Hindsight is always 20/20, absolutely. I think we would have been more vociferous in demanding that XL come forward with paper, but you have to recognize the fact that any other recall has been predicated on illness.
When you look at the time chart and you talk to public health, it was the day after the CFIA notified public health, which is the proper thing to do. They started analyzing, looking for spikes of illness. E. coli, listeria, and all these great things generally occur between April and September. That's the hot spot, and because of temperatures and people handling the food. They're barbecuing more and they set some hamburger out on the counter; then they're home two hours late, and gee, something happened to it on the counter.
They're always analyzing this. We're looking for spikes right away with public health. There weren't any. There still aren't any.
Other than four or five people in Edmonton who ate meat coming out of that Costco needling, there has not been a cluster of people affected by this particular outbreak. None of the 13 in Saskatchewan was connected to the XL product, none. You need that analysis right away to know where to look and to see where that product went out. While that evidence is accumulating—and it's based on sound science, on protocols, and so on—you form that analysis.
You can see by the timeframe—and we'll make sure everybody gets a copy of it—how that was starting to build. We actually had recall notices out on the product before the U.S. did. Yes, they closed the border, but they were still accepting all kinds of Canadian product. They were still moving XL product in the U.S. beyond the dates that were covered. In fact, they were going to cook everything that was recalled and put it back into the food chain. We're not doing that.
There are differences, but there is equivalency at the end of it.
Looking back, what would we have done differently? We followed all of the protocols that were laid out. I think the CFIA would have been a lot more hard-nosed in getting the material from XL, rather than being nice and going through the format of a letter and so on. You stand banging at the door until you get it.
However, we're not seeing any illness spikes to drive us to the point of decertifying; that's a nuclear strike. Certainly we have tremendous empathy for everyone affected by this, the 16 people who were ill. That redoubles our efforts to make sure that the CFIA and public health have the capacity to analyze this type of thing in a more timely way and get any of that type of product off the shelf even faster.