Mr. Speaker, the compliance verification system, or CVS, is now the backbone of the government's safety regime. That is how the government wants it.
Sheila Weatherill said quite clearly in her report, and New Democrats said something somewhat similar in the subcommittee on listeriosis, that the pilot program being run in CVS, which was all that was happening in 2008, had to be evaluated and measured and a determination ultimately made whether it actually worked, because at that point it was just a pilot. No one knew if it worked or not.
That was not really done, although there was an audit by PriceWaterhouseCoopers. We can go back and forth on whether or not it was comprehensive on this or that. In my view, what ultimately happened was that we did not evaluate the pilot program to indicate that it was the program we should indeed build the backbone of the food safety regime on. Nor did we ever do an official audit in the traditional sense that would have given us adequate numbers to say how we should resource and purpose these particular CVS inspectors to make sure that the job gets done properly.
In my view the government, unfortunately, has taken the easy route out when it comes to that review by PriceWaterhouseCoopers rather than actually doing what New Democrats would consider to be an exhaustive audit to make sure that the program truly works and helps Canadians in the area of food safety.