By Alex Binkley
True North Perspective
Originally writter for Ontario Farmer
When you root out the obvious political posturing, the report from the Commons food safety subcommittee provides some good ideas for restoring respect for Canada’s food safety system.
The opposition call for a full public inquiry into the outbreak of Listeria last summer in Maple Leaf Foods deli meats is, to be polite, a silly notion. The lessons learned reports from the federal and Ontario agencies at the centre of the affair, the sub committee’s work and the conclusions that special investigator Sheila Weatherill will release later this summer will tell us all we need to know. Getting action on the recommendations from these various initiatives is the matter the MPs should turn their attention to when they come back to Ottawa in September.
To spend millions of dollars on judges and lawyers to sift over already well worked ground and report in a year or two on what happened in the summer of 2008 is a complete and utter waste of time and money. The food safety system will face challenges in the future and better to prepare it to handle them than have federal officials rehash what’s already happened.
However the Conservatives didn’t do a lot better in their section of the report when they tried to drag changes made to the federal inspection system in 2005 into the equation. They had plenty of time to fix them.
These recommendations should show the public what a screwed up place Parliament has become because the political parties don’t work nearly as hard on making a minority Parliament effective as they do at trying to embarrass each other.
The opposition submitted 14 recommendations and the Conservatives 22. Many of them are quite similar and should command a lot of attention from Ms. Weatherill as she finalizes her report and from the federal and provincial agriculture ministers as they prepare for their annual meeting in July. One of the items on their agenda is a national food safety standard. The ministers have discussed ideas about a national standard for years and maybe they’re finally ready to take some action.
The one area the subcommittee didn’t dig into is what the Canadian Food Inspection Agency has done with the budget increases it has received during the last few years. Given all the controversy over the number of inspectors CFIA has and how much time they spend at various facilities, the MPs should have delved deeper into inspection issues. We keep hearing claims of shortages mixed with observations that more inspectors wouldn’t have prevented the outbreak at Maple Leaf. But the subcommittee didn’t seem to do the hard number crunching that issue called for considering all the public attention it has received.
26 June 2009 — Return to cover.
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