—because I don't think the memo needed to be clarified at all. Quite frankly, it's abundantly clear. The first one is abundantly clear, and if it needed to be clarified, it should have been clarified in 2008, not in 2012. That's four years afterward.
We had a listeriosis outbreak in 2008; the memo was reissued in 2009. Sheila Weatherill writes a report in 2009; this is reissued in 2010. We have one crisis after another and we keep reissuing the same memo, without a clarification.
Then, finally, when the union brings it forward to the minister and says “Minister, look at this”, why weren't your senior officers in CFIA aware of this memo? If they were aware of this memo, why didn't they act on it, if not after the listeriosis crisis in 2008, then at least after Sheila Weatherill's report in 2009? Surely to goodness, after the subcommittee on listeriosis that met in 2009, of which I was part, they would have said, “This is not on for Canadian food safety.”
If CFIA's number one priority is Canadian food safety, how can inspectors be told to ignore food safety? How can that be, Minister?