Thank you very much, Mr. Chair. I thank our witnesses for being here today.
What I've heard from each of you, either directly or indirectly, is that food safety is indeed a shared responsibility because there are so many different key players involved in the food process. We've heard from producers about systems and processes they implement at the farm gate and right through to processing. We've heard about food preparation and the impact it can have on food safety. Then of course it flows right through to consumers, who end up doing the final food preparation if they happen to be consuming it at home.
Mr. Wilcott certainly described well the challenges that are present when trying to define whether it is an outbreak. I appreciated your point that it's usually first discovered in the field. Then it's a matter of trying to piece the problem together from there by interviewing people: “Is more than one person ill? What did they eat two weeks ago? What is the source of the problem?” It's a complex problem and there are many interfaces.
One of the things that concerns me--from some of the questions my colleagues asked--is that I sometimes think their mission is to lay blame. They want to nail somebody for this. When my colleagues and I voted on establishing this committee, its working hours, and the kinds of witnesses we wanted, the aim was not to lay blame. The aim was to find out what happened, who the different players involved were, and what the interfaces were and how to better manage them. To me that's key, and we all need to work together to move things forward.
The lessons learned reports will help move things forward. They have been tabled by different organizations, and we certainly need to communicate better. I appreciated Mr. Jennery's comments on communicating key information to industry and the public. Again, interfaces between different governmental organizations need to be improved.
Let me follow up on one of the comments Mr. Jennery made on communication. You said that industry should find out before the media, and I'm wondering what your thoughts are on the practical application of that. Given the society we live in today--especially since we're all interconnected on a high-speed communications network--there's often a lot going on at once, but the media, industry, and the public must be finding out at the same time. Maybe you could elaborate.
I'm concerned that if we start putting a step-by-step process in place to share information, it will become more bureaucratic. Then people will say, “Listen it broke down here, and that's why the public didn't find out. It broke down there, and that's why industry didn't find out.” I'm wondering if you can comment on what you mean by this flow of information and who should find out first.