Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Minister, as you know, my background is farming, and I used to be on this committee, so I know the importance of our industry.
As many Canadians know, we lost 20 lives over the last year to listeriosis. We've seen documents from the Treasury Board that show your government could have reallocated funds. It was also alluded to here that Ms. Weatherill is doing an investigation. There are some concerns about transparency and whether she has sufficient tools. Our committee is going to be looking into that later.
I have two questions that came out of two media reports today. It's about the U.S. auditors inspecting our plants. They're pretty rough reports.
First, are you aware of the findings of these U.S. auditors in the plants and the many breaches of regulations that they found? Second, why do we have U.S. auditors coming here to inspect our plants? Don't we have in-house resources? Aren't we astute enough and don't we have the tools here to deal with it on our own?
Those are my two questions. You can go ahead.