It was a changing plan--I will say that. Every day there was new information coming in. By the time we actually--how can I put this so that it doesn't get misinterpreted--got rolling with information to Canadians, a lot of the damage was already done. Of course, we didn't know that. I know Dr. Evans showed you a chart, and I know Dr. Butler-Jones did as well, as to how the timeline unfolded. As we strove to do the recalls and so on, the cases were actually waning, which was a good thing. I know the chart that I saw, which Dr. Evans presented to this committee, is very dramatic in the way that it shows how this climbed and then just stopped because the product was recalled. Everybody out there, with the help of the media, Internet, and everything else, and with the great work that Public Health and CFIA did, got around the fact that they had to get this product out of their freezers.
We actually did a second push right after Labour Day, and just before Labour Day for that matter, because we knew people were going to go up and close their cottages. It was actually Dr. Evans who brought this point up at one of our morning brainstorming sessions when we were wondering what we were missing. That's what we kept thinking. Is another shoe going to drop? What are we missing? How do we get ahead of this.
Out of the blue, Brian said people were going to their cottages that weekend, and they were going to open the freezer and have this product in there and not recognize it. They were going to use up whatever it was. So, again, we put out another push to make sure that people, when they went to their cottages, went through the freezer and didn't use that product. It was the same thing when they came back. If they'd spent the last two weeks on holidays in August and came back to their condominium, or house, or whatever, we wanted to make sure that they hadn't missed the media and hadn't missed the recalls. That was always uppermost in our minds.
Our days usually began in the 6:30 to 7:00 a.m. range because of time zones across the country. We were talking with provinces and territories. There was information coming in. We quarterbacked it out of my department, out of my level of the farm building there. Public Health, Health Canada, the provincial folks, CFIA, and all of us were on these calls. They were almost unmanageable because of everyone wanting to know what was happening and how it was happening, and everybody wanting this information at once. That's why we started doing the daily press conferences.
I think they were exceptional. I give a lot of credit to the stamina of the folks around me, and of course the folks involved from PMO, PCO, and Public Health. Everybody involved did a fantastic job in making sure that information got out to Canadians on a timely basis.
It was disheartening at times when we talked about the people who were involved, those affected. Also, the death count, as it kept going up, was disheartening. At the end of the day, looking back in hindsight, I'm looking forward to these reports because I think they will give us a new basis to build a better system.