Thank you, Chair. I know you prefer not to notice me at committee, but....
I'd like to thank all of the witnesses for coming and enduring the time here today. I know the break we had to take for votes disrupted our committee flow a little bit, but we very much appreciate your patience and your time on this. This is a very important issue that we have in moving forward on food safety.
I would like to talk a little bit about food safety and maybe relate some of the things we have going on today to some of the things that have happened in the past in our agricultural sector, and indeed to some of the concerns we have when it comes to food safety in Canada, and also talk a little bit about our record and how strong it actually is.
First of all, I'd like to talk to Mr. Masswohl from the Canadian Cattlemen's Association. Could you give us a little bit of background on the science of BSE and some of what happened there? Could you relate how that affected us and, moving forward, how we could have been better prepared for that?