Thank you very much, Chair.
Mr. Ferguson, going back to food recall, I listened with great interest to my colleague, Mr. Woodworth. In your statement with regard to chapter 4, one of the things you said is that “While illnesses were contained in the recalls we examined, I am not confident that the system will always yield similar results.” Then you went on to talk about weaknesses in the inherent system.
While my colleague might say that you looked at some samples and you didn't actually find a lot of illnesses—albeit at XL there were some, there were not a lot, obviously—the other piece to look at under ICS is the additional piece that talked about how, yes, at the senior level, and I think Mr. Affleck said that, they understood ICS, but the folks who would have what we call “boots on the ground” did not.
There was this whole piece, it seems to me in reading this, and hopefully you can help me with this, that with regard to the folks who thought they had made decisions before who now weren't necessarily going to make the decisions, no one had actually told them that they weren't making the decisions anymore.
There was a whole ream of confusion, especially at the XL piece, because this was a major recall.... Well, it wasn't a major one; it was the largest meat recall in this country's history.
With that confusion, sir, is that a program that's actually working effectively when the identification is that we have confusion?