Thank you, Mr. Easter.
I won't go into the full detail of what's already in the editorial, since it's in the record, but briefly, the errors fall into two categories. First, there is the error of maintaining inadequate standards, unprotective standards, low standards for the presence of Listeria monocytogenes bacteria in ready-to-eat food. To reiterate, in Canada we allow 2,500 bacteria per 25 grams of ready-to-eat food. That's legal. In the United States the legal number is zero. That initially is a problem, and that is a failure of government policy to let the standard be as low as that, lower than any of the other 30 countries we looked at, lower than what the World Health Organization recommends.
The second failure lies in what was revealed through I believe a leak of a Treasury Board document about de-emphasizing CFIA's role in inspection and putting more inspection in the hands of the companies that are regulated, pushing inspection, if you will, from a public sector function into a private sector one. The error of that is so obvious as to need no further explanation. Obviously the private sector has to be vigilant and do its own inspections, that's true, but as a supplement and not as a substitute for public inspections. It appears that in the recent past, private inspections did become a substitute to a considerable extent.