Mr. Speaker, we need to proceed very quickly on this. The recommendation on the commission of inquiry is to strike it immediately and give it a mandate to investigate the avian flu outbreak.
The problem is that the CFIA has gone off into its little corner and done its own review without getting public input from the people who were most seriously impacted and involved. The experts, as I mentioned, are avian veterinarians in British Columbia who saw firsthand the problems and the mistakes that were made throughout the crisis.
On the one hand, we have a large group of individuals who understand what happened, who are ready to comment, who are ready to bring forth recommendations and who are ready to go into the details of what went wrong last year and to tell us why we had an initial quarantine and control that was then completely disrupted and a second quarantine zone again was breached. Those are the things we need to know. We need to know why a containment procedure fell apart and failed twice. It was only through good luck and the persistence of the local people working very closely with industry that we were finally able to contain the outbreak. However not one in that group of experts and individuals were consulted. CFIA has gone off and done its own whitewash.
The public inquiry would allow us to get the story from CFIA of course, but also from those individuals and those experts in the field who were there so we can learn the lessons to ensure this never happens again. The only way to do this is to do it quickly and effectively. I still cannot believe why the government is refusing.