I will do my best to be brief and to answer directly.
We do recognize that the report of the subcommittee, the dissenting report of the government, and the report of the independent investigator all underline the issue of resource capacity to address risks in the appropriate way. We recognize that the learned group that has heard that has spoken to that issue. And we have made a commitment to make sure that from our perspective in addressing recommendations from the various reports, we do our very best to demonstrate the resource capacity of the agency against the demands that we have against our program standards. And that will come out where it comes out.
The other point I would make, though, about this issue of whether it is only a matter of time is this. The best way I can answer your question is to say that at the end of the day--and I suspect Mr. Kingston has spoken to this issue several times before--it's not an absolute number of inspectors that will prevent this from happening again. It is the reality that we have invested in training, which was an issue raised before by the committee. In March this year, subsequent to last year's events, we had 325 staff trained on the new listeria requirements at the operational level to bring those into effect through the verification activities. We trained 20 internal inspectors in CFIA to provide ongoing inspection and mentoring to front-line staff in these areas. We also took on the training that was requested by this group in their report and by the investigator around training in the incident command system to make sure.... As Mr. Kingston has talked about, prevention is critical, but at the same time, you have to have a response capacity for those events that do happen. Again, I come back to the point that the focus around the table for the past period of time has been listeria, and I hope nobody ever believes that listeria is the only threat to food safety. We do deal with E. coli, salmonella, and campylobacter, and there are other pathogens that can play.
We have an increasingly vulnerable population in terms of allergenicity who we must be very conscious of in terms of food safety for those people who have allergens. We deal with the reality of a different culture in the world today. We have to deal with deliberate threat. Even in the reports yesterday there were reports of tampering with a food cereal in British Columbia. And we all see the issues with candies at Hallowe'en and turkeys at Thanksgiving. We have to be cognizant as to how we prevent and deal with those activities as well.
Again, I'm not trying to say that events won't happen, but we have to look at the broad scope of food safety challenges out there and make sure that our attention on listeria is appropriate and it's vigilant. But please don't expect that we're going to turn a blind eye to those other risks as well, because those can also have very serious health and social consequences and economic consequences for Canadians and our markets internationally.