Mr. Speaker, all of us in the House extend our sympathy to the families involved in the Walkerton tragedy.
The lesson from that tragedy is in fact that when our safety systems are weakened then we all pay a price.
Back in 1997 this Minister of Health eliminated our drug research bureau and gutted our food research labs. He promised at that time to restore food research and to recommission some of those labs. To date none of that has happened.
Will the minister act immediately to strengthen food safety research in the health protection branch so that we have the scientific capacity to head off the kind of risk that resulted in the tragedy in Walkerton?