I don't think it is. Whether they're small or large companies, these companies are in business to stay in business. In those cases where they're either federally or provincially registered plants, they're working with food safety programs that are founded on the basis of experience, and it's in their best interests to do so. There is always going to be an undesirable element that is going to want to cut corners, but it's in the companies' best interests to operate these programs so that the products, at the end of day, are not going to make people ill. I think Mr. and Mrs. Consumer can have a reasonable level of confidence that those in the industry who are in the business to stay in business—who are, by and large, almost all of them—are doing things to the best of their ability.
I express that confidence publicly, but there are going to be accidents that occur. There has been over the past 15 to 20 years an evolution in terms of the organisms causing these problems. Now, I don't know if this has been spoken of by any of the witnesses you've called in the past, but if you take a look at the food-borne illness statistics, such as they are in Canada—and they are woefully incomplete—you will see there's been a major change in the organisms causing food-borne illnesses. We don't see the frequencies of illnesses being caused by staphylococcus we used to, but we know why. We know it's because we're using better refrigeration systems; they're available to us now and the industry does use them. This organism, quite unlike listeria, cannot grow at refrigerator temperature. But guess what we've done? We've replaced the organism with listeria, an organism that's perfectly adapted to growing in our meat plants. So we have to address that. I'm confident we can do that as we move forward.
But if rules and regulations are brought in to demonstrate that government is doing something, and little other than that, it is very, very wrong. That's my concern, because we're faced with a situation where if you take a careful look at those new listeria guidelines with respect to end-product testing, we're going to see more of these regulations come down in the fall. There's a working group with industry that's making new regulations for non-food-contact surfaces. Those are walls and ceilings, folks, in the whole bloody plant. Yes, you're going to find listeria. Well, I'll tell you right now that you're going to find a lot of other organisms that mimic listeria biochemically—and those are the tests that you use to find them. So it's just going to be a quagmire. We're going to be caught up in circles of analysis, and the food is going to be rotten before we can get it delivered.
I think this kind of activity is going to disenfranchise, or invalidate, or make industry distrust HACCP. I think HACCP can work. I think these food systems that we have in place can be improved so they do deliver what they promise. They don't always deliver what they promise, but I think they can. But sure as heck, if we start testing end products and swabbing anterooms for listeria monocytogenes, the guys in the plant are going to say “Here comes the inspector, and he doesn't know sweet diddly”. That will be a loss of confidence, and that is what's happening in the United States of America, folks. So if we want to emulate them, let's just go forward and do it. But it's a waste of time.