Mr. Speaker, I should not be laughing in the House but that question was ridiculous.
What happened in the BSE crisis is on file and it is there for everyone to see. The minister of agriculture at the time was upfront. The Liberal government put in $3 billion to help Canadian farmers weather that problem. It is in the records.
The idea that E. coli is always in the food chain is ludicrous. Of course we know that E. coli occurs in beef. It is an excrement. That is true.
The member should not tell me that we cannot do it, because the United States tracks this regularly knowing that there is a risk. The United States does what the Weatherhill report asks, which is to track the trends to check when there is a super shedder. The Conservative government has not been doing it. The United States told the government that it had not been doing it. The government has fallen down on the job, and it is as simple as that. No whitewash and no insults can make that any different.