Conservatives wanted LOWER listeria standards

Stephen Harper and Gerry Ritz are talking tough now about strengthening our food safety system, after a listeria outbreak has led to the death of at least 15 people. And Tony Clement is down in Denver making macabre jokes. But before? Before the crisis they were doing everything they could to weaken the system:

OTTAWA — The Canadian government strongly opposed tougher U.S. rules to prevent listeria and lobbied the United States to accept Canada's more lenient standards, internal documents reveal.

Briefing notes prepared by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency for an April 7, 2006, meeting with the board of directors of the Canadian Meat Council outline how both industry and the Canadian government were frustrated with the increased precautions the United States was demanding.

Specifically, Canada opposed daily inspection visits and the testing of finished products for Listeria monocytogenes.

Further, the documents show the CFIA agreed to the meat packing and processing industry's request to end a 20-year-old practice of having inspectors issue reports and rankings on facilities. The Canadian Meat Council complained the reports were ending up in the hands of reporters through the Access to Information Act, leading to bad coverage.

Yes, we wouldn't want the media to find out which plants were failing inspections and not meeting standards, would we? They would tell the public, and the public might decide to buy their food from the safer plants, forcing the bad plants to either improve or go out of business.
That would be...wait a minute, isn't that exactly how the free market is supposed to work?

The government documents indicate Canada's meat producers were frustrated that they must add more stringent safeguards to their production lines when producing meat for export to the U.S. market.

"Industry would prefer a single set of standards for both the Canadian and American market," states the document prepared by Dr. Richard Arsenault of the CFIA, anticipating what meat council board members would tell CFIA at the meeting. "[The CMC] will also express their frustration about the recent [United States Department of Agriculture] imposition of product testing for Listeria monocytogenes and of daily visits in U.S.-eligible meat processing plants."

When it comes to something as fundamental as food safety, we shouldn't strive for the lowest common denominator. And in certainly seems in hindsight like more listeria testing would have been wise. If we need to harmonize standards, and given the heavily export-driven nature of our economy I think that makes sense, shouldn't we harmonize to the highest standard?

Gerry Ritz thinks so...now, after the crisis has erupted:

Agriculture Minister Gerry Ritz, who is responsible for the CFIA, hinted this week that Canada might move toward U.S. practices of preventing listeria, such as the pasteurization of packaged meat.

But before the crisis his department was taking a different track:

But the documents reveal the CFIA lobbied the United States to adopt Canada's rules.

"The CFIA is working at bilateral levels to convince the USDA that its system is equivalent to theirs in order to minimize the need for extra import rules," the document says.

It's easy for Stephen Harper and Gerry Ritz to say now, after 29 confirmed cases of listeriosis and the death of 15, that they support higher standards. But these documents and the documents released previously show their true thinking on the matter.

It's their thinking then, before a crisis erupted, before the public and media glare was on them, that showed their true judgment. And they had it completely wrong. They're only now being shamed into stronger action by the glare of the public spotlight, following the eruption of a food safety crisis.

On how many more issues, on how many more matters that have yet to become a crisis, have they and are they now executing this same bad judgment? On how many more issues, on how many of the little, every-day decisions of governing that are so impactful on the country, are they donning they applying their ideological mantras to their decisions instead of governing in the best interests of all Canadians?

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Harper and Listeria: The wrong priorities and the wrong leadership for Canada

Can we draw a direct line between the Stephen Harper Conservatives and the listeria outbreak that has killed at least six (and now Quebec cheese is being recalled) in the same way the Walkerton tragedy can be traced back to cuts by the Mike Harris Conservatives? Perhaps not, although there is an argument to be made for "prime ministerial responsibility."

You can say, however, that the listeria situation serves to highlight exactly why Stephen Harper and the Conservative Party are the wrong people to be running this country. It serves to highlight that their ideological motivations and beliefs are in contradiction to the wishes, the desires, and the best interests of Canadians.

Yesterday, Maple Leaf Foods president Michael McCain fell on his sword, saying its his company that should shoulder the blame for this tragedy:

Also Wednesday, the president of Maple Leaf Foods said his company should bear the responsibility for the distribution of meat that led to the outbreak, effectively absolving the Canadian food safety system of blame.

"This week, it's our best efforts that failed, not the regulators or the Canadian food safety system," Michael McCain said at a separate news conference Wednesday in Toronto.

"I emphasize: This is our accountability and it's ours to fix, which we are taking on fully. We have and we continue to improve on our action plans," he said.

That's all well and good. The company is to blame he says, not the system. Well, the fact is we learned recently that the Harper government wanted to blow-up our food safety system. Harper and Gerry Ritz and Mike Harris-crony Tony Clement wanted to take government out of the equation, and turn responsibility for the safety of our food system over to the industry. To let them police themselves, so to speak.

A government plan to transfer key parts of food inspection to industry so companies can police themselves will put the health of Canadians at risk, according to leading food safety experts who have reviewed the confidential blueprint.

The plan, drafted by Agriculture Minister Gerry Ritz and approved by the Treasury Board, details sweeping changes coming to food inspection in Canada.

The Canadian Food Inspection Agency is also ending funding to producers to test cattle for bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE, or mad cow disease) as part of a surveillance program, the document indicates, a move that is expected to save the agency about $24 million over the next three years.

The new system, part of a push to trim the agency's budget by five per cent, was approved last November, but a public announcement "has been deferred owing to significant communications risks," according to the confidential Treasury Board document obtained by Canwest News Service.

The document, addressed to the president of the agency, details how the inspection of meat and meat products will downgrade agency inspectors to an "oversight role, allowing industry to implement food safety control programs and to manage key risks."

Leading food safety experts, who reviewed the document, say the plan is a recipe for disaster.

We learned about these secret plans to gut Canada's food inspection system when a public servant blew the whistle and made them public. The government responded by firing the whistle blower, musing about criminal charges, and praising the person that outed the whistle blower. And they're stonewalling a parliamentary committee on the issue.

Speaking of Ritz, he too was insisting yesterday that the government system did its job in the listeria case:

Federal inspectors in charge of overseeing health standards at a Maple Leaf Foods processing plant at the centre of a deadly outbreak of listeriosis were doing their job properly, Federal Agriculture Minister Gerry Ritz said Wednesday.

Ritz, joined by members of the Canadian Food Inspection Agency and Health Canada at a news conference in Ottawa, denied allegations that the federal inspector responsible for the plant was mired in paperwork and was not present on the floor of the plant.

Let's review. Both industry and government say it's industry that fell down here, and the government wasn't to blame. Harper is promising “reforms” to the system.

And what reforms were Ritz and Harper considering before this outbreak? They wanted to hand over the government's role to industry. That's right. They wanted to ax the side that they all say was working, and turn it over to the side they all say failed.

The conservative mantra of industry self-regulation makes no sense, and conservative ideology can't be allowed to dictate food safety policy in this country. Contrary to what Harper, Ritz and Clement were cooking-up, we need a BIGGER role for the CFIA and the government when it comes to food safety inspections, not a SMALLER role. Industry self-inspection is NOT the answer.

I think the CFIA needs to do a much better job. I think it needs to be reformed. But the answer isn't conservative ideology. When it comes to food safety, big government isn't a bad word. REGULATION isn't a bad word. We shouldn't be proposing cuts to the CFIA like the Conservatives. We should be investing more heavily in the CFIA, making sure it has the tools to perform its vital oversight role.

Conservative ideology being applied to arts funding is bad enough. We don't need it applied to something as vital as the safety of our food supply.

We don't know what happened yet, but we know the Conservative cuts are not the answer. I shudder to think what would have happened had the Conservatives had the chance to push these cuts through, and carry out their plan for industry self-policing. That they were even thinking of this is frightening. It's a failure of judgment, and we shouldn't give them another chance to make such a mistake.

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