Subcommittee on Food Safety Committee on June 1st, 2009

[David Hutton]

What would have happened is that he would have perhaps felt confident that he could go to the Public Sector Integrity Commissioner and that his case would have been investigated. If it were found, for example, that he had suffered reprisals as a result of what he had done, then the people responsible for that could be disciplined, up to and including the point of losing their jobs. That's the theory and that's what our legislation says. But the practice is that our Public Sector Integrity Commissioner, in the past two years, has not found a single case of reprisal against an employee. There's a tribunal that she can bring into action to adjudicate cases when she believes there is reprisal. That tribunal has never sat.

In the U.K., when they established similar legislation some time ago, during the first three years the tribunal adjudicated more than 150 cases. That's more than 50 a year. This is a smaller jurisdiction, but the ratio is infinity—there has not been a single case—and we know from surveys of Stats Canada that more than one in five federal public servants report that they've suffered reprisal, mostly at the hands of their bosses. Our experience is that what will guarantee a reprisal is to try to blow the whistle. We think that close to 100% of those people suffer.

[Carolyn Bennett, Liberal, St. Paul's, ON]

In places where there has been legislation about, say, sexual harassment, it becomes mandated that there must be a designated person in the company or in the department that is a “safe place” for people to go to tell their story. I think it's sometimes very hard to tell your immediate boss, or even harder sometimes to tell the boss above your boss.

Would this be part of comprehensive whistle-blowing legislation, to your mind: that somebody be designated as almost the ombudsman for this?

[David Hutton]

Yes. It's actually one of the principles of this whole field that, where it makes sense, people should try to take it up the line through management in their own organization before they go outside. If the organization clearly has a track record of paying no attention to those and punishing people, then obviously they shouldn't bother with that process. But within our current legislation, there is a designated management person within most government departments and crown corporations to whom people should be able to go to make disclosures.

But as I mentioned earlier, that system is largely inactive. The numbers being reported through that system are very small. I mentioned the Canada Post case, in which there was not a single disclosure, in an organization that we know has had a history of labour problems. Corrections Canada is another one. So the theory and the reality are ending up in different places.

[Carolyn Bennett, Liberal, St. Paul's, ON]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

You basically have ten seconds left. Do you have a closing statement, very quickly?

[Carolyn Bennett, Liberal, St. Paul's, ON]

Yes, I just wanted to apologize to Mr. Pugh for the discrediting line of questioning that came from the opposite side.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

That's quite a statement.

Mr. Bellavance, you have five minutes.

[André Bellavance, Bloc, Richmond—Arthabaska, QC]

It's odd that Ms. Bennett finished on that note, given that I was just preparing to talk about the mock trial through which government members put Mr. Kingston, who is president of a union. Mr. Kingston is unfortunately not here to defend himself. If government members consider that the very fact of being a union president is somehow negative in and of itself, I can say that I do not share their view. I myself was president of a union when I worked at a radio station. The people around me, and others who worked at the station, felt that this was an advantage, insofar as I would be very familiar with the environment. I would think this also applies to Mr. Kingston, who was an inspector. He's very credible when he talks about his organization, because he knows it extremely well.

Regarding Canadians in general, you made a brief mention of the Nanos survey during your presentation on food hygiene and safety. I would like you to give us more details on the fact that most people believe the government should take the lead in guaranteeing the application of safety standards. In Canada, 73% of Canadians believe the government should have final responsibility for its food safety system.

You must be aware that the committee has heard Minister Ritz, as well as Ms. Swan, and almost everyone at the head of the Canadian Food Inspection Agency. They all said they were very happy that the president of Maple Leaf took responsibility. But Canadians do not share that view.

Do you yourselves, and the people you represent, believe that ultimate responsibility for food safety rests with the Canadian government?

[Terry Pugh]

Absolutely, that's correct, yes.

I think the underlying fundamental assumption of the Canadian public is that the government's job, your job as an elected person, is to make sure that laws don't get put in place or regulations aren't put in place that fundamentally harm Canadians. The public interest, the objective here--and the people believe that it's the government's role--is to regulate industry, private enterprise, to regulate the economy basically. There are certain freedoms that industry has, of course. But in the end, the people put their trust in their elected representatives, and the government agencies and institutions that they put in place, to protect people's interests. They're placing that trust in Parliament and their institutions.

So absolutely, that fundamental trust can't be simply transferred to the private sector. The role of government is to make sure that it functions properly in the interests of the constituents who elect them.

[André Bellavance, Bloc, Richmond—Arthabaska, QC]

In fact, the idea of handing over food inspection to the industry is exactly what was being proposed under Mr. Pomerleau's plan, referred to earlier. I'm referring here to the Conservative government's plan. The number of inspectors and the amounts invested are also subjects that seem to be a laughing matter to the Conservatives. Either way, statistics clearly indicate that on average, one inspector is responsible for inspecting five plants. Yet, it has been stated that the inspector working on the Maple Leaf plant had seven to inspect. I think you are the one who shared these statistics with us. We also learned that inspectors were increasingly focusing on paperwork rather than inspections out in the field, or in the plants. Regardless of what we say or what we do, some aspects of the food safety issue are not up to par, and this is one example. There is no doubt about that.

Also, we recently learned that the Canadian Food Inspection Agency was supposed to create an emergency fund to deal with crises like listeriosis and this fund would have come out of its operational budget. The money allocated for this purpose represents perhaps 10 or 15%. There is talk of additional funds being disbursed, but perhaps the agency may have to use this money to create a contingency fund. Well, this is not new funding, but rather a portion of its own operational budget. Statistics can be interpreted in any number of ways, but you did point to a certain reality.

[Terry Pugh]

Yes, when you transfer--

[André Bellavance, Bloc, Richmond—Arthabaska, QC]

Excuse me for interrupting you, but it seems as though some people are laughing on the other side.

[Terry Pugh]

—resources internally or externally, something is going to suffer if you're going to respond to a crisis. The crisis, of course, is what draws people's attention to the fact that there needs to be regulation.

This is what happened in the stock market crash. Everything was going great, until it didn't go great, until everything crashed, and then all of a sudden it was a problem that there wasn't enough regulation. But before the crash, of course, it was pointed out that everything was going up, so the lack of regulation was actually a good thing then, in the eyes of some people.

You need regulation whether times are good or bad. It's important that you have those systems in place and, as Mr. Hutton said, that you have protection for people who point out things that are going wrong.

Take the whole example of bovine growth hormone. There was an attempt to introduce this into the Canadian milk supply system a few years ago. That was actually prevented largely through public opposition to that growth hormone. It was a whistle-blower at Health Canada—three whistle-blowers, actually—who saw what was potentially coming down the line with that and took steps to ensure that the milk supply system was not put in jeopardy.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Thank you, Mr. Pugh.

Mr. Allen, five minutes.

[Malcolm Allen, NDP, Welland, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thanks to the clerk for providing the information that revived the dead donkey that delivered the documents from CFIA that I was talking about last week. I guess I was mistaken; the donkey didn't die after all. It made its way here, three legs or not.

Mr. Hutton, I have a question about the systems based on this. I had asked a question of Mr. Cameron Prince, who's a vice-president at CFIA, about whether he would provide me documentation about the compliance verification system. He said yes, he could and he would, and they did late last week. Part of that was asking whether the compliance verification system tasks had been done, of which there are five, according to their list.

According to this, it says that in regard to CVS tasks delivered April 2008 to January 2009--and I know you don't have the documentation in front of you, so let me just quote it to you, sections 1, 2, 3, and 5--there were 135,457 tasks delivered, and 134,764 tasks planned. They had actually delivered more than 100%.

But for section 4, which is the system design and reassessment, which was a new assessment, it says to see the explanatory note, which read:

Section 4 verification tasks are associated with periodic, comprehensive assessments of the company quality systems by a specialized team of food safety specialists once very two years. CFIA does not have complete data for section 4 tasks at this point, because they were to be completed over a two-year period ending March 31, 2010.

So if I do the arithmetic, I know they wouldn't have started to do it until March of last year. They can't give you a temporary report. They are saying, “Well, it's a two-year period, and I can't do it until the end.”

Does that seem logical to you, that when you have a system that was in crisis last year--clearly, they had a serious outbreak and they had 22 deaths—somehow the system couldn't be made such that you could say, “Here's what we see at this point based on what we know to date, albeit incomplete”, and not have at least some sort of information driven out of that one task?

[David Hutton]

I think you make a very good point about the timeliness of this type of information.

I don't want to start commenting on the specifics of Maple Leaf, other than what I know from public information, but it would appear from what we've heard in testimony before this committee that the failing they fell into was a fairly common one of gathering information that was very valuable for process control purposes and then failing to analyze it in a way that would show where the problem was.

I think the relevance to your question is that if they had had oversight from well-qualified people who understood what these types of systems were supposed to do, that failing would have been pointed out at a pretty early stage, because they essentially had an important part of the system be non-functional. I think that would be bound to come out in the type of comprehensive audit that section 4 apparently talks about.

[Malcolm Allen, NDP, Welland, ON]

Which I guess leads to the question, why wouldn't you accelerate it, since it seems your system didn't work?

[David Hutton]

Yes, one of the points I would come back to is that I think it's a grave mistake to take on trust that an organization has a functioning management system until you've verified that for yourself in a fairly comprehensive way. If you don't do that, then you run the risk of allowing an organization to maintain a facade. Behind that facade of paperwork and activity, the thing isn't really working the way it is supposed to and they perhaps don't even have the technical capability to do that. I think it would be a very important part of the oversight to do these sorts of comprehensive audits in a very timely fashion, not dragging out over two years, and for that to be a prerequisite for any kind of change in inspection regime this organization is subject to.

[Malcolm Allen, NDP, Welland, ON]

So from a system's perspective, for someone who has been in this field for 20-plus years, as you said, and you had a serious situation.... I know you don't want to comment on the Maple Leaf piece. I'm not asking you to do that. But let's extrapolate that to some other industry that has had some serious occurrence in their systems that has led to some sort of catastrophe of some description. I don't know how else to describe 22 deaths except as a major catastrophe. Would one not want to accelerate their audit processes to see what went wrong, to see if it couldn't be corrected more quickly?

A third party validator comes along and says, “We need to validate that for you, because folks are looking at you saying they don't think you've got it right.” Would that place not also want to be validated by that third party so they can put their hand up and say they're validated? I know from the manufacturing sector, when they developed all the new ISO 9000, 9003, and 14000 programs, that these are all externally validated systems. They're not done internally by the manufacturer. Those manufacturers aren't responsible for food safety. In some cases, they're making widgets and they have to be validated from the outside.

[David Hutton]

Yes, I think your point about the importance of the validation process is very well taken. I'd also like to point out that when we're talking about disasters, to me the whole process of looking into this disaster is flawed in many ways. I don't think the members of this committee would view this process as being as comprehensive and as thorough as the public would like.

If you look at air disasters when there's loss of life, a very intensive investigation happens. The site of the accident is maybe treated like a crime scene. All sorts of specialists are brought in to examine in great depth what happened, and that process can take a considerable amount of time and money. So it seems to me that, with the best efforts of the committee, we don't have in place in Canada at the moment an adequate way of fully investigating a serious occurrence and really getting all the lessons from it. We're dependent on what the supplier has told us and what we're able to find out through this process.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Thank you, Mr. Hutton.

Mr. Anderson.

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

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I want to ask both of you. Do you believe that food safety in this country is substantially improved from 10 or 15 years ago?

[David Hutton]

It's hard for me to say, but when I look around at.... I work across many sectors, and what I see happening is a pattern across many sectors of responsibility that has been taken away from government, handed to industry, oversight being reduced. I see oversight agencies being starved of resources, being given management that may not be completely in tune with what they're supposed to be doing, pressured to approve actions or industry initiatives that are not appropriate. I can't put my hand on my heart and say I know exactly what's going on in the food industry. But what I see is a very consistent pattern in this country, in the U.S.A., and in other countries of a type of deregulation going on that is being done irrationally and without adequate oversight.

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

We've already explained that this is not what's happening here. Do you feel your food supply is safer now than it was 10 or 15 years ago?

[David Hutton]

I've no way of making that comparison, but I don't have any great confidence that the system is as safe as it needs to be.