Thank you, Mr. Chair.
You can answer this in the course of your answers, whoever may be able to. It's more a point of clarification. You kind of left the impression that there were no environmental regulations in place up until a short while ago, and I would like you to clarify what was there as compared to the new overall environment protocols that are in place now.
The more I listen to you, in fact, the more I'm concerned about government agencies not doing their jobs. There's no question industry has a responsibility, but government ministers and agencies have the overall authority and responsibility for public health in this country. So let's not lose sight of that fact. We were in a time-set--and Mr. McCain, you were part of this time-set as well--that there's a view from the government side to deregulate, and the industry side wanted to reduce costs, so if deregulation was part of that, then that was great. That's kind of changed in the very recent past.
I'll come back to my earlier question on the slicer. A witness who will be coming before the committee was an auditor of the auditors of CFIA. He will be before this committee. He maintains that if CFIA was doing its job, they would not be looking just at the manufacturer's specifications on the slicer; they would have detected that potential problem before it occurred, if CFIA had been on the job doing the proper audits in a preventive sense that they ought to have been doing.
Do you believe that to be a way we ought to be going? Is there a way of better prevention here, by better foresight, by CFIA as an overall authority doing its due diligence to protect the Canadian public, but also to protect you in industry from running into the kinds of consequences that you faced as a result of the listeriosis outbreak?
I know you're accepting responsibility, but I think a higher authority has a responsibility here, and that maybe this could have been prevented if CFIA had been on their job.