Food safety watchdog

Food safety watchdog still unclear on numbers
Published On Thu Nov 04 2010EmailPrint


OTTAWA—The federal food safety watchdog is still unable to say how many full-time inspectors work in ready-to-eat meat plants more than two years after a deadly nationwide outbreak of listeriosis traced to tainted deli meats.

So, the union representing federal meat inspectors decided to do some arithmetic of its own and concluded that despite promises of new hires, Canadians are not any safer from processed meat than they were before the outbreak.

The Agriculture Union claimed there are now actually fewer people in charge of enforcing safety standards at non-slaughter meat plants than before bacteria found on deli meats from a Maple Leaf Foods facility in Toronto ended up killing 22 Canadians and sickening hundreds more.

The union said that before the outbreak, there were approximately 220 inspectors who spent most of their time working with a new compliance verification system that monitors safety in non-slaughter meat facilities.

The Canadian Food Inspection Agency, meanwhile, has estimated that it would need just 155 full-time positions to do that work.

“That makes no sense whatsoever,” union president Bob Kingston said in an interview Thursday.

Part of the problem is that the federal food inspection agency has yet to implement all 57 recommendations contained in a scathing report from independent investigator Sheila Weatherill last summer on how the government handled the crisis.

One of the recommendations was that the CFIA bring in third-party experts to conduct a resources audit that would help determine how many inspectors to hire.

The CFIA has yet to conduct that audit, but its president denied the allegations made by the union.

“I can tell you we have more inspection capacity on (the compliance verification system) now than we did prior to the outbreak,” Carole Swan told the Commons health committee examining the response to the Weatherill report on Thursday.

The CFIA was nonetheless unable to provide the specific number of inspectors that would be devoted to that task, although officials at committee did say they had hired 150 of 170 planned new inspectors.

Kingston said that without the resources audit, the CFIA cannot be confident it has enough people to do the job.

“To say that everything is fine and that we’ve got the resources we need, that’s pure nonsense and they know it,” Kingston said. “At this point in time, there has not been a proper evaluation of the resources needed to fully deliver on this system.”

http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/article/886200--food-safety-watchdog-still-unclear-on-numbers