Thank you for that question.
I think the point I emphasized at that press conference is that in the new reality of our food services, where we're having more products than ever before from ever larger organizations of international scope—products that are often made offshore and over which we have very little control—and a wider population with importation coming in, it behooves us to look at how we can survey that even more effectively and appropriately, or we will be left with further outbreaks, such as we experienced with listeriosis.
So the first issue or problem is the extent and breadth of the change in the food retailing market that we're experiencing in Canada as part of the global community.
The second aspect that listeriosis did bring out is that we have an ever-increasing vulnerable population. The success of our medical health care system is that we have an ever-aging population, and a very mobile and active octogenarian and nonagenarian group that is out there moving around. We have more people who are living long term from having survived either cancer or a transplant by taking medications for the long term that are immuno-suppressive. So unlike healthy people, who could have listeriosis and normally just pass it off and not become ill, this ever-growing group in the population is there and very susceptible.
I believe it's our responsibility to put in place the surveillance methods that can provide quick alerts to protect this group from the consequences of food-borne illnesses—as Dr. McKeown has alluded to in his talk—which are quite prevalent out there.
This means that if we don't improve our surveillance systems and our laboratory surveillance systems as well, and our coordination at all levels—because it is becoming a more complicated global issue—we will face these issues even more in the future, because they will not go away. The organisms are ubiquitous in our environment; they can enter easily into our food chain. And especially when products are coming from afar, we may not be as well versed on what's in those products, and what we have to cautious about, and the preparation systems.
So our surveillance, coordination, and communication have to be much improved in the future for this.