The top priority for me as minister is to make sure that CFIA has the capacity to do its job, both from a budgetary and a manpower perspective. We've done that as a government. We've increased its budget by 20%. We have over 700 new people working at CFIA on inspection files and so on. We continue to build that capacity, and we won't stop.
XL was a very difficult exercise. These challenges always create opportunities. There are ongoing investigations, one by an independent panel and one internally at CFIA. There will be lessons learned. There will be things brought forward. As we learned with listeria, things will be brought forward that we will learn from again.
There's a much better collaborative approach between public health, both at the federal and provincial levels, and CFIA. We're making use of provincial labs and industrial labs to make sure that the turnaround time on samples is better. We've identified the gap, as Mr. Mayers was talking about, on the traceability side in-between the processor like XL and through to the multiplicity of people who reprocess that product.
What we're looking for is harmonization in the way they report and the paperwork that's required. You're putting together a road map and when every piece of paper almost contradicts the last one, it takes precious time to do that.
We're getting beyond that now with the capacity in Bill S-11 to have a harmonized, simplified set of forms that everyone will use so that when CFIA comes in, they'll be able to trace it out much faster than they did during that XL situation.