Madam Speaker, I certainly appreciate a lot of the remarks made by the member for Souris—Moose Mountain, especially his comments that there needs to be response team personnel in place who need to be proactive. He laid out a number of needs.
If he would go back to the remarks I made earlier, he would see that all the needs he outlined have now been met. Why should there be another study to meet the needs that have already been met in terms of the action plan outlined by the CFIA? Another study would take human and financial resources away from doing what needs to be done. It would go over old history.
The member said that it is not an issue of playing politics when looking at the past. However, it is an issue of politics when one fails to recognize what has been done to rectify the mistakes of the past and one continues to talk about those things for which there is already an action plan to overcome. It is politics when a study is called for on an issue which has already been studied three times and one fails to recognize the action plan that has been put in place to address the points raised by those studies. That is playing politics.
As I said earlier in my remarks, this is a different Parliament. This is a Parliament in which the minority parties themselves have to accept some responsibility for the decisions made. The parties over there do not want to recognize what has been done. They want to continue to rehash old ground. They want to talk about all the bad things of the past even though recommendations have been put in place to overcome them. That is not being responsible on the part of minority parties. That is being irresponsible. It is costly to the Canadian public and the farm communities because of the financial and human resources that would be taken up by conducting another study on an issue which the parliamentary committee itself studied.
The member said that we did not have a management plan in place, that we took a long time and procrastinated. Let us put the facts on the table. A provincial lab said there was a problem on February 15. On February 16 it went to a federal lab. The virus was an H7 virus subtype and that was known on February 18. The flock was destroyed on February 19. That was under the old plan.
As a result of some of the complaints, new plans are now in place. Any suspicion will be acted on within 48 hours. The farm will be frozen down. A pre-emptive cull agreement is in place. That is the action plan that is in place. Let us at least put some of the facts on the table.
The member quoted from the report and went through the old history. My point is that the government and the agency have recognized those problems. I laid out 10 points earlier which address those problems. All I am saying is that this is a good report from the Standing Committee on Agriculture and Agri-Food, but for heaven's sake, let us be responsible and not conduct another study. Let us review this in a year's time and make sure that the plan laid out by the CFIA has been followed through on. Let us not rehash the past, which the party opposite continually wants to do.