Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I also want to thank our witnesses for showing up.
I have to take exception to Mr. Easter's comments. He wants to lay all of the blame on the federal minister and the federal departments, and he's essentially saying that people are missing in action. Well, the Minister of Agriculture was holding press conferences every day from August 24 to September 5 to relate to the public exactly what was happening.
So if Mr. Easter wants to sit around and start pointing fingers, maybe he needs to look in the mirror. When he was parliamentary secretary to the Minister of Agriculture back in 2005, they were the ones who cut the funding for mandatory testing of listeriosis through an environmental test. So if he really wants to start thinking about the big picture here, he also needs to put himself in the group of suspects so that we can actually get down to the basis of this.
I want to go back to the comments Dr. Evans was making. I think it's important that you made the comment about HACCP. I know that through this process last summer there were a lot of stories in the media and a lot of issues that were coming up from the opposition about HACCP being an example of privatization. I'm glad you said that it does not actually involve privatization. This approach has been going on for 15 to 20 years, when the HACCP protocol was first developed and brought into the meat processing industry and the food processing industry. We were even talking about it at the farm gate, of doing these things as well as farm HACCP, noting that it essentially increased accountability and provided a paper trail.
So if HACCP weren't in place, would listeriosis and this situation have been caught sooner, or would there have been someone else looking at this? Would this just have fallen through the cracks and actually made your job more difficult?