I'm an old-timer in this town. I go back many years. Director General of the Product Safety Branch of Health Canada was very high-profile in the public service in this town. I was told by officials at Health Canada that from 1992 until a surge of bad product came in from China in August 2007, not one inspector from Health Canada visited China. There was no oversight of what was going on. It's embarrassing and it's just despicable. No wonder we saw these problems.
A very effective regulatory oversight tool is spot audits, but they don't exist any more. The government has not put in the resources to get the inspectors needed to get the job done. That's the problem we have. In the U.S., the Consumer Product Safety Commission is going through the same trials and tribulations. They've been cut down to nothing. They have 400 inspectors in a country of 310 million people. We have one-tenth of that. Go figure. That's the problem.