Mr. Speaker, I will be sharing my time with the member for Rimouski-Neigette—Témiscouata—Les Basques.
I rise today to speak to an issue of great concern to Canadians. It was even the subject of an emergency debate. This situation can be deemed a crisis. That is the right word for it. The XL Foods tainted meat scandal is having an enormous impact on the Canadian economy and especially on Canadians' confidence in the system.
It is the largest beef recall in Canada's history. A number of people have been infected by the E. coli bacteria and have fallen ill. Fortunately, there have been no deaths, but this is a very important health and safety issue for Canadians.
I have been an MP since May 2, 2011, and I can say that being a parliamentarian is not easy. We have many responsibilities. I can imagine that a minister also has many responsibilities. It is a very serious matter to call for a minister's resignation.
The NDP has given this much thought. My colleagues opposite say that it is simply a political move, but it is more than that. In this case, the minister is not doing his job and we are asking that he be replaced by someone who can do the job and inspire more confidence.
Two weeks ago, I raised a matter with the Minister of National Revenue. I asked her to apologize because the Canada Revenue Agency made a mistake. To my surprise, she apologized; she took responsibility.
In this case, the Minister of Agriculture is not taking responsibility. Even worse, he is not taking the matter seriously.
When we talked about having an emergency debate on this issue, the minister called it “silly”. Afterward, he had apologized, but it shows how the minister puts things lightly when we have a crisis. It is not helpful. We want Canadians to feel reassured but, when there is a crisis or a problem, we need to address it and talk about it. In this case, the minister did not do his job.
On October 2, when we knew there were some problems, the minister had been at a luncheon conference and said, “We had some great Canadian beef for lunch. I don’t know where it came from; I don’t care”. At the same time as the minister was saying that everything was fine, we were telling Canadians to look at where their beef was coming from because there had been a recall and they needed to be careful. Saying that everything is rosy does not help Canadians. They need to be given the right information.
On October 8, The Hill Times stated:
There is no excuse for him not to have been in the House last week for three days, dodging questions and remaining silent.
We saw that when we asked questions of the minister. The minister has a responsibility to be here to answer questions and, if there are a lot of questions, he needs to answer all of them.
People need to be reassured but the minister has failed to do that. This is but one of the things he failed on in terms of his responsibilities.
There was another incident in which the minister did not do his job properly. We have to remember the past. Why do we no longer have any confidence in the Minister of Agriculture? The reason is that this same minister held the same position in 2008, when 22 Canadians died as a result of the Maple Leaf food crisis. There was a problem at that time, and we must learn from our mistakes. Clearly, the minister did not learn his lesson.
This government is pushing for cuts. We also believe in an efficient government and Parliament, but cuts should not be made when they affect services and safety. The government is giving industry and businesses more and more power to regulate themselves. The companies themselves have to take the initiative and do the inspections. We all know that a company's main objective is to make a profit, and if measures affect that profit, the company will certainly try to do everything possible, evaluate the risks and then determine whether it should shut down or recall products.
It is up to the government to ensure that the products that are offered to Canadians are safe. We must not let businesses regulate themselves, as the government is currently doing. We should have learned from the 2008 listeriosis crisis. Twenty-two deaths is too many. Twenty-two people died, and the government did not learn its lesson. We find that rather shocking and we do not understand it. The same minister was in office then as now, and we are facing one of the biggest crises ever in terms of the recall of beef products. Clearly, we do not have any confidence in the minister because, rather than taking concrete action, he is engaging in hyperbole and saying that everything is fine. No concrete action has been taken. The government is really doing exactly the opposite of what it should be doing.
I know that the members opposite say that there have not been any cuts. Yet, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency's May 8, 2012, report on plans and priorities, which was signed by this same minister, indicated that $46.6 million in cuts would be made and that 314 full-time employees would be laid off from 2012 to 2015. Clearly, cuts are being made.
I am a member of the Standing Committee on Finance. Last year, during pre-budget consultations, we asked witnesses about the potential impact of budget cuts on food inspections or food safety. The witnesses warned us in no uncertain terms during these pre-budget consultations that such cuts would jeopardize Canadians' safety, because if cuts were made to the agency mandated to protect the health of Canadians, not only would this lead to reduced services, but it would put safety at risk. And look what happened.
If the government had invested in hiring people to protect us instead of making these cuts, then the largest beef recall in history could have been avoided. What is more, 2,000 people have lost their jobs. There are closures. The impact this is having on trade and the economy far outweighs what it would have cost to keep the inspectors in place.
This motion calls for the minister to be replaced and for the budget cuts to be reversed in order to truly address this problem instead of pretending that everything is just fine and that we can eat whatever we want with no problem.