Thank you, Monsieur Bellavance. It's a very important question.
I've appeared before committee on multiple occasions. My commitment to public service and my commitment to Canadians is not in doubt, I hope, with this committee.
I would point out very clearly that, yes, there was a meeting on July 24 with one of the representatives from Maple Leaf Foods. In the disclosure it was indicated very clearly that this meeting had been originally scheduled for February, earlier in the year, but because of other commitments it had had to be postponed and cancelled because I was not available. This was also part of the ATIP release. In fact, this was a deferred meeting. I was contacted by Maple Leaf officials about a week before July 24. They indicated they were coming into town for other meetings and asked if we could re-engage on those issues that we hadn't been able to talk about in February.
In the Access to Information Act and the Privacy Act there are provisions that indicate issues that might relate to corporate interests and issues that might relate to.... In effect, we talked about seven different topics, and it was clearly indicated in the meeting notes that we talked about seven different topics. Some of those topics dealt with internal Maple Leaf restructuring, which was deemed by those people responsible for ATIP to be information private to the company, and at CFIA we did not have the option to disclose that.
The Access to Information Act also looks at issues as they relate to other departments. In our discussions with Maple Leaf we also talked about some of the technical negotiations that we, as Canada, were involved with on food safety at the global level. We and Maple Leaf have been very clear about this. Because the discussion made specific reference to engagement with other countries, it was deemed by Foreign Affairs and by other officials to be confidential government-to-government information.
There was never a denial that we talked about microbial issues. The inference in the press was that we talked about listeria and the Canadian circumstance with listeria. We were very clear, when pressed on that issue, that listeria specifically was not mentioned. What we did talk about--and I think Mr. McCain raised it here as well--was that it's very important for Canada to ensure that whatever standards apply to domestic industry in this country also apply to imports.
Members of this committee will recall that at that particular time we had gone through a circumstance with one of our trading partners in which it had increased border testing, or import testing, of Canadian products, and the nature of that discussion was to outline to them some of the activities we were undertaking to ensure reciprocity in microbial testing. It covered listeria, E. coli, campylobacter, and salmonella. That was the only context in which listeria was mentioned.
I personally apologize to this committee, I personally apologize to Canadians, and I personally apologize to any media if there's any inference from what we discussed that there was any information provided to us at that time by Maple Leaf that gave us any early indication of a problem in the plant. As we've indicated, we did not become aware of an issue of listeria operating in Canada that could have a food source until August 6.