Subcommittee on Food Safety Committee on April 20th, 2009

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

I call this meeting to order.

If I could just speak to the media, while we welcome you here, the table is reserved for members and witnesses. Thank you very much.

Welcome here today to our meeting of the subcommittee on the review of food safety, basically brought about by the listeriosis outbreak last summer, as we all know. I hope everyone had a good Easter break. We'll get down to business.

I'd like to welcome our guests here today, Mr. McCain, Mr. McAlpine, and Mr. Huffman from Maple Leaf Foods. This first part of the meeting today will go from 4 till 6, at which point we will break.

We'll keep the presentation to 10 minutes, if we could, Mr. McCain, and then we'll go from there.

Welcome, and thanks for coming.

[Michael H. McCain, President and Chief Executive Officer, Maple Leaf Foods Inc.]

Thank you, and good afternoon, Mr. Chairman and members of Parliament. Thank you for the invitation to be here today to discuss food safety.

I know the primary reason you want to talk with me and my colleagues is that Maple Leaf Foods, a Canadian institution of which I am the responsible custodian, failed in our efforts to protect consumers last August and was responsible for the deaths of 21 Canadians, and illness and worry for many more.

This was by far the most awful event in the 100-year history of our company and one of the worst food-borne catastrophes in Canada. I can't properly describe the overwhelming sense of grief and responsibility we all felt and I felt personally. In the shock and grief that occurs when one is responsible for an event like this, a company has only its values to fall back on and to guide it.

Our primary concern was to do everything possible to contain further risk, including providing Canadians with as much information as possible to protect themselves and their families. That is why we immediately took full responsibility to bring clarity to a confusing and scary time for consumers. We went to extraordinary lengths, including television advertising, to inform people directly of what had happened. All major retail customers and food service head offices, distributors, and franchises—more than 15,000 in all—were personally contacted in writing and via phone to notify them of the recalled product and provided with instructions for product removal, a process that began within hours of our notification of CFIA findings.

It is no consolation to you, or certainly to us either, but we believed we had effective food safety programs in place at the time of the outbreak. We had a proprietary “40 Steps to Food Safety” program that set higher operational standards for ourselves covering every step of the supply chain, from the purchase of raw materials through to food processing, packaging, and distribution. In addition to complying with all applicable regulations, including those of CFIA and Health Canada, we invested millions to achieve these higher, self-imposed standards. And we had third-party auditors evaluate our performance annually.

Let me spend just a moment on the testing we were doing at the time, and feel free to come back to this in your questions afterwards if you like. The CFIA has recently implemented a new set of policy regulations—all of us have learned lessons from last August—that are strong upgrades from what was in place previously. Last August there was no requirement that food processors even have an environmental monitoring program in place for listeria control. Nonetheless, Maple Leaf was testing for it extensively across our packaged meat plants. We were conducting 3,000 tests per year at our Bartor Road plant alone. These test results were continuously available to the CFIA, and every time we found a test of listeria anywhere in one of our plants, we cleaned, sanitized, and retested that location. And every time we retested the site, the listeria was gone.

However, what we did not do then, and what we do do now, is apply sophisticated investigative and pattern recognition science to analyze test results to better determine root cause. This might have warned us earlier about the problems of last August.

Maple Leaf's conduct through the recall has been the subject of much commentary. Our own judgment is more self-critical than that. Our established food safety practices, as strong as they were relative to best industry practices and regulatory standards, failed us. As a result, we enhanced every element of our program.

First, we've implemented enhanced sanitization procedures, including disassembly and deep sanitization of all slicing equipment well beyond recommended guidelines.

Number two, we've doubled the amount of testing in our facilities, including more rigorous testing on food contact surfaces, which is the best early warning system we can have.

Number three, we analyze every single positive sample event looking for patterns. We look at the bigger picture every time we get a positive sample, so that we can investigate the root cause of that individual positive sample site. These may be patterns on entire lines or patterns of repeat occurrence, but our technical people study each one.

Number four, our executive staff and our technical and operating people review our food safety test results on a conference call daily. Every positive finding is chased down, with Dr. Huffman and me personally participating in these calls each and every day, with few exceptions.

Number five, we now have product quarantine procedures in place to hold product for additional testing if we have concerns.

Number six, and lastly, we have delivered comprehensive training to our employees across our packaged meat plants on our enhanced food safety protocols and standard operating procedures. Continuous training and awareness-building is critical to the effectiveness of our program.

Let me be very clear here, please. I believe that had we known then what we know now, and had we done then what we do now, we might have saved 21 lives. This tragedy was a defining moment for Maple Leaf Foods and for those of us who work there. We are determined to make a terrible wrong right. That is our obligation to those who died and to their families.

Our intention is to discharge that responsibility in three ways. First is by raising our own standards for food safety to provide consumers with the highest safety assurance possible. We had to improve, and we did immediately, and we will continuously. Second is by advocating and participating in industry-wide initiatives designed to raise the level of food safety practice amongst all companies. We believe strongly that food safety knowledge should not be the source of competitive advantage and must be shared for the benefit of all Canadians. And third is by doing what we can to educate Canadians about food safety risk, about how to assess risk, and how to minimize risk for themselves and their families through proper storage and handling and the preparation of foods.

One of the most important steps we took was to hire the gentleman to my immediate right, Dr. Randall Huffman. Last fall we created the position of chief food safety officer, I believe the first in Canada. Dr. Huffman has the mandate to ensure that Maple Leaf Foods is at the cutting edge of global food safety practices. We are better today than a year ago, but as knowledge and technologies evolve, we will be better again next year and the year after that. This is the process of continuous improvement.

Now, none of this is said proudly. The steps we took to become a food safety leader are our penance for being the company behind the worst food-borne outbreak in Canadian history. Our determination to make something good of this tragedy goes beyond our own practices. We would like to work with this committee, with the appropriate government agencies, and within our own industry to raise the standards for food safety across the board. As an industry, we are only as trusted as our weakest link.

The role of government and the role of industry in food safety are interdependent. A food-safe system cannot exist without both working within their respective jurisdictions towards the same goal: safe food for all Canadians. In fact, a strong, credible regulator administering a science-based policy is critical. If all stakeholders were candid about learning together, we believe what happened last summer was a failure of expectation, not a failure of inspection.

We believe that the role for government would be built around four key principles: one, defining with detail the requirements and expectations of an operator to deliver a strong and effective food safety program; two, building inspection and testing that is adequate to validate and verify the compliance with regulatory expectations, with tough accountability for those who are not meeting those requirements; three, ensuring consistent application and inspection nationally and at our borders; and four, developing policies that encourage responsible and proactive behaviour by operators.

We are certainly not experts in government processes, and making policy is the responsibility of Parliament, but if these responsibilities require more resources for the CFIA, we would certainly support that. When you're assessing the many potential approaches for food safety for Canadians, we would urge you to keep these perspectives in mind: first, you cannot see bacteria, so visual inspection has very limited value. You can only discover it by looking at delayed test results and data over time. Second, these bacteria don't live everywhere. They set up camp in any one of a million potential homes, and the trick is to find where they actually do live, because it's pretty easy, but often misleading, to determine where they don't live.

The revised CFIA policy on listeria that has just been put into place has indeed strengthened the approach to regulatory oversight of the industry's ability to control listeria in certain ready-to-eat foods. It describes a regulatory testing plan that will ensure that the concepts of Health Canada policy on listeria are properly implemented by industry. The Health Canada policy is based on sound scientific principles and is recognized globally as an appropriate approach to listeria control. The CFIA's new testing protocol represents a significant increase in environmental and product testing and will require many Canadian food processors to adapt and improve their approach to listeria control. These are all strong improvements, and we support them.

The key to the success of the policy will be for CFIA to enforce it consistently across the industry and to ensure that the details are properly communicated to inspection staff and the industry itself. Response to positive findings under the new testing regime must be rigorous in every facility. Interpretation of trends and patterns of environmental results over time must be carefully conducted to avoid misinterpretation.

The CFIA must also appropriately ascertain the safety of imported ready-to-eat products by equal enforcement of its revised listeria policy at the border. And we would go further to advocate that this new policy should represent the common standard for all ready-to-eat plants nationally, regardless of whether they are federally or provincially inspected.

Government food safety regulations to us are a floor. We also answer to the Canadian public, who vote with their purchase decisions daily. Our job, as industry, is to produce safe food each and every day, minimizing risk to the lowest practical level possible, and implementing best-practice food safety systems and procedures at or above the minimum requirements specified by government. We are the ones who make the food. Government should set the rules and provide oversight to ensure the rules are being complied with, but ultimately, safe food depends on the food company, and we have a very material obligation to deliver.

The final prong in our approach is consumer education. Most Canadians first heard of listeria from us, despite how common it is. However, as a string of recalls in recent months has indicated, it is hardly unique to Maple Leaf Foods. We have used and will continue to use a variety of methods to educate consumers about listeria, how to assess the risk and how to minimize the risk once the food is in the home. It's a difficult issue for us to be talking about, but we believe talking about food safety is our responsibility.

Mr. Chair, members, we are determined that Maple Leaf Foods be worthy of its great history with Canadians. We look forward to helping you with your efforts to understand both what happened to create the tragedy of last year and what lessons can be learned to improve our food safety system in Canada. To support this, we certainly would like to extend an invitation to you to tour our Bartor Road facility.

With these remarks, Dr. Huffman and I look forward to your questions and to our dialogue.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Thanks very much, Mr. McCain.

We'll start our first round of questioning with Mr. Easter, for seven minutes, please.

[Wayne Easter, Liberal, Malpeque, PE]

Chair, I have a question on process first. I assume first rounds are seven minutes, and then we're going to five minutes, because we haven't established a process, and there'll be--

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

It was suggested earlier at the main committee that it be the same process, and that was the assumption under which I was running, Mr. Easter.

[Wayne Easter, Liberal, Malpeque, PE]

Okay, and we'll go until we've exhausted questions, I gather.

Mr. McCain, thank you for coming. I might say, in beginning, that I think your performance in this whole exercise, in this crisis, really shows such forthright transparency in terms of your operational concern, if I can say that, and I think honesty certainly goes to your credibility as a person and to your credibility as a company. I want to say that on the record because I'm pretty sure your lawyers were probably advising you otherwise. I think you've done the right thing for Canadians with the direct approach you've taken, and I want to congratulate you on that.

In your remarks today you've certainly accepted a lot of responsibility yourself. I understand that and I congratulate you for it. But there is another player, if I can put it that way, in this crisis, and that is the Government of Canada and the Canadian Food Inspection Agency. I guess one of my concerns is that we need to have the overall authority as the Government of Canada, through whatever agency it may be—it's supposed to be CFIA and Health Canada in this case. We need that overall authority. In your case, in your plant, in your operation, you may have been able to handle this kind of a crisis, but there are a lot of other players out there who might not be able to handle it in the way you have.

I just want to outline that in the beginning. Certainly one of my concerns is that we have to look at the industry as a whole, and not just specifically Maple Leaf.

You can answer me if I'm wrong on this, but I understand the cause of listeriosis, in the end, was in fact a slicer. As I understand it, from talking to people in the food inspection business—and you were following, no doubt, the manufacturer's specifications, and you can answer that as you see fit—at one point in time in our food inspection system, auditors would actually go in and they would go further. CFIA auditors, or whatever they were called prior to CFIA, would actually go in and do an audit, do an analysis, maybe tear the equipment apart, and maybe go above and beyond the manufacturer's specifications. That's the understanding; it's not happening now. Maybe you can inform us as to how that specific machine would have been inspected by the government authority in the past versus how it's done today, and how we propose doing it in the future so that this kind of problem doesn't occur again.

[Michael H. McCain]

That's an excellent question, Mr. Easter, and I'll try to resist giving you a technical answer.

The root source of the contamination was deep inside a piece of equipment called a slicer. It's important to understand that the harbourage point inside that piece of equipment is just not accessible on a daily basis. It requires many hours for the maintenance department to disassemble parts that are not prescribed by the manufacturer as being “disassembleable”. Such is the nature of bacteria. As I said in my opening remarks, it's a bacteria; it's a micro-organism that can exist in many millions of places inside a facility, and it resided deep inside this equipment.

To your real question about the role of inspection, you cannot see this in an inspection. There is no inspection where you can visually, with your eyes, see that outcome. The only way you can detect it is by taking a sample, a swab site, at various points in the production process and then analyzing the results of that swab site several days later when they come back from an accredited laboratory. On the epidemiology and the scientific process, I would encourage you to ask Dr. Huffman or any of the other experts why that's so.

I genuinely don't believe this was a failure of inspection per se, where we used to inspect at one level and now we don't inspect at another level. I think the root cause was something very different from that. That's not to say we don't need more resources in the CFIA to do appropriate things; I believe we've been on the record to date saying we do believe we should. But let's not have false expectations about trying to discover bacteria or a pathogen that's not visible to the eye in an assembly or disassembly process that can't be done in any kind of routine manufacturing environment. It requires a set of engineers to disassemble a piece of equipment. That again is the nature of microbiology.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Mr. Easter, we'll come back to you.

Mr. Bellavance is next for seven minutes, please.

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

Thank you for your presentation, Mr. McCain.

Are you going to reset the clock, Mr. Chairman?

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

I'm not going to take that time away from you.

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

From the beginning of this tragic event, you explained the situation publicly on several occasions. You did not try to hide anything and you accepted your responsibilities. I will not repeat what Mr. Easter just said about how transparent you were.

In the statement you just made, you virtually take full responsibility for what happened. I am uncomfortable with that. I have a hard time believing that Maple Leaf is solely responsible for these deaths. There is joint responsibility. Several incidents that occurred over time lead us to believe that the government also has some responsibility to bear. We cannot say that the government has no say in public health. Inspectors from the Canadian Food Inspection Agency must be in plants, and Health Canada also has responsibilities for food safety.

For some time now, you have been saying that if we had done things differently, 21 people would not have died. You appear to be taking full responsibility. What leads you to say such a thing?

[Michael H. McCain]

First of all, we did take responsibility and accountability for this, because it occurred in our plant, on our watch, with Canadian consumers eating our product. We have an obligation to produce a safe product, and it's an obligation we've held very close for over 100 years. We had systems and protocols in place that we felt were best practice, and they failed us. So accountability and responsibility for that series of events does rest very squarely on our shoulders as an organization, and I'm personally accountable for that organization, so that rests very squarely on my shoulders.

But I think there are lessons to be learned from our responsibilities and what we've learned since August that apply to the rest of the industry or the regulator. I think all the stakeholders, from the regulator to other industry participants and Maple Leaf, can learn from this tragedy and improve in the future. Examples of that are reflected in the new listeria policy that is effective April 1. The CFIA and Health Canada have reflected a large portion of the learning from this in the new policy. Going forward, we believe that policy will be a strong underpinning for food safety in this country. Our caution point is that success in that policy will depend on the rigour and consistency of its implementation nationally and at the borders.

So just because we are the company that has accepted accountability and responsibility for this tragedy does not mean others can't learn from it. I think the whole industry and the regulators need to learn from it, and they are getting better right now. The process of continuous improvement is ongoing, so we need to be better again next year than we are today.

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

I agree with you that there are some lessons to be learned and that other organizations should do the same. But before the crisis occurred, the agriculture committee had held briefing sessions on the firing of a CFIA employee because he had revealed to his union the government's intention to reduce the agency's operating budget by 5%.

The agency also put in place a plan to allow plants to inspect themselves. We must not simply focus on what happened following the crisis at Maple Leaf and on what unfortunately happened to the victims, we must examine the entire food inspection system. Neither Maple Leaf nor the government is on trial here. A series of chronological events lead us to believe that the responsibility does not lie solely with the company, but also with the agencies and governments that are responsible for public health and safety.

[Michael H. McCain]

That is an excellent question.

I agree with you that these lessons learned should span the industry and the government, and we should look at what those lessons were prior to this. Maybe it would be helpful if I described what the protocols were prior to 2008 versus what they are today. That contrast would help illuminate the response to your question.

As I articulated in my opening remarks, prior to 2008 there was no requirement—zero—to have an environmental testing program inside a processing facility for ready-to-eat foods. Now, I respect the fact that it's possible to say, well, that's an element of deregulation. But I don't think that's an accurate or fair characterization, because that regulation never existed. It never existed and was cut; it never existed and was reduced: that regulation to have an environmental monitoring program never existed.

In the face of that, at the Maple Leaf facility we had an environmental monitoring program. We did have one of those. We were testing at the rate of 3,000 samples per year. We had our own “40 Steps to Food Safety” operating plan. We spent over $20 million on capital, including biosecure access, and we had third-party audits--but against the backdrop of no environmental monitoring program in place.

When there's no monitoring requirement--that was the expectation established not by a government but by industry and the government since the beginning of the food processing industry centuries ago, meaning never--then that becomes the foundation of that expectation. No amount of inspection, higher or lower, would have changed that outcome.

I think there are important policy questions here. There are important policy questions around the role of inspection, around the role of regulation, around product testing versus environmental testing. Those are very important questions. But if you want to go to the exact cause of this outbreak, it was not about a lack of inspection. It was not about a lack of product testing or a lack of inspectors. It was about a failure to analyze test data that we weren't even obligated to collect--a failure on our part to analyze that data and look for root cause analysis, to investigate and follow up on individual trends, to look for patterns, so that we could find the bacteria that we couldn't see inside these facilities and end up with a different result. So it was more a failure to analyze those findings for root cause and a failure of those protocols than it was a failure of inspection, per se.

We believe the CFIA should have, as they're now implementing, the new listeria policy as part of a new mandate. Now, that's not to say that there aren't very important issues in there for this committee to investigate for food safety, as Mr. Easter says, for the benefit of all Canadians and the whole industry. There are important questions in there, moving forward. But if you want to get down to the root cause, to what caused this, we don't believe that was one of them.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Your time has expired, Mr. Bellavance.

Mr. Allen, seven minutes, please.

[Malcolm Allen, NDP, Welland, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

And thank you, Mr. McCain, for joining us today and for your opening remarks. Let me perhaps go back to the comment you just finished with and bring it into another context. It's on page 5 of your report, in the first paragraph. It says “you cannot 'see' bacteria so visual inspection has limited value.” I would take it, because you're an extremely articulate man, that you paid close attention to the words. I think we all agree we can't see bacteria. You can't get those glasses that you used to be able to buy in the back of the comic that told you you could see everything. So we're not able to do that. We all accept that.

What you do talk about is how visual inspection has limited value. I would ask you to comment on the issue of having very experienced and qualified inspectors on site who work for third-party agencies like CFIA, who understand the processes of your particular industry, because that's what they do and that's what they learn. These aren't folks who don't have biochemists in the industry and don't have bioscience degrees. These are very educated people who understand how these sorts of pathogens can actually take hold in the particular factory they're working in, because really they're working in a factory; they're not working on a farm. This is a food that's produced in a very large facility. With the type of experience these inspectors have--albeit they can't see bacteria--is it not plausible that indeed with their experience they could see circumstances that might lead to the bacteria actually starting to colonize and indeed be a problem for your production systems and be able to help your folks interpret that so that we're looking and testing in an appropriate way? As you said in the page before, you took 3,000 tests that the CFIA had access to, but in the report it doesn't say whether your folks actually said to them, by the way, we found listeria and we eradicated it by sanitizing. It doesn't actually tell us.

So there are two questions here. It doesn't really tell us. Did you inform that inspector who was responsible for your plant that they'd actually seen listeria at that point in time, during that period of testing, because that's a different timeframe?

[Michael H. McCain]

That's an excellent question. The role of an experienced and seasoned, educated inspector is indeed critical. I'm going to turn it over to Dr. Huffman to talk about the role of an inspector and what they can see visually versus what they can't and how that can be relied on. I think relying on just the visual can be dangerous, if not misleading, but it can be instructive, and he'll get into that. But I would ask him to also talk about what we were informed of versus what we weren't, because it is the law, sir, that we make all of our data available to the CFIA, and we have always made our data available to the CFIA. That has always been the case and presumably always will be.

Randy, maybe you could address that.

[Randall Huffman, Chief Food Safety Officer, Maple Leaf Foods Inc.]

Mr. Allen, you raise a good point. Visual inspection certainly plays a role in producing safe food, and having a trained, knowledgeable, and experienced inspection force is a critical factor in food safety. There's no debate regarding this. We would all agree.

Over the past 10 or 15 years, the food industry has begun to understand what it takes to control listeria within a refrigerated food processing environment. We've learned that visual inspection is not enough. You must have an aggressive environmental testing program that provides data on which you can make informed decisions. An experienced and competent inspection staff would also play a role in evaluating these data. As part of the new CFIA policy that went into place on April 1, this will certainly be happening in all of our facilities going forward. In fact, it's probably happening today. We expect this to enhance the safety of the products that we and our peers in the industry produce.

Just to reiterate, I agree that visual inspection plays a role in safety. But with respect to this food safety hazard, listeria monocytogenes in ready-to-eat foods, it's even more important to have data. You need data generated through an aggressive environmental testing program that provides you with a view of what's actually happening in the process.

With respect to the second question regarding data sharing, the information was in the past generated before August. The information related to the listeria testing program that Mr. McCain refers to was available for review in a binder in the office. As Mr. McCain says, we are obligated to share this information upon request. It certainly was available for inspection.

[Malcolm Allen, NDP, Welland, ON]

Let me be clear. I wasn't suggesting that it wasn't being made available. But you have to take into account that the CFIA inspector you had at that time had six other plants besides your own. Knowing the frequency of the CFIA inspectors' visits, was someone notifying the inspectors of possible detections, as opposed to simply showing them where you kept the binder? When you have seven plants, you have limited time to look at the data. That's not necessarily Maple Leaf's problem, but perhaps highlighting those events would make the inspection process more effective. It wasn't about somebody trying to obfuscate information; it was more about clarity.

[Michael H. McCain]

The question of who has the obligation to point out particular test results is certainly an issue, but the test data were made available. We cannot comment on the allocation of an individual inspector's time and their additional responsibilities, but we can comment on the fact that they have an obligation and were at our facility each and every day. How long during the day they were there is another matter. But they were present in our facility each and every day, by law, when we were producing. There is a presence there daily regardless of how they allocate their resources.

I think the most important question in enhancing food safety has to do with how you interpret the data. Going back to first principles, we were collecting these data without being under any obligation to do so. There's no regulation requiring us to collect the data in the first instance—there never has been in the history of food processing. When you're not required to collect something, it tends to colour your sensitivity to interpreting it.

Finally, given the mandate that we believe is appropriate for the CFIA, for the government and regulator going forward, we would share your view that more resources are required, not less. But that is not for us to decide.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Thank you, Mr. McCain.

Mr. Anderson, seven minutes.

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

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, Mr. McCain, for being here today.

I would like to acknowledge your willingness to take responsibility for the products that were produced in your plant, which resulted in the deaths of 21 people. I'm glad to hear you say again today that you stand by those statements and take full responsibility for the role that Maple Leaf played in that.

I want to talk to you a little bit about the environmental testing here. I guess I need a little bit of clarification. You said there is no environmental monitoring policy in place, or there wasn't last summer. There was a policy in place up until 2005. Can you tell me how that impacted on testing in the plant? I understand it was changed. It's mentioned in our “Lessons Learned” document here. I'm just wondering if you can tell me what was happening prior to 2005, and what changed at that point? Would that have affected the discovery of listeria?

[Michael H. McCain]

To my knowledge, and I will confess that I am not a regulatory expert, there has always been a policy from Health Canada that reflects an environmental monitoring program as being best practice, but it was never transitioned into a regulation that required the implementation of that policy. So to the best of my knowledge, and I certainly stand to be corrected, I don't know of there ever being a regulatory requirement for a listeria monitoring program in place inside the food facility, unless I'm misinformed on that.

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

Was it in place? Were companies using it at the time? I don't have time to go over the section in “Lessons Learned” here, but it seems to me that samples were required to be taken. I'm wondering, were the plants doing that, or did they choose not to? The requirements did change in 2005, and I think it was because the American government first changed their sampling procedure and then we changed ours.

[Michael H. McCain]

Are you referring, sir, to the M205 sampling plan?