Subcommittee on Food Safety Committee on June 1st, 2009

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Thanks very much, Mr. Stein.

Mr. Allen, seven minutes.

[Malcolm Allen, NDP, Welland, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you to everyone for coming.

I think perhaps you weren't actually finished. Maybe we'll continue on a bit, because it seemed you wanted to say some more about the equipment.

Perhaps, as you tell us a little more, you could address the issue of where it was developed, where it was first used, so we get a historical context of where it's coming from as the next generation, in a sense, to get us to that place where we all want to be, whether we be the primary producers or the end consumer, and that is food that we all feel comfortable and safe with. There isn't anybody in the chain who doesn't want that, whether it be the primary producer or those of us who only have forks in our hands. All of us want the same thing. You'd find unanimity in this committee about that, and throughout the country as well.

Mr. Stein, you may have a few more minutes with that.

[Peter Stein]

Thank you very much.

It's important to note that this technology really allows the ingredient list to be backed off. In other words, you don't necessarily need to put the preservatives into your ingredient list that you would if you didn't use this technology. This is a benefit and is really the primary reason Piller looked into this a few years back.

Also, as Jim mentioned, the testing protocol that we have to undergo from CFIA is the same for any product, even for a product that goes through this technology. As a matter of fact, this is pretty new technology. There is nothing in the regulations that dictates how we deal with this. We may be able to lower one category in testing, but honestly, the product is pasteurized in its package. Really, there is no risk to this product once it passes through the system. It passes through the system only in one way. If there are any faults or errors, the system shuts down and doesn't open. It has to be recovered, and we go through the system properly, maintaining and reaching that 87,000 psi, so there is really no way for anything to go through that isn't treated. It's a very safe, very accurate technology that gives us tremendous results.

As I said, it's definitely something that's going to be at the forefront; however, it's extremely expensive. It adds cost to the product, very minimal, but it's something that we feel in our organization is a very proactive approach to providing our customers with peace of mind on the food safety aspect of our products.

I'm not sure if everybody can do it, but certainly we made the investment before any of the listeria outbreak last summer and so forth. This was already in the works a year before that, so I think you will definitely see an increase in the use of this.

It was originally started to treat vegetables, I believe, and the units were very small, or much smaller. It has now been adapted for larger types of processing. You can treat hundreds of kilograms at a time in one cycle of this unit. The way the technology has improved over the years shows in how large a batch this technology can process. This unit is fully 20 feet high and 50 feet long. It's a big piece of equipment and weighs in excess of 200,000 pounds. It's a very robust piece of equipment that needs to be that size if you're going to be containing that much pressure. But we feel that's definitely part of the way of the future for food safety.

[Malcolm Allen, NDP, Welland, ON]

It's interesting to note that you said the company actually looked at the equipment to back off on preservatives, and I think salt was mentioned in the earlier statement.

This leads me to Mr. Olson, because you said something that was intriguing. It's not by omission from here, but it is a sense that it isn't as closely watched in the committee as you would probably like, which is really about healthy choices as part of the food safety chain.

So here we have one company that talked about buying technology to help reduce.... What I think they probably are saying--at least in the case of sodium--is that it would be a healthier choice if we all had less sodium in our diets. They went to a different technology, and you have indicated that's perhaps the one piece that we are not necessarily as involved in looking at as we might otherwise be.

I'm interested in your comments around how you would like to see us look at that vis-à-vis what you have heard from Mr. Stein.

[Thomas Olson]

Clearly, that kind of technology is the very thing we should be talking about. Not only does it make safer food, but it allows us to have healthier food, because in the end, safe food that's not healthy is no answer; it's only a partial answer.

[Malcolm Allen, NDP, Welland, ON]

For some of our diets--mine included--you're probably correct. Some of us don't always make the best choices, and unfortunately, parliamentarians don't necessarily get to make the best choices here either sometimes.

What I've heard from nearly every group that's been represented--and the clerk will correct me if I'm wrong--is that it seems to me that every group primarily represents producers. And I'm looking at Ms. MacTavish now and Ms. Lawrence and Mr. Rice and Mr. Olson, for that matter, who have all talked about the cost. Whether it be a HACCP or farm safety program, or whatever acronym one uses--because we all love acronyms, I know--they work wonderfully well, but one of the things is the cost.

I don't want to sound overly naive, but no one has actually asked the question, what does it cost you? I want to preface that by understanding that we're not talking thousands of dollars per animal, and we all kind of get that, I think. But no one has ever said to us, “Well, this is the actual cost” in the sense that we can't recover. That seems to be the other piece of that question, because there isn't a way to incentivize it, as you said, when it comes to selling the product, because folks simply expect the food to be safe.

So if the government is going to pick up the cost--and I know I probably don't have much time to get it--but what is the sense of the cost there? Do you have a sense of that cost?

[Dawn Lawrence]

For the Canadian Pork Council, the average cost per producer for just the audit is probably about $500 or $600 per producer per year. That doesn't include the cost of implementation, or the timing commitment that's put into developing the protocols and maintaining the records, but just the audit. We have about 7,000 producers. So if we looked at the lower end of that, we're looking at $3.5 million per year in audit costs. And the operation of the program itself, at the national office and with our provincial board's contribution to that, is about $1 million on the administrative side.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Mr. Olson, or Ms. MacTavish, would you like to comment on that?

[Jennifer MacTavish]

I would just like to concur with Dawn on the costs of the program for producers. One of the issues around incentives in the lamb industry is that right now we have such a shortage of Canadian lamb on the market that you can pretty much sell whatever you produce. If nobody is demanding that a producer be on a food safety program and, therefore, be willing to pay for it, there's no incentive for producers to be there.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Ms. Lawrence, do you want to comment further?

[Dawn Lawrence]

At the opposite end of the spectrum, once the hog industry got things rolling for a couple of years with our program, a number of packers, rather than offering an incentive for being part of the program, were cutting the price by 25¢ or 50¢ per hundredweight per hog going into the plant if they were not in the CQA program. So the producer was bearing the cost of implementing the program. Not only were they not getting paid more if they were implementing the program, but they were also losing money on their hogs if they were not implementing the program. Since that time, it has evened out, because we do have so many packers; but producers are not seeing an increased price based on the fact they are implementing these food safety practices on the farm.

[Thomas Olson]

To give you an example with bison, the cost, we understand, of the health and safety issues in the slaughter plant for bison runs at about $50 a head per bison, which has been passed back to the producer. That includes the cost of the inspector, the cost of rendering—and remember, rendering an animal doesn't get BSE—and finally, the cost of all the testing that has to go on there. At $50 a head, it doesn't sound like a lot, but that's part of the reason we had over half of the bison, over 30,000 bison last year, going to U.S. plants, simply because it's cheaper.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Okay, thank you very much.

Mr. Anderson, for seven minutes.

[David Anderson, Conservative, Cypress Hills—Grasslands, SK]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I want to thank the witnesses for being here today. I think we have a good mixture of witnesses to get some answers on some broad questions.

I actually want to talk about national meat standards in national and provincial plants in one minute, if most of the people could get ready to give me their thoughts on that, but I wanted to talk first to Mr. Laws.

You had some concerns, I think, about the pre-market registration for labels, and I don't think you had a chance to address that the other night. Do you want to address that now?

[James M. Laws]

I certainly can. Thanks for the question.

We had read in some media reports that some groups had been saying that this pre-market label approval process was a food safety issue. I did send a letter to each member of this food committee, wanting to clarify that we, the Canadian Meat Council and our members, strongly disagree.

Getting a label pre-approved—that's the important part, pre-approved—by somebody sitting in Ottawa who may never have been into a meat plant in their lives has nothing to do with food safety. What does have to do with food safety is making sure that the label on the container is correct.

The meat industry gets a double whammy. We have to go through this pre-market label approval process, but we already have inspectors in the plant. I mean, that's where the rubber hits the road. We have inspectors in the plant, and they can go up and say, “All right, what are you making today?” They can check the product formulation. They can check the label. That's what the inspectors should be doing in the plant. They have to make sure that whatever is on the container is in there. The consumer, if they have child who's allergic to peanuts, wants to make sure that there are no peanuts in that. Somebody sitting in Ottawa who may pre-approve the label has nothing to do with it. They have no idea whether the guy has accidentally put peanuts in or not.

So that's where it stops. As well, if a product label says that the product is either fully cooked or not fully cooked, the guy sitting in Ottawa has no idea whether that product has been cooked or fully cooked. Another important consideration is cooking instructions.

We all know that the products recalled last year--resulting in this committee's creation--all had labels that were pre-approved in Ottawa, showing you again that it has nothing to do with food safety.

There were other arguments used by people--for instance, that you have to worry about products coming in from foreign markets. Well, that is true, but that's why the Americans come up and audit our system and the CFIA goes down and audits theirs. They similarly rely on the inspectors down in those plants to make sure that, yes, what they've put in the product is what's in the product.

Interestingly enough, before last August in Canada, you were not allowed to import a product that had sodium diacetate as one of its ingredients. That's too bad, because had we been able to import ready-to-eat meat products from the United States with sodium diacetate in them, the products would have been safer than the ones sold in Canada. Finally, we have that approval from Health Canada.

So we couldn't disagree more with the comments some other groups have made about pre-market label approval. There are other challenges with the pre-market label approval process; it has nothing to do with food safety.

[David Anderson, Conservative, Cypress Hills—Grasslands, SK]

Mr. Stein, you seem to be agreeing.

[Peter Stein]

Absolutely.

[David Anderson, Conservative, Cypress Hills—Grasslands, SK]

Okay.

I'd like to spend more time on that, but I don't have a lot of time here, so I'll go back to the issue that Mr. Olson had raised about plants across the country.

We've had witnesses say that we need a national standard that applies to everybody. We've had other witnesses say that we don't need that, because what it will do is destroy the smaller plants; it won't be feasible for them to continue operating. Is it possible to have different standards? Is it necessary to have different standards? Or do we need to go to that one standard for every plant across the country?

Start wherever you want, but I'd like to hear from a variety of people.

[Thomas Olson]

Well, certainly the federal plants have standards. We understand that those standards are driven in part by our trading partners.

[David Anderson, Conservative, Cypress Hills—Grasslands, SK]

If we need some standards like that, how do we keep the smaller plants open?

[Thomas Olson]

In terms of the standards that may be required by trading partners, if in fact all those requirements are driven by our trading partners, the next question is this: what does food safety really require? I'd go back to the question asked by the former Prime Minister--namely, why is something that's safe in Alberta not safe for somebody in Ontario? If we're looking strictly at food safety issues and not at other political issues or other kinds of objectives, then it seems to me there is only one standard: is the food safe or is it not safe?

To the extent that there are small plants that are unable to meet food safety standards, it seems to me there is a bigger question of why we're allowing that food into our system. But to the extent that we have rules that are not practical.... For example, I was told--I could be wrong on this—that there is a requirement for there to be both male and female restrooms. At a small plant, one restroom might be adequate for the two people who work there.

If we can get back to practical rules, then food safety is not compromised, and smaller plants that have safe food don't have to meet requirements that really don't deal with food safety, or at least with food safety on that scale.

[David Anderson, Conservative, Cypress Hills—Grasslands, SK]

But there is a political issue, which is that if we want to export, some jurisdictions require standards that we wouldn't necessarily apply in this country. That doesn't mean the food is not safe or is produced at a different level; it just means that if we want access to that market, we have to reach those levels.

[Thomas Olson]

That's right. So it seems to me you could have a round federal seal for export and a triangular seal for domestic consumption.

[David Anderson, Conservative, Cypress Hills—Grasslands, SK]

Okay. Are there any others?

And do we need a national standard in the country, or is it good to have a variety of standards for those smaller plants that are producing into limited markets?

[Jennifer MacTavish]

The smaller plants that are producing in limited markets are what keeps our industry in business. So we really don't want to do anything that's going to impede their ability to process more lambs.

We'd perhaps like to see a reciprocal agreement across provinces. We don't have enough lamb for the consumers in Canada. We're not looking to export huge quantities of lamb; we just want to be able to ship it out of Ontario and into British Columbia so that British Columbians can eat Canadian lamb. If there were a reciprocal agreement among provinces so domestic trade could occur, that would be wonderful. We do not want to put the smaller processing plants in any kind of a position where their livelihood would be threatened.