There is a higher authority in food safety, and that rests with a regulatory agency. I don't believe that means they are the primary responsible party here. I think we've accepted that because this occurred in our facility and on our watch.
I've articulated what we believe the role of government and the regulator should be going forward, and I'll reiterate that. First is to define the expectations of an operator in tremendous specificity and detail, as reflected in a food safety protocol. Second is to have the resources and processes in place to validate and verify that those regulations are being complied with. Third is to ensure the consistency of implementation across the country. Fourth is to encourage responsible behaviour by the operators. We believe that mandate will require more resources by the regulator, not less.
A great deal of this has been reflected in what we're doing today that we weren't doing before and in the new listeria policy in place today that wasn't there before. Now it's down to the quality of the implementation across the country to make sure it gets implemented well.
But your question is really about whether or not there was an obligation, and if somebody had been doing something different previously, whether it would have been detected. At the end of the day, with something as scientifically difficult as this, I don't know if anybody could go back and say what looks obvious today. Things of this nature, in retrospect, look incredibly obvious to us and to anybody else who might examine that data and say, “If I'd known that at the time I would have been able to do something.”
Goodness knows we were collecting a mountain of data at that time. We think the operative regulatory question is that no data was required to be collected at all, not how that data was being interpreted at the time. But could somebody go in after the fact and say they could have analyzed the data if they had the time, the resources, the skills, the training, and come to a conclusion? Maybe they could have; maybe they couldn't. I know it's voluminous, very scientific, and highly interpretative data. You have to spend the time and energy to examine it all, and in retrospect we've said we should have known that. We should have had the systems in place to see that. Others could have come to the same conclusion.