Subcommittee on Food Safety Committee on June 1st, 2009

[David Hutton]

I'm not a specialist in food safety, particularly; I work across many industries. But I will try to give you an answer. It relates in a way to the incident I mentioned in the U.S.A. whereby, basically as a result of the failure of their oversight, a very small plant was able to cause a huge outbreak.

I think we have to treat foreign suppliers as not having systems and therefore rely more on product inspection, unless we have very convincing evidence that they have a system that works. It's the same logic as internally: it takes a lot of expertise and commitment and consistency to establish a good food safety system. We have seen an example, in Maple Leaf, of how a rather small oversight of not doing proper analysis of the environmental testing led to the problem not being discovered.

You have to have producers establish their capability, like the case with passing a driving test, before you can give them the privilege of being inspected in a different way. You should assume that suppliers do not have the capability to manage process control and all that type of thing until they have absolutely demonstrated that they do have that ability.

[Wayne Easter, Liberal, Malpeque, PE]

Terry, do you have anything to add on imported food?

[Terry Pugh]

Yes. I think the standards we hold imported food to should be the same as Canadian standards. It's important to make sure that we don't put Canadians at risk by importing food that falls below the standards we have for our own nation. It's important that we make sure we have sovereignty over the rules and the regulations for our food safety in Canada.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Okay, we're going to move on, because we have votes.

Speaking to the witnesses, you hear bells ringing. We have votes in a few minutes.

But Mr. Bellavance, you'll have seven minutes. I'll have to hold you to that pretty well, André. Thank you.

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

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Thank you for your testimony.

Mr. Hutton, it's interesting to have the views of an expert from an organization that protects those who make disclosures. The events that occurred before the listeriosis crisis revealed the deficiencies in the Canadian food safety system. I would refer you to the case of Luc Pomerleau, an employee of the Canadian Food Inspection Agency. On his computer, at his work station, he discovered a government plan to cut the agency's operating budget by 5% and increasingly rely on the industry to inspect foods. There was a whole series of similar measures.

We cannot even accuse Mr. Pomerleau of public disclosure, because he did not reveal the plan publicly. He told his union that there were to be cuts, and possible job losses. It was quite understandable for him to pass on the information to the appropriate people. He did not hack into the computer system to find the plan, nor did he break into a safe—words we have heard used here—to get the document. Yet, he was dismissed by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency for having done no more than his duty. Obviously, Canadians ended up hearing about what happened. It's fortunate that this plan, which was a secret at the time, no longer is.

I would like to know your views, since you work in the industry. Can we consider Mr. Pomerleau a whistle-blower? In this day and age, how can we still dismiss an employee because he notified his union he had discovered a certain document?

[David Hutton]

I agree with you that Mr. Pomerleau seems to have been simply doing his job, and it's regrettable that he was dismissed. I think it's very telling that he has never claimed to be a whistle-blower. I don't believe he has approached our Public Sector Integrity Commissioner's office. In his position I wouldn't either, because he won't get any protection there.

Basically, public servants, regardless of what kind of legislation and claims we are making, are not protected. What happened to Mr. Pomerleau for a very innocent and, in my mind, very appropriate action is typical of what happens to people. We have people coming to us all the time telling us about the harassment they're receiving for much smaller actions than that. So it's very regrettable.

We wrote an article that appeared in The Hill Times saying that it's possible that this crisis could have been averted if we did have proper whistle-blower protection in Canada. First of all, the plans could have been made public much earlier so that we could have debated them. Secondly, we could have heard from inspectors in the field when they were having difficulty with the implementation of these plans. And thirdly, we could have heard from people in the food industry about what's actually going on, what's common practice. We had a failure in one of the biggest and most well-known organizations in the country. What's happening elsewhere? Are we not running risks elsewhere? We won't ever know unless these people are protected.

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

The scandal is that the issue was public health and food safety. Instead of being transparent and explaining the plan, since someone had found it, the agency acted like a regime of terror. The example of Mr. Pomerleau was probably taken note of in the entire CFIA, and even in other government departments, carrying the message of what would happen if anyone was unfortunate enough to dare inform people. I repeat that, in this case, Mr. Pomerleau notified his union of the coming changes, which were worrying for Canadians in terms of public health. I consider that your work is important, since we still do not have the system we need to protect people like him.

[David Hutton]

This is true. So I urge the committee to recommend whistle-blower protection for the industry.

I brought along a document. There's legislation going through the U.S. Congress at the moment; it's being debated. I have a summary here, and it's available on their website. It has a whole laundry list of, I think, very sensible actions that they are taking, or proposing to take, in the U.S. to try to get their food system back on track. Right in there, the very last item under “general provisions”, is providing whistle-blower protection for people in the food industry. That's something they are certainly looking at, and I think we should do the same.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Mr. Bellavance.

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

Could you please give your draft to the clerk, so that she can have it translated and have it distributed to everyone? Thank you.

[David Hutton]

Yes, I will.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Thanks very much, André. I appreciate that.

We're going to have to recess for as long as it takes to vote. We just have one vote, gentlemen, so we'll try not to hold you up too long.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

We will call our meeting back to order.

I thank our witnesses for their patience.

Mr. Anderson.

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

I wonder if we have quorum or if we should wait until Mr. Easter gets back. He probably wants to hear the rest of this as well.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

I don't believe Mr. Easter is coming back. I think Ms. Duncan is sitting in for him.

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

Okay.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

We do have quorum and we'll resume our questioning.

I believe Mr. Allen is next, for seven minutes.

[Malcolm Allen, NDP, Welland, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you both for your patience. At least there's only vote tonight and not three or four.

Perhaps, Mr. Hutton, I could start with you. We heard in earlier testimony—and I'm not sure if you're aware of it or not, but let me give you a quick synopsis—that the CVS, which is part of the compliance system that they were putting in place, was started as a pilot program. According to Mr. Kingston, who testified, it's a verification system that actually was never verified by CFIA after the pilot was done to see if it actually worked. Yet the constant harping on it that I hear from everyone is that this is a science-based program and these are science-based initiatives. So wouldn't one want to verify a science-based system, since we put it in place and utilized it?

As someone who's an expert in systems, do you think it makes sense to put a verification system in place that was never verified as to whether it fully operates and works well in the first place?

[David Hutton]

The answer is clearly no. There clearly is a need to re-evaluate how you provide oversight as the industry moves towards these management systems. But the great risk here is to be too naive about what industry is capable of and therefore to move to a mode of inspection that really isn't going to do the job.

For example, when an organization is simply not technically capable or capable in its management of implementing a system competently, what you end up with is a facade of paperwork that can conceal all kinds of incompetence and even wrongdoing. So it's important in that situation for the oversight to go behind that and to start looking at what's happening on the line and in practice, whereas if you have a very competent organization that has established a system that has been proven to work for a while, maybe you can operate in a different mode and give them credit for that.

I think your question about the CVS is very appropriate. It doesn't make sense to roll out something that hasn't been tested.

[Malcolm Allen, NDP, Welland, ON]

The other piece I found interesting, when you talked about whistle-blowers, was one of the things we've heard from food inspection people when they spend a lot of time on the floor. Not discounting what they saw as they did physical inspections, the great debate is, well, you can't see listeria. Well, I recognize that the x-ray glasses in the back of the comic books you bought never did work, so we understand that. But what they did say that I thought was extremely interesting was that, not just from time to time but very often, plant employees would come up to inspectors on the quiet, or on the QT, as one might say, and tell them that they ought to look at such and such.

I don't know. Maybe you're an expert on the whistle-blower situation, but that seemed to me almost like an internal whistle-blower operation happening, but no one was ever identified because the inspector would then go and do what they needed to do based on that information. Of course, there's no repercussion against the inspector, because the inspector is a third party, not directly beholden to or employed by that particular agency or that particular body.

With less time on the floor, their argument was that it took away from that. I wonder what your comments around that are as to the system being perhaps more accurate or at least being more effective.

[David Hutton]

That's a good question.

The employees would be a good source of information for inspectors. It has been my experience, working as a management consultant, that simply by creating a safe environment for people to talk you would soon find important information about an organization that their own senior management were not aware of, even though everybody else knew. That kind of channel for employees would be helpful. It would be even more helpful if the employees had some kind of protection to do this officially to their own management.

Looking at other jurisdictions and other sectors, there's a pattern. There's a failure of more than oversight. The agency doesn't want to upset industry or rock the boat, and so the inspectors are under pressure not to report things. We've seen that in aviation. I think you'll find a lot of that going on in the U.S. With the salmonella outbreaks, there were whistle-blowers who tried to draw that to the attention of the FDA . If the agency that's providing the oversight is not prepared to pay attention to its own inspectors on matters like this, then you really have a problem, and that's when they need to be protected to go somewhere else.

[Malcolm Allen, NDP, Welland, ON]

I've heard more acronyms in the last two months than I've heard in my previous career, and they're all based on these systems. They all sound wonderful, and they probably are all wonderful systems, but no one has yet told me how they verify that they actually work and whether they have people qualified to work inside them. There doesn't seem to be a method of determining whether the people running the system are qualified to make it work. The systems are imposed on top of a workforce that's already there, who may or may not have the skills to do it. With an overreliance on a system, are we more safe or less safe than we were when we were just looking at a system to see whether it would work?

[David Hutton]

You should never accept that any organization has a system working until you see the evidence. You typically would need a fairly in-depth audit to make sure the system is actually working. If it's not working as it's supposed to, then it's simply a facade, and all kinds of things could be going on that you might never find out about unless you probe behind it.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Mr. Anderson.

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

Mr. Pugh, are you aware that we put $113 million into the food safety action plan, that we've hired 200 more inspectors, and that CFIA's employment levels have gone up 13%?