Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you very much, Mr. Gorrell and team, for being here to walk us through this.
We certainly have some questions in terms of the background on how we got to this, but also on what our steps are moving forward. Certainly, I think some of the frustration we've heard is that those of us on this committee didn't know anything about this before that press conference.
If something like this were to happen again—hopefully it does not—I think it would behoove the CFIA and the government to at least inform the Standing Committee on Agriculture and Agri-Food about this situation so that we could be prepared to address it. I was inundated with calls from my grain growers across Alberta, and I didn't have a whole lot of answers because I didn't know anything more than they did at the time. I think one step that was missing was informing members of this committee about this, and I think that in the future we should be prepared and have some tools in our tool belt to address something like this.
I'll ask my first question. What was the contact between Japan and Canada before the news conference was held? Were there discussions between those two countries before the CFIA news conference was held?