Mr. Speaker, we see the excesses from the other side one more time. What we do is that the previous Liberal government took every measure possible to gut our food safety system.
Unlike the Liberals, our government has increased funding and inspectors to food safety. We originally added 200 new inspectors and put $113 million into the food safety and consumer action plan. We have just announced an additional $75 million for food safety and another 160 food safety staff to address the Weatherill report.
Contrast that to the Liberals. Food safety was cut by the Liberals in 1994, again in 1995. If that was not enough, they did it again in 2005. To justify his cuts, former Liberal Prime Minister Paul Martin said:
Surely we can all agree that it is simply silly for a food-processing plant to have a federal meat inspector, a federal health inspector, a federal fish inspector, not to mention a provincial health inspector and a provincial food inspector tripping over themselves on the same day, in the same plant...
The record is clear. The Liberals gutted our food safety system.