Thank you for the question.
I think people need to understand what the lessons learned really were intended to achieve. As President Swan has indicated, in effect we have this Office of Food Safety and Recall. It operates 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. It doesn't stop. It works full time all the time. Therefore, it is in itself an operational centre that is equipped to handle most emergencies as they occur.
Once we were into the circumstances in the week of August 14 and the information was starting to build that it was beyond one or two facilities and one or two people...the reality was that we had discussions with the Public Health Agency, who were activating their emergency centre, because on August 14 it was recognized that in fact there were illnesses outside of Ontario. This had moved from a provincial focus to a national focus. So we embedded ourselves in their operation centre. We had people deployed to be with them full time to make sure we were coordinated, sharing information, understanding what the needs were that we could supply directly to them.
What we realized in hindsight by doing this is that it's still the right thing to do, and we would do it again, but by not activating our own emergency operations centre, what we lost was an internal capacity to track the information, to document the information in real time. Again, it had no impact whatsoever in terms of speeding up recall. It had no impact whatsoever in speeding up the investigation. But when we went back to do the lessons learned, we had to go to multiple places to get the consolidated history. If we had operated a national emergency centre...you operate then with what's called the “war diary”, so it's minute by minute, who spoke to who, what was said, and if there was a decision taken, what information did you know at that time on which to base the decision.
In hindsight, that type of compilation, which is very important in terms of when you do go back and do lessons learned...we had to rebuild that to some extent, so that's what that issue gets at. Even though we were embedded with PHAC and operating very closely within their operation centre, the fact that we didn't have our own internal single point of information gathering meant that when we went back to do the review, we had to pull that all back together again.