Since July 2014, under Canada's Health of Animals Act, both the shipper and receiver of swine must report animal movements to PigTrace Canada within seven days.

Jeff Clark, the Manager of PigTrace Canada, an initiative of the Canadian Pork Council, says, nationally, about 11,300 movements are being reported each week.

Jeff Clark-PigTrace Canada

In the last year alone we've had about 700,000 movements, so that's March 2016 to the end of March 2017.

In Manitoba I think we're at about 15 hundred movements reported a week so we do continue to increased compliance and participation in the program.

I suspect people who are reporting, some of their movements, maybe aren't doing the farm to farm so there's still some clean up we have to do in terms of validation and reaching out to people to encourage them to report more.

We do have financial penalties now that the Canadian Food Inspection Agency can issue.

That came into effect August of 2016.

Most of the infractions would be minor violations they call them, which is a 13 hundred dollar fine.

That should never happen in a first offense.

Our understanding is CFIA inspectors can issue a verbal warning first, written letters of noncompliance and then, if there's a history developed there, they do have the capacity now to issue a fine.

To date it's mostly been educational.

We have had some inspectors that are a little more heavy handed, haven't been all that compassionate or lenient and have issued letters of noncompliance from repeat offenders.

I have heard from the producers in some of those cases.

There's not a lot.

Mr Clark notes, over the last nine months since the fine structure came into effect, there have been no fines issued.