The Canadian Pork Council anticipates the introduction of fines by the end of this year for failure to comply with regulations requiring the reporting of swine movements within Canada.
Since July 1, 2014 both the shipper and receiver of swine within Canada have been required to report those movements to the PigTrace Canada database within 7 days.
Jeff Clark, the Manager of PigTrace Canada, an initiative of the Canadian Pork Council reports, so far, enforcement has been limited to education.
The Canadian Food Inspection Agency is responsible for enforcement. Right now the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, when they do their enforcements, it’s typically a verbal warning. If they find it’s a continued pattern they’ll issue a letter of non-compliance so it’s just kind of a written record that the person is not complying. There is no fine structures as of yet. There’s a separate amendment that has to take place with the regulation.
That’s the Administrative Monetary Penalties Regulation federally and we’re told that amendment is probably coming by the end of 2016. We don’t have the date yet. When we know when the fines will take effect we’ll certainly broadcast and communicate the broadly. We don’t know what the dollar amounts would be and we’re told that it is not a public consultation. Essentially those dollar amounts are set by government. It’s a ministerial order from my understanding. But we do have some precedent with the cattle sector and sheep sector.
There are fine structures for animals that are not tagged or identified properly. We’re told that a CFIA Inspector can’t just apply a fine with no previous history, so it would have to be kind of an escalating history of non-compliance so letters of non-compliance from CFIA would be the first steps. ~ Jeff Clark – PigTrace Canada
Clark says we do have experience with the cattle industry where there have been fines, but it takes pretty blatant non-compliance for fines to be issued and it’s not rampant.
