Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thanks to the clerk for providing the information that revived the dead donkey that delivered the documents from CFIA that I was talking about last week. I guess I was mistaken; the donkey didn't die after all. It made its way here, three legs or not.
Mr. Hutton, I have a question about the systems based on this. I had asked a question of Mr. Cameron Prince, who's a vice-president at CFIA, about whether he would provide me documentation about the compliance verification system. He said yes, he could and he would, and they did late last week. Part of that was asking whether the compliance verification system tasks had been done, of which there are five, according to their list.
According to this, it says that in regard to CVS tasks delivered April 2008 to January 2009--and I know you don't have the documentation in front of you, so let me just quote it to you, sections 1, 2, 3, and 5--there were 135,457 tasks delivered, and 134,764 tasks planned. They had actually delivered more than 100%.
But for section 4, which is the system design and reassessment, which was a new assessment, it says to see the explanatory note, which read:
Section 4 verification tasks are associated with periodic, comprehensive assessments of the company quality systems by a specialized team of food safety specialists once very two years. CFIA does not have complete data for section 4 tasks at this point, because they were to be completed over a two-year period ending March 31, 2010.
So if I do the arithmetic, I know they wouldn't have started to do it until March of last year. They can't give you a temporary report. They are saying, “Well, it's a two-year period, and I can't do it until the end.”
Does that seem logical to you, that when you have a system that was in crisis last year--clearly, they had a serious outbreak and they had 22 deaths—somehow the system couldn't be made such that you could say, “Here's what we see at this point based on what we know to date, albeit incomplete”, and not have at least some sort of information driven out of that one task?