Thank you.
Madame Demers, in the spring you came to visit with a number of members of Parliament on the Hill to express your concern, as you had said in your remarks, about your scientists and the people you represent being worried about the capacity of the agency and other places to be able to fulfill, as I think you said today, the expectations of Canadians in maintaining what we all know has been, until now, the safest system in the world.
Also, having been at a meeting in Washington where a representative of the FDA very frankly said to us that he only had the capacity to inspect 1% of the products coming into his country, and I think, as our colleague Monsieur Bellavance said yesterday, the problems we have in Canada seem to have pretty well come from a situation that moved to a way of self-regulation or to an audit-based verification system instead of actually direct inspection.
Unlike my colleague Mr. Komarnicki, I would like your advice as to who you think we should call before this committee in terms of what scientists would be able to speak and what scientists would not be able to speak, as we heard yesterday. Who could give us the best possible assessment of the risk that could be placed in terms of the health of Canadians if these changes that have been articulated in the secret document take place in the future?
I think as we heard clearly yesterday, people were able to look at us and say there have been no cuts. But this document was laying out a plan to change the total system in Canada to one that has already proved to be a bad experiment in the United States of America.
So I would like to know, Madame Demers, what your scientists are saying in terms of the capacity now to do their job as it is, and what they are also saying in terms of their ability—it sounded like one-armed paperhangers—to do what they believe Canadians want them to do.
The letter from Wayne Wouters seems to be very important, as well as the secret document. Is there any way you could find those documents and table them at our committee while we seem to be waiting for the government to do that?