Thank you, Mr. Chair. I have a couple of comments and a question.
I listened intently to Mr. Mayers' explanation. We are talking about a memo that went to the Brooks XL plant. There are two things.
One is—and Mr. Da Pont, you also said this, or it may have been both of you or just one or the other—that this is an explicit instruction to a food safety inspector, whose mandate is to inspect food, that they should do one piece and one piece only, and that is to inspect the Japan stuff and ignore the rest; that's what you're saying this is. Then we'll catch it later—don't worry about it.
Square the circle. You just had the largest beef recall in Canadian history from this plant. What happened to all of your safeguards on the other side of this? If we were even to believe that somehow this didn't impact upon anything else, that somehow this was all well and good, you just suffered, sir, the largest beef recall in this country's history. This memo comes from the same place, and you were still re-issuing it last year.
I find it absolutely dumbfounding that somehow we can't just say, “This should never have happened. We won't let it happen again; we're going to change this. We're going to tell our food inspectors that when they see something wrong with food, no matter where it goes, we're going to fix it”, yet you're trying to explain to me that it's okay to ignore it, because somewhere else we'll catch it.
We didn't catch it, sir, so help me understand how this system, which you say works, did in fact work—because it didn't, quite frankly.