The Canadian Pork Council expects to have a working swine traceability system in operation on a voluntary basis in advance of regulatory changes that will make the reporting of swine movements in Canada mandatory.
To accommodate swine traceability, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency is revising Canada’s Health of Animals Regulation to, for the first time, require the reporting of all movements of pigs.
A draft regulation, published this past summer in Canada Gazette One, is being revised in response to stakeholder comments prior to publication in Canada Gazette Two, when it will become law.
Jeff Clark, the manager of PigTrace Canada an initiative of the Canadian Pork Council, expects a voluntary system to be in place before movement reporting become a requirement.
The regulatory process, we’re not going to let hold us up.
We are expecting to come out with our program under a voluntary basis and that way we will, quite confident, have a workable system in place before it becomes mandatory.
We have our movement reporting database ready to go this month in November.
We’re just making some final tweaks to it, we’re getting our information kits and our producer manuals and all of those printed off and ready to go out so we’re fully expecting through this winter to go live with our PigTrace Canada program under a voluntary environment and moving ahead the regulations will really help to solidify the program that we’re building, gain an international reputation for a top quality traceability system that is supported and enforced by a federal government.
We also expect that having a regulation in place will help us really get as close to 100 percent compliance as we can on the program.
Clark acknowledges, the time frames for moving ahead on the regulatory changes are fully in the hands of the Canadian Food Inspection Agency but he expects a revised version of the amended Health of Animals Regulation to be republished in Canada Gazette two sometime in 2013.
