Subcommittee on Food Safety Committee on May 4th, 2009

[Robert de Valk]

I think you're quoting there something that says 100% of U.S. meat imports are inspected but in Canada only 10% are. I don't know who gave you that information. But again, Canada and the United States have essentially the same system. That's why we have equivalencies. We're the two countries that have better equivalency in meat imports and exports than any other two countries in the world. Basically, what both countries do is randomly test at the border meat imports and exports. That's the kind of testing that happens to all other imports as well. But we randomly test them for all kinds of things, including pathogens, but also pesticides and so on.

On top of that, the two points I mentioned in my presentation, the fact that you have system equivalency and you have prior label approval, both those things are practised by both countries. If we want to export to the United States, we have to get prior label approval from the USDA for that product to go into the United States. Similarly, for an export from the United States, they would have to get prior label approval from the CFIA.

In effect, the inspectors in both countries act for each other to ensure that the regulations are being met, and they take those responsibilities very seriously. Often, loads are held up in the United States that are not being exported to Canada because an inspector has decided to take issue with the interpretation of a Canadian regulation. We have to get a Canadian inspector to intervene and correct the interpretation they're making and let them know that's not quite the way it is.

But they're very careful. In Canada we do exactly the same thing. Nothing can be exported to the United States that doesn't meet U.S. requirements.

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

I think in your presentation, when you talked about the prior label approval, you said that so far it's just beef, pork, poultry, and processed vegetables, yet a lot of the things we've had trouble with here in Canada didn't fit into those categories. Whether it's raspberries from Guatemala or...there are things I can think of that were not in those categories. A prior label approval would then, as a best practice, be applied to everything because of this issue of traceability.

I want to find out where the rest of this stuff is. If you end up with a problem, would that be a safer and a more even approach? Is that it?

[Robert de Valk]

Obviously it's not going to solve all your problems, so keep that in mind. We do have problems in meat from time to time as well, even though we have these two very safe food safety enhancement procedures and policies in place. It does give you a lot more information. It gives you an extra check in the system, and it allows you to certainly get involved in that traceability element, which now is not in place for a lot of goods.

We don't know anything about the goods until they get to Canada on our supermarket shelves and an inspector starts to look at them.

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

Are you aware of whether the CFIA inspectors are sampling ready-to-eat meat products for things like E. coli and salmonella and listeria?

[Robert de Valk]

Yes, they are.

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

Okay. Again, we're hearing that they're not.

Obviously in any audit system or any random sample system, more is better. When there are backlogs, and they're short of staff and all of those things—I think people have also been concerned about not having enough inspectors—then sometimes a lot of stuff gets through that was slated to be tested. Is that not true?

[Robert de Valk]

That's not true at the border. You can almost count on your fingers when your load's going to be inspected, because about every 12th to 15th load gets inspected randomly. They just pick it out of the system, and it gets inspected. There's always an inspector around to do that. You may not get the inspector as quickly as you would like, but once that load has been chosen under that system, it has to be inspected.

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

Do you know which load is going to be inspected? Do you get advance notice?

[Robert de Valk]

No, it's done randomly.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Ms. Bennett, your time is up. Thank you.

Mr. Bellavance, you have five minutes.

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

I would like to come back to the issue of public confidence.

Like the vast majority of people, I have confidence in the quality of our food, fortunately. I do not know what people would do if they lost this confidence. However, with what happened last summer, we see that it does not take much to shake this confidence.

It is also a question of perception. We can accept that unfortunately accidents do happen, in the hope that no one dies as a result. Fortunately, that is not something that happens here very often. But we do see that it can happen here. We often hear that imported products are dangerous, and can cause disease and death. But it turned out that this was not true, that bad things can happen here as well.

Fortunately, people retained their confidence in our food, and of course I am very pleased about that. However, as I was saying, it does not take much to shake our confidence in our food products.

People talk about imported food all the time, not just since the establishment of this committee, but since I have been on the Agriculture Committee, since 2005. You just talked about it. Mr. de Valk said that inspections were carried out at the borders, and so on. That is true. You said, Mr. Doyle, that we could not inspect everything that comes into the country. That is true also.

However, I would say that both for our domestic products, and for our imported products, there is room for improvement. I hope you would agree with me on that, but you are entitled to disagree.

Mr. Doyle, I'm thinking particularly of a producer who told me that chocolate milk or a chocolate drink from China was being sold by Walmart. What is this product? Is it milk, and if so, is it of the same quality as the milk we have in Canada? It may be a different type of product. We saw what happened in China, where melamine was added to the milk, and so there are grounds for concern.

There are safety standards in China at the moment. The problem lies with the way they are enforced. It is possible that it may be more difficult to enforce these rules in some regions, and we have also seen that there are problems. Nonetheless, why is it that these products are ending up on our grocery store shelves? Tests were probably done and validated, but would it be possible to get a better idea of what this product is and to ensure it meets proper standards, because that is supposed to be what happens.

The fact is that I still have a great deal of concern about products of this type. I'm talking about China, but maybe questionable products from other places as well. They may even come from the United States, our neighbours, who also have rules, but who did manufacture food for animals that poisoned pets. I know pets are not human beings, but we are talking about food, and this was not a pleasant situation either.

I think there is room for improvement, and we have to determine what should be done. When an agency employee tells us he heard in the media that the Canadian Food Inspection Agency's budget would be cut by $24 million over three years, and that increasingly, inspections would be done by the industry itself, I think about people's confidence, which I was talking about earlier. It is dangerous to shake people's confidence.

The cost of hiring more inspectors and ensuring that the work is done right and that there are more inspections carried out, particularly at the border, is not that high compared to the economic cost that would be paid by our producers and processors if there were a loss of public confidence in our food system.

That was a long preamble, but I would like to hear everyone's views on this.

[Richard Doyle]

I will try to be more succinct than I was last time.

First of all, I agree with you. I think there is room for improvement in any system, and we are working on that. When we look at consumers' priorities, and their concerns about food, food safety is always at the top of the list.

You were talking about chocolate milk from China. With the trade liberalization that has happened as a result of globalization, it is obvious that we will face more and more risks, often from developing countries. On the other hand, we cannot test everything either. We cannot necessary do tests to detect melamine, for example. Tests are done on a random basis, but that is no easy matter either. We cannot do tests for 2,000, 3,000 or 4,000 chemicals or other substances. That would not be possible.

Let's talk about ways of improving the system. There is one thing I find deplorable. Let's take your story about chocolate milk. We noticed the problem, and we asked the agency to follow up, to inspect the product, etc. I can only assume that it did so, but I really have no idea whether this was done. It might be good if there were greater transparency in following up on complaints or concerns in an industry. We do that to try to protect consumers. I understand that there are some trade considerations, but it would be nice to know whether anyone saw this as a problem, whether the agency followed up and settled the matter. Otherwise, we can only wait until the product is no longer on the shelves, which would be an indication that someone had followed up on the complaint. There might be room for improvement in this regard.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Thank you.

Mr. Allen.

[Malcolm Allen, NDP, Welland, ON]

That was an interesting comment, that last piece about the report back. Yes, there's proprietary information, and we all understand that. I don't have to explain it; you could explain it better to me.

Other products we see on store shelves are labelled but are assumed to be milk products. Yogurt may not be mislabelled, but there's a misperception about what it is. Not everyone can read the fine print on some of these things, especially some of us who are wearing glasses that are thicker than we'd like, or who are a little older than we want to be. Could this lead to products that are misleading or even misrepresented?

[Richard Doyle]

Absolutely. Take ice cream. A year ago, we saw another product coming in called frozen dessert. It was on the same shelves and had the same look. It's called frozen dessert, in light blue over dark blue. As you pack the ice cream cartons on top of each other, the cap of the one below hides the name. These are all marketing practices. Manufacturers can claim that they are respecting the legislation and designating the product properly. But it's misleading to consumers. It's not just the terminology. These products are made with palm oil and other ingredients. But the consumer has absolutely no idea. We tested markets. Consumers bought the product and said they didn't know it wasn't ice cream. It was the same cost, in the same place, with the same look. The agency is not intervening, because the product meets the regulations.

Is the product misleading? To prove that, I would have to go to court and sue the company. There should be no debate about whether it's misleading. Is a butter tart with no butter in it misleading? Some 84% of the consumers in the survey done by CFIA said that if they see a name of a product on the label they assume that the main ingredient is present. That's not me, that's consumers. It's not even my survey. My survey shows 76% of consumers believe that the name and the main ingredient match. CFIA shows 84%. But we shouldn't debate whether it's misleading or not—we should just make sure that we prevent these practices.

[Malcolm Allen, NDP, Welland, ON]

To bring it back to food safety, I actually think it has an impact on food safety when consumers, who are quite often in a hurry, because of the lifestyle they lead in the sense of their time constraints, are often buying products off the shelf that they assume to be...and I think ice cream is a perfect example, when indeed it may be some other ingredient. They don't necessarily have a traumatic allergy, but they may suffer minor complaints from allergy-type symptoms. They are buying products that they believe are one thing and they are absolutely something else altogether. Some of the statistics we read about on the number of food-borne illnesses around this country go into the millions, depending on the reports you want to read.

My sense is that if folks can't get a clear label that's basically staring them in the face, saying that this isn't really ice cream or this isn't really a butter tart, then we're really not informing the consumer. I don't believe we're doing them a service when it comes to food safety if indeed we're not showing them what it is and how it could affect them, based on the ingredients.

[Richard Doyle]

I would add to this, because I agree with you.

The key issue is this, and our consumer survey is exactly showing this, and it's going back to what Mr. Bellavance was saying. If you lose the confidence of the consumers, whether it's on the label, whether it's on the inspection system, whether it's on anything, if you lose that confidence that the product they buy is safe, that it is exactly what it says it is, then they can decide whether they want to pay for it or not. At least they're not being fooled, and we're going to continue to have a good system in this country.

We did a test with processed cheese with consumer groups two or three years ago, and basically we have a regulation that says what processed cheese is supposed to be, and it describes it very well. Processors who are not meeting the regulation just add the word “product”, so they called it “processed cheese product”, and that prevents them from having to meet any regulation whatsoever. So we put it to consumer groups and we went shopping with them. We basically explained the difference and the distinction of how they were being fooled by this type of marketing technique. You have no idea how outraged they were. They were outraged because they don't want to be told that they're being fooled and they sure as hell don't want to know that they're being fooled. And once they do know, they lose confidence in the company.

Food safety is an issue. To go back to what we were talking about, it's not just one company, it's the whole agricultural system. If there is one cheese, for example, that is affected, it's the whole cheese consumption of all kinds of cheese. It's the whole confidence of the consumer not in one single cheese, but in eating cheese that is affected. We've seen that in this particular case of listeria: it affected the whole cheese consumption, not just a specific cheese that was more affected than others. But it's the confidence of the consumer that affects the market, and that's what we have to prevent ourselves doing.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Thank you very much, Mr. Doyle.

Mr. Shipley, for five minutes.

[Bev Shipley, Conservative, Lambton—Kent—Middlesex, ON]

I only have a couple of quick ones.

I do want to clarify one or two things for the record in terms of the comment made by Mr. Bellavance in terms of the cutting of the inspectors. I think the record has shown this before, but I'll just say, for the record, that we've in fact invested $113 million towards food safety and put 200 more inspectors on the floors. We brought back...to replace the environmental testing for listeria that was cancelled in 2005, so actually what we've done is try to move forward on food safety. This is particularly around listeria, but for food safety. So we want the record to be clear about what our government actually has done to help improve that.

Mr. Doyle, I wanted to finish off just one part of my previous question, and that had to do with the antibiotics. This is an issue out there. I commend you for the steps your industry has taken to prevent anything with any antibiotics from getting into the system. In terms of the development of that program and in terms of the development of the testing, is that similar to the same testing process that is used in the detection of antibiotics and meat so that we're sure, in terms of the human safety of antibiotics, that they have that protection?

[Richard Doyle]

Well, I'm not as familiar with the meat antibiotic detection, but I know that in milk you test every truck before it's unloaded. You will have a test, and if you've found any positive tests on any source—so there are no false positives or negatives—it's going to be retested and confirmed, and then each of the samples of the farmers will be retested, and not only will the truck be destroyed but the farmers will be charged with the destruction of that milk. You're talking about some trucks at $70,000 a shot. There is no incentive for farmers, knowing that it's all going to be tested, to do it. Unfortunately it does happen on a rare occasion, and it's often a new employee who didn't tag the animal properly and milked them all.

So it happens, you know. To go back to some of the comments made before, these things will happen, but the system has to pick them up. Errors will continue to happen, but you need to be able to pick them up. Consumer safety, in the end, is really what you're aiming for.

[Bev Shipley, Conservative, Lambton—Kent—Middlesex, ON]

And I think that's clearly what this is all about. You know, we're humans and we aren't perfect, obviously, and whether it's in the dairy products or whether it's in other commodities such as pork livestock, the important thing is to make sure it doesn't get to the consumer. That's really what it's about, and from my understanding of what we want to create and have created to the greatest extent, it's not a process; it's a number of processes that are put together for the protection of the consumer by different organizations, starting with the primary producer and taking it right to the counter, to the person who actually puts it on the counter in some cases.

Let me take you back to this, and then I'm done, Mr. Chair. You talked about the biosecurity, that to address the biosecurity of Canadian dairy farms, you've worked closely with the beef industry. You didn't mention the pork industry, which I would think actually has a more stringent biosecurity program not unlike the feather industry. They have a very strict biosecurity program in place before entry into barns because those livestock.... The beef industry tends to have more open facilities in raising its beef compared to the pork industry.

So I'm wondering why you're focusing on the beef industry rather than the pork industry.

[Richard Doyle]

I guess it's similarity of the animals more than anything else. You know, biosecurity exists on dairy farms, and most dairy farmers.... I was listening to Monsieur Bellavance speak about dressing properly and protecting yourself. Most dairy farms now, if they have visitors, are going to take the proper measures before allowing visitors to the farm. You can't just stop by and go through the whole facility anymore.

The Canadian Cattlemen's Association had worked with CFIA in trying to look at developing a biosecurity national standard program. We felt this was a good idea and that there might be sufficient similarities between the dairy cattle and the beef cattle. So that's why we basically say maybe we can save ourselves a lot of duplication in the work. Mind you, clearly, biosecurity on a dairy farm will be different from that on a beef farm, just as it will be different on a pig farm. Altogether, there might be some similarities in certain aspects in terms of the development of the standard.

[Bev Shipley, Conservative, Lambton—Kent—Middlesex, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Your time has expired.

Thank you very much, gentlemen, for coming here today. I think we've certainly had some good questions and some great answers. So thanks again.

The meeting will suspend for a maximum of 10 minutes, and I would like to have everybody back to the table by then. Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

I call the meeting back to order.

On a point of order, Mr. Anderson.