Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you, Mr. Charlebois.
I've heard my colleagues ask who we report to, and I believe I heard you say that we need to separate the two. An expert report was done for the government quite some time ago, back in 1990. It talked about this dual mandate and how it set up a conflict of interest within the CFIA between the inspection role, if you will, being the overseer of what they needed to do, and being the promoter of the industry itself as a whole. I'm not going to take the time to quote it back to you. Negating the mechanics of who we actually report to--because I hear you saying Parliament, but that may well be simply a term you've used in the sense of not necessarily meaning all 308 members, perhaps, but in some other form, Parliament being this institution here on this Hill--I'll allow you to explain that to me.
When I questioned the minister on this when he was before us, that was the question I put before him, about a dual mandate, and he seemed to be very comfortable with that; the dual mandate the CFIA started out with and still has today was fine. He believed--and I'm paraphrasing his words--they were comfortable and they didn't see the inherent conflict. They were comfortable within the structure of CFIA being able to delineate the two pieces, so in their minds there wasn't a conflict.
Do you see any inherent discrepancies with that?