Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you to all of you for coming.
I appreciate, Mr. Laws, the number of recommendations you've put into the report. Obviously, you've spent some time, and your agency has spent some time, thinking through these things probably from past experiences, because some of them may not be new.
I was hearing from Ms. Nicol earlier about going back to 2002, which I think is when she started that timeline for us about how we were looking at things, and here we are in 2009.
What I don't want to infer, Mr. Laws, from some of your recommendations is that there are some things that I might see that maybe you're not telling us. So I'm going to try to ask in a way that you can tell me whether indeed it's implicit in your number 6, when it talks about better training for inspectors. It says “CFIA inspectors need to have the regular consistent training”, and it goes on to say that the new implementation of April 1, 2009...“many inspectors didn't know...about proper aseptic sampling techniques”. I think we saw that actually in a news release that came out, where folks were saying they weren't able to do that. CFIA said their folks were unable to do the sampling because in some cases there was cross-contamination.
If indeed we're asking folks to be better trained, there's a resource commitment that needs to be made to that, which is a polite way of saying we need additional money. “Resource” always sounds really flamboyant and really nice, but the bottom line is, somebody write a cheque because we need some extra bucks to make sure we train the folks, because it takes money to train folks. You have to take them away, and if you have to take them away from their regular duties, it seems to me you need additional folks to backfill where they are, or you're paying them OT, overtime, I'm not sure which. Sorry about the acronyms--old habits.
Am I seeing that in there or am I not, in the sense of what your perspective is when you wrote this? Are you also saying--and make it the third question--that CFIA inspectors ought to be doing a little more inspection than what they're presently doing, and spending a little less time filling out forms and reviewing binders, actually being on the floor conducting inspections?