Subcommittee on Food Safety committee  Is that what you're suggesting? Is that your solution?

Subcommittee on Food Safety committee  Mr. Chair, on a point of order, that's completely hypothetical. It has nothing to do with the discussion we're talking about. People can surmise anything about Mr. Easter's theoretical questions here.

Subcommittee on Food Safety committee  Mr. Easter may have forgotten there were daily press conferences. There was no blackout on anything, so he needs to acknowledge that.

Subcommittee on Food Safety committee  I need just one minute, Mr. Chair. Mr. Allen asked earlier who called which witnesses. We checked into that for him, and we can give him some information. Mr. Easter asked for Mr. Irons, Mr. Allen asked for Ms. Fowler, and both of you asked for Mr. Stamatakis. The request was sent out on behalf of the chair by the clerk to CFIA parliamentary affairs, which is the standard procedure for inviting witnesses to the committee.

Subcommittee on Food Safety committee  I'd like to talk a little bit about CVS. Now you've talked about HACCP and CVS, so I assume everybody supports that and sees that as a tool they can use in the plants to their advantage. Is that correct?

Subcommittee on Food Safety committee  Both of you have been in the system long enough to see HACCP come in. You see the positives from that. Do you want to talk a little bit about those--because we have talked some about HACCP--and then maybe you could talk about what CVS builds on top of that. We had a witnesses earlier who doesn't seem to appreciate CVS the way some other people do.

Subcommittee on Food Safety committee  How much time do I have left, Mr. Chair? A couple of minutes?

Subcommittee on Food Safety committee  I want to talk a little bit, then, about last year. Basically we've heard from witnesses that if those positive environmental test results had been communicated to CFIA prior to July, alarm bells might have gone off earlier and the outbreak might have been prevented. Now, that environmental testing was eliminated in 2005 under a Liberal government.

Subcommittee on Food Safety committee  Both.

Subcommittee on Food Safety committee  That's what we've heard from basically everybody, that the risk cannot be eliminated completely but that we certainly can control it. I think those new regulations have done that.

Subcommittee on Food Safety committee  No, that's fine.

Subcommittee on Food Safety committee  Did you want to go any further with that? I didn't want to stop you, because you were laying out how it happens. But if you're at the end, that's fine.

Subcommittee on Food Safety committee  Mr. Irons, I'd like to go back to the first question Mr. Easter asked about the reviews and the changes to the reports, the clarification. He seemed to be implying that because they were done at the same time, there was something strange about that. But it would be reasonable, if the audit is being done and these questions arise at the same time, that the clarifications would be made at the same time.

Subcommittee on Food Safety committee  Okay, thank you. I think Mr. Bellavance talked about inspectors. What are the requirements to be an inspector? It seems to me, from our testimony, that it has moved from being a position that was at one point fairly general to being something that's more specialized all the time.

Subcommittee on Food Safety committee  The reason I ask is that the last witness criticized us—or I took it as criticism—because we were hiring other than inspectors. This may be for Ms. Airth, but he seemed to imply we shouldn't be hiring biologists. But the reality is that you've got inspectors across a broad range.