Mr. Chair, there is not a day that goes by that we do not go back and retrospectively have a look at what was done and how it was done. Our thoughts and prayers remain with the victims of that listeria outbreak.
We agree with the member in his presentation that when this began we were looking for a needle in a haystack. My congratulations go out to the CFIA teams and the public health teams, both federally and provincially, that did yeoman service throughout that stressful time and continue to seek a better way to do this. We have analyzed and found the root cause but no one can guarantee that this will never happen again. We are hopeful that we can limit it, that we can get on top of it quicker and that there will never be this severe an impact. We are pledged to do that.
This really tested the mettle of the complete Canadian system. What this brought to the forefront and what we learned, which has already been applied with H1N1, is far better communication and coordination among everyone involved. I think we have seen that borne out as we came to grips with H1N1. It continues to unfold and that compatibility of programming and so on is being redesigned and redeveloped.
To that end, we as a federal government have reinvigorated our efforts under both product and health, in both Health Canada and the CFIA, to reinvigorate the number of inspectors and the volumes of money that will be allocated in budgets. We look forward to a compilation of the lessons learned reports that we have already seen, plus the independent investigation led by Sheila Weatherall. It will give us a better indication of gaps that we may have missed to this point that we can again address by human and budgetary resources. We certainly pledge to do that.
We are quite excited by the tremendous work done by Sheila Weatherall. She has the capacity, knowledge and tools at her disposal to come forward with a great report. I look forward to that coming up in July and to continuing the great work that has been started and will continue to be done by the CFIA.