Food Inspection

After two weeks of chamber music, it’s time to get back to politics.

The Globe and Mail reports that a second life may have been claimed by the outbreak of Listeria monocytogenes which has caused havoc in the meat packing industry. Maple Leap Food Inc., the company that owns the Toronto plant from where the outbreak is thought to have originated, has already been forced to recall two million dollars worth of meat products that can be found in supermarkets and restaurants like MacDonald’s and Mr. Sub. More recalls are expected in the next few days.

The sheer scale of this bacterial outbreak raises the question of why on earth the problem wasn’t spotted earlier. Experts from the Canadian Food Inspection Agency have only recently been able to establish the presence of Listeria in Maple Leaf Food’s Sure Slice brand of roast beef: it’s too little, too late.

The problem is that health officials can only monitor 2% of the food that is shipped to consumers. Most of what ends up on our plate is trucked directly from the plant with no inspection whatsoever in between.

Leaked Cabinet documents reveal that the Conservatives were planning on reducing spending in the Canadian Food Inspection Agency by shifting the responsibility of monitoring food safety to the industry. The announcement of the policy was apparently delayed “owing to significant communication risks” (e.i. it would go down terribly in the polls), but Cabinet remains committed to releasing it at some point in the next year.

This Conservative plan would hand the responsibility of monitoring the safety of meat products to the industry that produces them. This equates to asking inmates to guard their own jail. The Liberals and NDP rightly derided the proposal and Stéphane Dion even likened it to the Harris Government measures that led to the Walkerton disaster.

But the opposition didn’t have to launch such a childish and demagogical attack on the government when at least half of policy makes perfect sense. Industry should play a bigger role in food safety control and the sooner that responsibility is bestowed on it, the better it is for the consumer. However, industry should not replace the government health officials but merely complement them. Hopefully, this will make it possible to change that dismal 2% figure that I mentioned earlier on.

Inmates should be given security duties and asked to keep watch over their fellow prisoners. But the jail guards should also keep their jobs!