Mr. Speaker, the recall was so large that people in British Columbia, Alberta, Quebec and Newfoundland and Labrador suffered from illnesses related to E. coli contamination. There was a recall in over 40 states in the United States, as well as in Japan and Hong Kong. That is how pervasive this is.
The Minister of Agriculture trivialized this by saying, I think on October 3, that nobody was falling ill. It just does not make common sense. Intuitively, we know that he was absolutely wrong. He should have been on this file. He should have been out there filling the gap where the CFIA had failed and providing it with the proper resources it needed. Instead, he just pushed the blame off to the CFIA and to XL Foods and avoided taking any responsibility whatsoever, responsibility that he should have assumed.