Thank you, Mr. Chair.
And thank you, Mr. McCain, for joining us today and for your opening remarks. Let me perhaps go back to the comment you just finished with and bring it into another context. It's on page 5 of your report, in the first paragraph. It says “you cannot 'see' bacteria so visual inspection has limited value.” I would take it, because you're an extremely articulate man, that you paid close attention to the words. I think we all agree we can't see bacteria. You can't get those glasses that you used to be able to buy in the back of the comic that told you you could see everything. So we're not able to do that. We all accept that.
What you do talk about is how visual inspection has limited value. I would ask you to comment on the issue of having very experienced and qualified inspectors on site who work for third-party agencies like CFIA, who understand the processes of your particular industry, because that's what they do and that's what they learn. These aren't folks who don't have biochemists in the industry and don't have bioscience degrees. These are very educated people who understand how these sorts of pathogens can actually take hold in the particular factory they're working in, because really they're working in a factory; they're not working on a farm. This is a food that's produced in a very large facility. With the type of experience these inspectors have--albeit they can't see bacteria--is it not plausible that indeed with their experience they could see circumstances that might lead to the bacteria actually starting to colonize and indeed be a problem for your production systems and be able to help your folks interpret that so that we're looking and testing in an appropriate way? As you said in the page before, you took 3,000 tests that the CFIA had access to, but in the report it doesn't say whether your folks actually said to them, by the way, we found listeria and we eradicated it by sanitizing. It doesn't actually tell us.
So there are two questions here. It doesn't really tell us. Did you inform that inspector who was responsible for your plant that they'd actually seen listeria at that point in time, during that period of testing, because that's a different timeframe?