Agriculture Committee on Oct. 25th, 2012

[The Chair, Conservative, Merv Tweed]

I call the meeting to order.

Good morning, everyone. Welcome to the Standing Committee on Agriculture and Agri-Food.

This is meeting number 52. Pursuant to orders of the day, we are studying the order of reference of Tuesday, October 23, 2012, Bill S-11, an act respecting food commodities, including their inspection, their safety, their labelling, and their advertising; their import, export, and interprovincial trade; the establishment of standards for them; the registration or licensing of persons who perform certain activities related to them; the establishment of standards governing establishments where those activities are performed; and the registration of establishments where those activities are performed.

Joining us today we have Mr. Ritz. I will just advise the committee that I will be adding 10 minutes to the end of the meeting for the minister to stay. He is the Minister of Agriculture and Agri-Food and the Minister for the Canadian Wheat Board. I will ask him to open with his comments, and then we will move to questions from committee members.

Mr. Minister, welcome.

[Gerry Ritz, Conservative, Minister of Agriculture and Agri-Food and Minister for the Canadian Wheat Board]

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I'm joined today by officials from the Canadian Food Inspection Agency: the president, George Da Pont, as well as Neil Bouwer, Paul Mayers and Dr. Martine Dubuc.

It's a pleasure to be here as a former chair of this committee myself. Congratulations to you, Merv, on being elected to your position. Like you, I didn't tolerate tardiness either.

It's good to be back at this table to speak about an issue that is important to Canadian families.

As you know, Mr. Chairman, consumers remain this government's number one priority when it comes to food safety and consumer confidence. That's exactly why I'm here today to urge the members of this committee to pass Bill S-11—and you read out the long title, Mr. Chair, so I won't—the Safe Food for Canadians Act, as expeditiously as is possible.

The Safe Food for Canadians Act will strengthen and modernize our food safety system to make sure it continues to protect the safety of Canadian food.

This act will give CFIA more authority to require industry to produce timely and usable information when it is requested. It will also require companies to have traceability systems. These additional powers will help food inspectors analyze data to speed up any future recall investigations, thus more quickly protecting Canadian consumers.

The Safe Food for Canadians Act will improve food safety oversight by instituting a more consistent inspection regime across all food commodities, implementing tougher penalties for activities that put the health and safety of Canadians at risk, providing better controls over imports, and strengthening food commodity traceability.

The act will implement tougher fines for those who knowingly tamper with our Canadian food supply. Under current legislation, the maximum fine that could be imposed for such an offence is some $250,000. The Safe Food for Canadians Act raises the maximum fine level to $5 million, and possibly more with court activity, for activities that intentionally put the health and safety of Canadians at risk. This bill will allow the CFIA to create a regime for administrative monetary penalties, or AMPs. AMPs, Mr. Chair, will be a key tool in our inspectors' arsenals to discourage those who are looking to cheat or subvert the system.

We all know that Canadians depend on the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, the Public Health Agency of Canada, and industry itself to make sure that their food is safe. These monetary penalties are an intermediate step to ensure that food processors are taking the safety of food production seriously. The act will also consolidate the CFIA's food commodity acts and will align inspection and enforcement powers across all food commodities.

This move specifically addresses recommendation number 43 of the Weatherill report. In fact, Mr. Chairman, upon passage of this important legislation, our government will have addressed all 57 of the Weatherill recommendations.

This new act gives government more authority in areas critical to food safety inspection and investigation.

While the number one priority is strengthening food safety for Canadians, the Safe Food for Canadians Act will also benefit Canada's agricultural industry.

The agricultural industry, as you well know, helps drive Canada's economy, with over $44 billion in exports and one in eight Canadian jobs. This act will further align Canada's food safety system with our key trading partners and increase importing countries' confidence in Canadian foodstuffs. This will help increase demand around the world for our top-quality Canadian products.

Finally, to address a concern that has been heard many times around this table, the act will strengthen controls over imported food, introduce the ability to license all food importers, and prohibit the importation of any unsafe foods.

Mr. Chair, recently consumers have heard a lot of fiction from opposition parties with respect to Canada's food safety system. I'd like to take this time to correct some of the fiction we've heard in the debates last week.

Let me begin with the member for Guelph, who recently said that Bill S-11 is not a panacea that would give the CFIA more powers than it has today.

Mr. Speaker, that is patently incorrect. The fact is that this act will give the CFIA more authority to require industry to produce timely and usable information. It will implement tougher penalties for intentional activities that put the health and safety of Canadians at risk while providing better control over our imports of foods.

Dr. Sylvain Charlebois, associate dean of the University of Guelph's college of management and economics, recognizes that this power is currently missing from CFIA's toolbox. He said:

The CFIA, on the other hand, does not have the authority to compel the speedy delivery of information from industry during an outbreak.

That is testimony coming right from the member for Guelph's riding, Mr. Speaker.

The NDP have stated that CFIA has fewer inspectors and less resources. This could not be further from the truth. Just because you didn't vote for it doesn't mean it didn't happen.

The fact is, Mr. Chairman, that our government has increased the budget of the Canadian Food Inspection Agency by some 20% since we took office. With this budget increase, CFIA has hired over 700 net new inspectors. The CFIA has also increased the number of inspectors at the XL facility in Brooks by some 20%, adding two veterinarians and six inspectors to the complement at the plant.

The member from Welland continues to make erroneous claims that the initial detection of E. coli was done by the United States. He continues to do this despite knowing full well that Canada detected E. coli on the same date that the U.S. notified Canada of their finding. Furthermore, he knows that no product associated with this initial finding entered the marketplace.

To repeat, at that time all affected product was contained and there was no evidence that any additional product had been affected. Thus, no recall was needed. As I said at the time, no product made it to store shelves.

The CFIA started investigating immediately. They have been acting ever since to protect consumers, as outlined in the timelines on display here, working in concert with the Public Health Agency of Canada and the provincial agencies they serve.

The opposition continues to mislead Canadians by saying that the U.S. system is somehow better than Canada's. This is false, for a number of reasons that I am sure the CFIA would be happy to explain to you, but I will give you two very clear reasons here today.

First, Canada and the United States maintain one of the largest trading partnerships in the world. That is only possible because our food safety systems are equivalent. We will continue to make sure that our food safety system is strong and that our imports and exports continue to meet this high standard, which is revered around the world.

Second, you will see by the chart provided that it was Canada that issued the first recall health alert to the public. While I realize that the facts do not suit the opposition's rhetoric, I'm pleased to get these facts on the record again here today.

Mr. Chairman, at each step of the process, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency and the Public Health Agency of Canada have run a transparent investigation. They have published science-based evidence and information on websites as soon as it was available and have held many public briefings and technical briefings. Canadians can also sign up for instant information on recalls and food safety concerns. The agency will continue to rely on science-based evidence and a commitment to protect consumers. Our government will continue to provide the CFIA with the workforce and resources necessary to protect Canadian food.

In closing, Mr. Chairman, we all know that food safety is an issue that is very important to Canadian families. That is why consumers are our government's first priority when it comes to food safety. The Safe Food for Canadians Act will provide the Canadian Food Inspection Agency with much-needed additional authorities to protect Canadian food and consumer confidence.

I urge the members of this committee to help our government make Canada's robust food safety system even stronger and send this bill back to the House as quickly as possible.

Thank you for your kind attention, Mr. Chair. As always, I look forward to your questions.

[The Chair, Conservative, Merv Tweed]

Thank you very much, Minister.

Mr. Allen, you have five minutes.

[Malcolm Allen, NDP, Welland, ON]

Thank you, Chair.

Thanks to the minister for being here today.

As he noted in his opening, I believe he referred to recommendation 43 being the last one from the Weatherill report to be completed. Recommendation 43 actually speaks to recommendations 6 and 20 of the Weatherill report. I will read from the last half of section 6. This is a quote from the Weatherill report:

Meat processors should not wait for requests for information from the CFIA inspectors and should, in the interests of food safety, ensure that inspectors have all information they require.

I would draw the minister's attention to the timeline that he supplied to us, showing that indeed it was the CFIA that was actually making the requests, not necessarily XL Foods that was providing them voluntarily. Section 20, which is on page 43 of the report, also speaks to that:

The Canadian Food Inspection Agency should formally communicate its expectation that registered meat processors will bring all information with potential consequences for food safety to the attention of their assigned inspector in a timely manner.

Around the document issue, Mr. Minister, it has been clear in the CFIA's timeline that one of the weaknesses of this particular incident was the availability of the information in a timely fashion and the fact that, in the vernacular of the CFIA, a lot of CARs were put out there—calls basically requesting information. There were delays in that process.

Can you point to me in Bill S-11 where sections 6 and 20—the two recommendations in the Weatherill report—will be fulfilled in the mandate of Bill S-11, understanding, of course, that there is a piece in Bill S-11 that talks to the production of documents when requested? Sections 6 and 20 call for more than just the production of documents when requested; they actually call for the facilities to produce them without a request, knowing full well something is occurring.

Can you help me find that in Bill S-11?

[The Chair, Conservative, Merv Tweed]

Go ahead, Mr. Minister.

[Gerry Ritz, Conservative, Battlefords—Lloydminster, SK]

You've mixed a couple of things together there, Mr. Allen, in talking about CARs as well. Those are separate from the production of documents on the timeline we're talking about. We'll certainly address that at some point, I'm sure.

The Weatherill reports are predisposed on a company that is transparent, that is looking to facilitate and help CFIA move forward in a recall situation. Unfortunately, in this instance, XL was not that forthcoming.

The CFIA, I should stipulate, did receive boxes of documents over a period of some three days, after constantly going back to XL with written asks—of course they were verbal to begin with—and expediting it to the point where it finally got documentation. As I said, it received boxes of paperwork over a period of two or three days that then had to be analyzed and worked back through to start to put together an assessment on a trend analysis to show where there were gaps and where there could possibly be spikes in E. coli.

The initial find, the problem, was that they had had a discovery but then had not bracketed properly. That's taking production on either side of the affected batch out of the food cycle as well. They had not done that, and until CFIA was back in there doing the trend analysis, that was not discovered. That then started CFIA to look even deeper. That's the timeline leading up to the 12th, as they put all of that together with sound scientific evidence to begin the process of asking for more documentation, and so on.

With XL not voluntarily coming forward with documentation, it became apparent that Bill S-11, which we tabled last spring, well in advance of this, started to look like the right thing—even more so than we thought—because by regulation it would force a facility such as XL, or any other one, to be transparent, to come forward with information in a timely way and a way that is formatted to be usable right away, not with boxes of paperwork that take days to work through It would be a format that is usable, very similar to our timeline. When you see it written down on a pad of paper, it doesn't give you the same impact as a flow chart does. This is the type of information we're requesting from facilities like XL.

George, did you want to add anything, or Paul?

[George Da Pont, President, Canadian Food Inspection Agency]

Yes.

[Malcolm Allen, NDP, Welland, ON]

I have another question. We have other time, and I'm sure we can get to—

[The Chair, Conservative, Merv Tweed]

You have 10 seconds.

[Gerry Ritz, Conservative, Battlefords—Lloydminster, SK]

I know how important this is to you, Mr. Allen.

[Malcolm Allen, NDP, Welland, ON]

We'd like Mr. Da Pont to add, but we only get five minutes, as you know.

A follow-up to that piece is this. If indeed we have an XL—let's use the vernacular of the bad actor—what, then, in Bill S-11, through an enforcement mechanism or through the fines you've escalated, which we are pleased to see, would then allow you or CFIA to actually impose penalties because they were not forthcoming, without actually saying, “Now, we'll charge them because of all the other things they've done”?

Simply say, “Look, you were supposed to bring them forward; you decided not to; here's the enforcement piece; here's what you pay; this is the penalty.” It would be similar to what we see, Minister, when we drive down the highways in Ontario: it would say, “Go over the speed limit and enforcement is basically through regulation and fine.” You don't get off easy.

[The Chair, Conservative, Merv Tweed]

Mr. Minister, please be as brief as you can.

[Gerry Ritz, Conservative, Battlefords—Lloydminster, SK]

It's not really a genuine comparison, because with radar you have a speed gun that says you were doing this. There is no speed gun in a facility such as XL.

You know, I don't think anyone would say that XL was trying to hide anything. You have to prove intent in order to put AMPs in play, and I don't think it was intentionally trying to hide anything. What it was doing was giving voluminous boxes of paperwork, trying to cover off all the bases, which then had to be deciphered and gone through one at a time, put in a proper sequence, put in the right order to make sense of all the files, the testing data and so on, that it put in play.

What Bill S-11 would do is set a format that XL and other plants would be asked to follow, a format that would actually give you usable data when you ask for it—not boxes and boxes and files of paperwork, but actual usable data with trend analysis captured and so on, on a go-forward basis. Bill S-11, by regulation, would set a standard; all plants would be asked to do this.

Some do it now, voluntarily; some don't, because they're not asked to by regulation. These regulations would now set the benchmark for everyone to come to that standard.

[The Chair, Conservative, Merv Tweed]

Go ahead, Mr. Lemieux.

[Pierre Lemieux, Conservative, Glengarry—Prescott—Russell, ON]

Thanks very much, Chair.

Thank you, Minister, for joining us this morning.

Certainly the recent events at XL in Brooks have made this legislation even more important, and I know in the debates in the House....

Our food safety system is rated as superior, not by us but by a report on OECD countries. In reviewing the bill, I noticed that there are parts that will grant CFIA more authority, more ability, and more efficiency in getting recall information from companies in a timely manner. I actually think that this probably would have played a positive role in the XL situation.

I do want to bring up a quote so that we have an outside opinion on this. There's a Dr. Sylvain Charlebois, from the riding of Mr. Valeriote, actually, who works at the University of Guelph. I'm just going to read for you what he has said: “The CFIA...does not have the authority to compel the speedy delivery of information from industry during an outbreak.” That's what Dr. Sylvain Charlebois says.

Minister, you know from the debates we've had and from the panels we've been on that the opposition and the food inspectors union have said repeatedly that CFIA already has all the powers it needs to obtain important documents from companies such as XL Foods. However, there are experts, such as Dr. Sylvain Charlebois and others, who have said that CFIA needs the powers that this bill will give them to obtain these documents, and certainly in a more timely manner.

Minister, could you share with the committee who is right on this matter about what the CFIA is able to do now and what they will be able to do once this bill passes into law?

[Gerry Ritz, Conservative, Battlefords—Lloydminster, SK]

Well, when you look at the timeline shown behind me, Mr. Lemieux—you'll have a copy of that in front of you, or you will have shortly—you will see that CFIA began reacting immediately, asking XL for documentation and asking them to show where the bracketing was done on that first batch. I'm not saying that XL was negligent or criminally intent on hiding anything—absolutely not. What I'm saying is that they came forward with boxes and boxes of paperwork over a period of time, as they amassed it. Did they put enough attention on it? Probably not, but that's for them to describe and explain as they move forward.

At the end of the day, Bill S-11 now will give us extra tools in the CFIA tool kit. I'm happy to help put them there, with your help and the help of the opposition in getting this bill passed, so that they have the ability to ask for it on Monday morning and expect to get it by Monday afternoon, and in a useful format.

This is the important part: you can have timely access, but if you get 12 boxes of paperwork and have to sit down and start to analyze and go through all of it, that's time wasted, time lost, but if you have it in a format that is standardized across all food commodities and across all manufacturing processing in this country, you have something that can be worked with very, very quickly to initiate recalls or to say that we don't need a recall because it has been handled. That's the important part.

The biggest concern with Canadian consumers is the timeliness. They want to know that their food is safe, but they also want to know that when there is a breach, when there is a problem, we are timely in getting that product off the shelves. That's why I said right away, to assure consumers on the initial outbreak, that the product never made it to store shelves. Consumers needed to know that.

We have not seen any huge move away from beef in Canada. Actually, beef products are still moving, are still being consumed. We're not seeing any beef being stopped from export around the world, even into the American market, other than any product coming out of number 38, the Lakeside XL plant in Brooks. Even XL product—live animals and so on—that the Nilssons own is still available to go to the U.S. It's only the product coming out of that plant as CFIA works towards recertifying that particular facility.

[Pierre Lemieux, Conservative, Glengarry—Prescott—Russell, ON]

Thank you.

I have a question about industry. Industry's on the receiving end of this, in a sense. CFIA works with industry. Industry has its own food inspectors. I'm just wondering, Minister, if you could share—

[Gerry Ritz, Conservative, Battlefords—Lloydminster, SK]

Well, they have quality control people.

[Pierre Lemieux, Conservative, Glengarry—Prescott—Russell, ON]

They have quality control people who are focused on food safety.

[Gerry Ritz, Conservative, Battlefords—Lloydminster, SK]

Right.

[Pierre Lemieux, Conservative, Glengarry—Prescott—Russell, ON]

Here's what I would like to ask you, Minister. I know that there has been consultation done on Bill S-11 and on what the industry itself has been asking for. Could you share with the committee what industry has been saying about Bill S-11 and the measures contained in this bill?

[Gerry Ritz, Conservative, Battlefords—Lloydminster, SK]

Well, you'll always get mixed response. There are those who say that we don't need more regulation, that regulation slows down the speed of commerce and so on, but then you'll also get those who say that we need a rules-based system, such that everybody maintains that benchmark. Because there are always people who are driven by a bottom line as opposed to food safety, you'll always get some of that happening, depending on their criteria.

Having said that, at the end of the day, having a set of rules that sets a benchmark of a higher standard across the country and across all food commodities lets everybody know what they're up against, what they have to conform to.

I think having a standardized format will help a lot of the smaller producers in being able to understand what that we require from them. As you know, business abhors a vacuum. Business abhors the idea that there isn't stability in the regulatory regime.

These are not over-the-top regulations. These simply specify the timeliness and the format of any documentation that CFIA requires. That's all this does. We're more than happy to work with our partners at the Public Health Agency and industry—it's a three-way partnership—to deliver safe food for Canadians. Everybody plays their part.

[The Chair, Conservative, Merv Tweed]

Thank you.

Mr. Valeriote is next.

[Frank Valeriote, Liberal, Guelph, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you to everyone for coming today.

I would just like to point out that Mr. Charlebois is on the minister's own expert panel, and has been for some time. You can derive from that whatever you wish with respect to Mr. Charlebois' opinion about the issue of the timeliness of the production of reports from the industry.

That said, section 13 most clearly gives authority now to demand production. There are clear penalties in the act, including shutting down the plant, which happened in this case. You can say to someone that you have all the authority you need, which it says now, or you can say to someone that you have all the authority you need including this, this, and this, which, by the way, was already indicated to the CFIA inspectors in a bulletin from the minister's own department in February of this year.

That said, Minister, in her investigation into the listeriosis outbreak, a concern was expressed by Ms. Weatherill. She said that a lack of detailed information and different voices left the independent investigator unable to determine the existing level of resources and the resources necessary to operate the compliance verification system. She made a recommendation—recommendation 7, to be specific—for a resources audit by an independent third party expert.

Can you explain why that audit has yet to be done?

[Gerry Ritz, Conservative, Battlefords—Lloydminster, SK]

Well, there are a number of different factors in the question you asked, Mr. Valeriote, and—