Well, when you look at the timeline shown behind me, Mr. Lemieux—you'll have a copy of that in front of you, or you will have shortly—you will see that CFIA began reacting immediately, asking XL for documentation and asking them to show where the bracketing was done on that first batch. I'm not saying that XL was negligent or criminally intent on hiding anything—absolutely not. What I'm saying is that they came forward with boxes and boxes of paperwork over a period of time, as they amassed it. Did they put enough attention on it? Probably not, but that's for them to describe and explain as they move forward.
At the end of the day, Bill S-11 now will give us extra tools in the CFIA tool kit. I'm happy to help put them there, with your help and the help of the opposition in getting this bill passed, so that they have the ability to ask for it on Monday morning and expect to get it by Monday afternoon, and in a useful format.
This is the important part: you can have timely access, but if you get 12 boxes of paperwork and have to sit down and start to analyze and go through all of it, that's time wasted, time lost, but if you have it in a format that is standardized across all food commodities and across all manufacturing processing in this country, you have something that can be worked with very, very quickly to initiate recalls or to say that we don't need a recall because it has been handled. That's the important part.
The biggest concern with Canadian consumers is the timeliness. They want to know that their food is safe, but they also want to know that when there is a breach, when there is a problem, we are timely in getting that product off the shelves. That's why I said right away, to assure consumers on the initial outbreak, that the product never made it to store shelves. Consumers needed to know that.
We have not seen any huge move away from beef in Canada. Actually, beef products are still moving, are still being consumed. We're not seeing any beef being stopped from export around the world, even into the American market, other than any product coming out of number 38, the Lakeside XL plant in Brooks. Even XL product—live animals and so on—that the Nilssons own is still available to go to the U.S. It's only the product coming out of that plant as CFIA works towards recertifying that particular facility.