulmer, I believe. You didn't mention it in your overview. He suggested that the Auditor General be required to provide an annual report on the cost-effectiveness under three points: the cost of the service; the percentage of allocation of that cost to the public good versus the private good; and third, which I think would be very difficult to do, the comparative costs of services in other countries.

I wonder what your view on that is. Can it be done? Because that would address some of the concerns on cost recovery.

Mr. Doering: Mr. Easter, those are all three good questions, and I agree with you on all three of them.

I think we have some help.

On the first point, cost recovery, somebody has to look at this from a broad impact point of view. This is now pretty well recognized within this town. There was a meeting yesterday hosted by Treasury Board. I'm not sure if you were back yet from your visit.

Mr. Easter: I was in Toronto fighting with the Ontario Federation of Agriculture.

Mr. Doering: And we missed you the day after the election here, but the Treasury Board did host a major meeting on this point yesterday. And this was a case of Treasury Board hosting the meeting, not one of the line departments, which is an indication that they too recognize their responsibility to coordinate a coherent approach to cost recovery.

That's not a perfect answer to you, but as someone who's lived and worked in this town all my adult life, I think it's a significant signal that Treasury Board organized this.

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Your chair also raised, yesterday, the possibility that this committee could make a significant contribution to get a handle on this too by hosting a round table session that could at least begin before Christmas and carry on after Christmas. This way you could finally cut through much of the, in some cases, confusion. In other cases people are deliberately dissembling. It's in the interest of people, through half-truths, to take certain perceptions of these things.

If this committee could get people here - people from the departments and people from industry - they could have this cut-and-thrust debate and actually learn about it. It seems to me a very positive step to getting a handle on this general problem of the overall impact that cost recovery's having on industry, and Canadians more generally.

Certainly from our point of view this would be helpful, and the agency will have to take this very seriously. There's no denying it. There's no point in trying to pretend. In the hundreds of meetings we had and in the consultations on whether or not to create the agency, I found myself dealing more with cost recovery than with the idea of an agency.

Many people say the agency is great - the feds are getting their act together, and that's fine - but what about cost recovery? It continues to be an issue that has to be taken seriously and is a real thing for real people.

On the $44 million, we have given you some material on where this comes from, but frankly what happens with government agencies is you spend the money you get and then you try to get as efficient as you possibly can. We know we're getting $44 million less. We also know that the projected saving, what we told everybody, wasn't from cost recovery.

As I indicated on the first day.... I think you were a fairly consistent participant in these sessions; I'm sorry if I'm repeating myself to you, but for the record we honestly believe there is a significant amount of overlap and duplication in informatics, enforcement, communication functions and actual presence in enforcement at the border, for example. There's a fair bit of overlap and duplication in labs and lab rationalization.

To save this money, in our first two years we have to focus on all of these opportunities to concentrate on cost avoidance, cost reduction and getting rid of the overlap and duplication. It would be very hard down the road to try to impose a new cost recovery if we hadn't shown we were able to do that first.

On the role of the Auditor General, I'm pleased to say this committee has been quite helpful in focusing our mind on this, even in the last few days. How could we accommodate the Ron Bulmer proposal? More than one member has raised this. We actually have a view on how this might be done without changing the legislation.

On Tuesday I think the Deputy Auditor General, Mr. Dubois, will be here himself, or someone very significant from the Auditor General's office, to provide some elaboration, so I don't want to speak for them, but they will confirm, I believe, the role they have in looking at and auditing the performance indicators we submit to see if the material we gave is sufficient and to determine if it really helps the accountability of members of Parliament. They don't do that now for any government department, but they're going to do it. They're required by our legislation to do it.

Would the agency, as a matter of course in this business plan and this performance reporting, have something on cost recovery to say this is what we did, here's how it compares and here's the analysis we did on the impact it has on the industry? If we did that kind of report, that would in fact be audited by the Auditor General under existing wording.

So if, in consultation with the Auditor General, we can firm this up a little better between now and Tuesday, it would be helpful.

As I say, Tom, who worked all his life for the Auditor General until he was seconded to us for the last couple of years, can elaborate on this, but I think we actually have a way to achieve that objective, Mr. Easter.

Tom, could you just take a minute?

Mr. Beaver: You're correct in your interpretation of the proposal in the bill, but in addition to that the Auditor General Act requires that he do a value-for-money audit on all federal spending. This will be in addition to the annual performance audit and the annual opinion. We're not layering audit on top of audit here, but there is another value-for-money, and the regular, periodic audits the Auditor General does will continue to happen under this new regime. This is additional work over and above that.

Mr. Doering: Actually, Mr. Easter, you're among many other members from over a long period of time. I remember this being an issue 15 years ago in another department.

Members of Parliament are frustrated. We really can't get a handle on how well you're doing.

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The agency is a rare public agency: we'll actually say how we're doing. We are required to set out our objectives and say how we've done in our performance relating to these objectives; and we've gone ahead and said, under paragraph 23.(2)(b), that the Auditor General of Canada will look at the fairness and reliability of that information. It seems to me there's a way under that paragraph to accommodate the Ron Bulmer proposal.

The Chairman: You have another brief comment, Mr. Easter.

Mr. Easter: Yes. A concern was raised - and you didn't mention it in your paper, either - under clause 56, proposed subsection 7.(1): ``An inspection may seize all fish containers and other things''. There was a concern about what ``other things'' meant; that ``other things'' could mean almost anything. I think we need some comments on the record on that.

Secondly, for the new human resources framework you outline three proposals. The second one was the separate employer situation. How do you handle collective bargaining in that process?

Mr. Doering: I'll take the last one first. I don't remember this ``other things'' part, but we owe you an answer on that and we're coming to it in a moment, I trust.

On the HR regime, as a separate employer the government is going back and negotiating collective agreements. We will then be sitting down, negotiating our own collective agreement, after the first-year transition period. It will presumably be with the same union, or there could be some reorganization there. It will be the Canadian Food Inspection Agency and its unions negotiating their own collective agreements.

Mr. Easter: But they can't strike.

Ms Pollock: Only a certain percentage can't strike. It's similar to the designation process we find in departments now. It's no different. There are certain employees who can strike but there are people who are designated essential for health and safety purposes. That's no different from the current system we have -

Mr. Easter: That's not any broader than it currently is.

Ms Pollock: No, not at all.

Mr. Easter: Fine.

Mr. Doering: Now the answer on clause 56.

Mr. Beaver: May I try? I was at the table when things were put in there.

The list is quite extensive. It has to do with a lot of the equipment around a fish plant. This list was quite long, but there is a list. We've narrowed it down to ``things'', which I think -

The Chairman: The list would would be in the regulations, then?

Mr. Beaver: The list will be in the regulations, and I think we can produce a list of the ``things'' for you.

Mr. Easter: Jake, I'm worried you might be on that list.

Mr. Hoeppner: I was wondering if that could include my wife. I would object strenuously to it.

The Chairman: You would object.

Mr. Hoeppner: Yes, I would. I made a commitment 35 years ago, and I signed it.

The Chairman: Okay.

Mr. Doering: Mr. Easter, our lawyer will have a brief comment on that, but if it's not sufficient - I want to deal with this and take this seriously - we'll have a better answer for you by Tuesday.

Mr. Easter: Okay.

Mr. Hoeppner: Just a point of clarification, Mr. Chairman. Would those ``other things'' include bank accounts?

The Chairman: They're going to clarify what that is on Tuesday, when we do clause-by-clause. Okay?

Mr. Hoeppner: I would like to know that.

Mr. Peter Sylvester (Legal Counsel, Health Canada): I may be of some assistance to the committee on this. Some of the members may not realize that the Department of Justice was represented by three different legal services, or lawyers, at the drafting table. The fisheries issues were handled by one of my colleagues, and I'm sure if we have a bit of time I can check with my colleague.

My recollection is that in the drafting we had toyed with the idea of having an exhaustive list. This proved to be impossible, so we were left with the very generic term ``things'', which of course raises the question posed by Mr. Easter.

We will get back to you with clarification on that.

The Chairman: Mr. Landry, you had a brief question.

[Translation]

Mr. Landry: Yes, thank you.

Can you tell me if the cost recovery system envisioned for this agency and the other cost recovery systems introduced by the department will have an effect on the competitivity of our farmers?

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[English]

Mr. Derouin: I'm not sure if I can answer that question. If I understand it correctly, you want to know how cost recovery will affect the competitiveness of the industry.

Mr. Landry: Yes.

The Chairman: Farmers too.

Mr. Derouin: I guess I have to go back to the point we were making earlier. The agency itself won't create any new cost recovery between now and the year 2000, but the current plans will go into play and will continue through the third year of the business alignment plan.

As for how this affects consumers, I don't have that answer. I know some studies are being conducted by Treasury Board now to try to get a handle on exactly how all the different fees play on a producer or a company and how it affects competitiveness. I don't have the answers to that, but certainly it's an issue that is raised now. There's an awareness that some work has to be done on it, but I don't have the information.

Mr. Easter: I have one other question on the fish act. I know you had this in here and I can't seem to find it. There was a concern about aquaculture. I know that's a little different matter, and there are the inspections under Environment and under Fisheries and Oceans. Can you run that explanation by me again? If there are other duplications there that can be gotten rid of, then we should.

Mr. Doering: We tried to capture that in issue 9, Mr. Easter. I can elaborate a bit. We were getting close to the three-bell ring when I was at issue 9, so I may have made it too short and talked too fast.

We've had very strong support from the aquaculture industry from the very beginning of our consultations. They believe that they fell between the cracks because they were neither fish or farming. They don't think they are fully understood at Fisheries and Oceans - this is of more use to people who are hunting fish - and at the same time there are farmers and they don't deal with aquaculture.

So we've had a kind of ongoing dialogue with them about how to deal with aquaculture. All it does is underline the broader point that at some stage down the road, there will have to be some decisions about whether aquaculture as a sector will be treated differently than it currently is.

You will note, though, that Ms Ford did not say she didn't want to be dealt with by Fisheries and Oceans. There is even within her industry a debate on this point. The two specific things she wanted were to move the fish health program and the mollusc and shellfish water quality program into the agency's responsibility.

The fish health program is the fish veterinarians, the people who actually work on fish. They actually are veterinarians for fish. Even though when you get your veterinarian degree you don't spend much time on fish, that's what these people do. It's a very big issue, particularly because of the new problems that come up when you put fish in such a confined place.

They wanted us to take over that. This came up in a major industry liaison committee we had on September 4, and we did a fair bit of work on it at the time. We concluded that it was too complex a problem to deal with in this legislation. It was September 4 and the legislation was coming forward at the end of September, and some pretty serious discussions with the departments still hadn't been undertaken. So people said we'll do this in the comprehensive review that we do next spring.

The mollusc and shellfish water quality program is actually delivered by Environment Canada, and it was never really part of our consideration here. It's a significant program and we'll clearly have to work well with Environment Canada over the next little while as we do a good job on this, because they've actually had some problems in this field. But it's inappropriate at this time to take on that very significant machinery of government to change, frankly. We've undertaken to give this a high priority in the next phase, and we believe this is the best way to look at it.

There has not been adequate consultation with industry on this either, other than the single aquaculture group. It would be inappropriate to make that kind of change without doing a better job of looking at the real issues, what they mean, and how much money is going to be spent, for example.

If you want more information about the Department of Fisheries and Oceans side, we have Regis Bourque here.

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Reg, is there anything I've said wrong or that should be added?

Mr. Regis Bourque (Director, Inspection Services Branch, Department of Fisheries and Oceans): Not on this issue.

Some hon. members: Oh, oh!

A voice: That's a big help.

The Chairman: He certainly has us curious about what you've said wrong somewhere else.

Some hon. members: Oh, oh!

Mr. Doering: I invite my colleague from the fisheries and oceans department to join us at the microphone.

Is there something that is an egregious error here, Reg? Perhaps we can deal with it Tuesday. Or do you want to deal with it today?

Mr. Bourque: You can deal with it Tuesday. I think -

The Chairman: Move up to the table for the microphone for a minute, Reg.

Mr. Doering: Please join us.

Reg has had thirty-some years in this business, so if there is some part of the fisheries side that -

The Chairman: Would you identify this gentleman for us for the record, please?

Mr. Doering: This is Reg Bourque, from Fisheries and Oceans Canada. He is a very senior person there and is seconded temporarily to our office of food inspection systems to help make sure that we do a good job of accommodating the interests of the fisheries sector as we create the agency.

The Chairman: Go ahead, Reg.

Mr. Bourque: The issue I was referring to is the previous one with regard to proposed section 56. What we mean there by ``other things'' is that the way the regulation is written now, you can seize the fish, but if the fish is being taken away with a transport vehicle, for example, you can't seize the transport vehicle.

You can't seize the transport vehicle, so you're stuck with the problem on the highway someplace where you have a transport vehicle that has the fish and you have to find another transport vehicle in order to take that fish back to some place where you can store it in a freezer or something like that. So you have a problem in that you have the fish, but you don't have the vehicle. And I think the second part of the regulation requires that the seized things be returned.

The Chairman: Okay.

Mr. Easter: That might cover it.

Some hon. members: Oh, oh!

The Chairman: Let's not take the lid off that one again.

Some hon. members: Oh, oh!

Mr. Doering: I think we could say that Reg had a different colour of hair and more of it before the tunagate scandal. He was up to his ears in it, frankly.

Mr. Bourque: That's right.

The Chairman: Thank you very much to the committee members and to all of the officials here today.

Thank you for your indulgence as we left you periodically. Again, I want to thank you, as many of the members have, for the excellent information and for the other comments. We will see some of you or all of you at your discretion.

Mr. Doering, we will see you on Tuesday morning for a clause-by-clause of this bill.

The meeting is adjourned.

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