Subcommittee on Food Safety Committee on April 20th, 2009

[Dr. Brian Evans]

Yes. As I say, the pilots were validated, and over the previous two years their effectiveness was confirmed. Maple Leaf was part of that system, along with 123 other plants. When that was then extended to other plants, it had already been tested and verified in other locations, so on April 1, there was no change whatsoever to what was going on in Maple Leaf when it was instituted nationally across other jurisdictions.

[Wayne Easter, Liberal, Malpeque, PE]

Thank you.

Earlier, when Maple Leaf was before us as a witness, we were talking about the slicer in question. I have talked to—and he, in fact, will be a witness before the committee—one of the previous employees of CFIA, who was an auditor of the auditors. It was his view that if CFIA had been doing things properly, manufacturers' specifications wouldn't have been followed; that unit would have been looked at more closely by CFIA auditors themselves, and maybe—not necessarily, but maybe—the problem would have been found, in a preventive sense.

What are your thoughts on that? Has there been a weakening of the audit system over the years? And that doesn't have to be recently; it could be five, six, or ten years ago.

[Dr. Brian Evans]

My response to that, honourable member, is at two levels.

In previous discussions I've had with Dr. Randy Huffman, who I believe was accompanying Mr. Michael McCain earlier today, and drawing on his broad experience again...these--for lack of a better term--slicers, because that's how they're referred to, are monstrous machines. These are computerized. These things are bigger than my car. To insinuate that we, at CFIA, would have the ability or engineering skills to dismantle or go further than the manufacturer's ability.... First and foremost, I don't think most companies would let us do that, because they might not get them back together again by the time we were done with them. These machines require a strong degree of sophistication in order to be disassembled to the point where you would find something that was contributing to this circumstance.

With respect to the audit, I can honestly say that there was a time, going back to 1999, when in fact we did annual verification audits that were quite extensive. What we determined from that, of course, was that in 1999 we would be better off to do audits quarterly than annually, because, again, doing so would give us a much more intense look, on a more frequent basis, than we would have if we waited for a year for these things to happen.

So, in fact, there was an adjustment in 1999 to go from an annual audit to quarterly FSEP and verification audits, to increase that frequency, and to find things in a faster way. So that program, in effect, ran up until the start of this year, with the quarterly audits being undertaken. And then through the piloting of CVS, the major components of that audit system were then incorporated into daily, weekly, and monthly activities through the CVS program.

To infer that in fact we, at CFIA, were somehow dismantling slicers on our own in past years I don't think is accurate, sir.

[Wayne Easter, Liberal, Malpeque, PE]

That's not what I'm saying, but I do know that in the drug manufacturing area equipment is dismantled.

[Dr. Brian Evans]

Yes.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Your time has expired.

Mr. Bezan, you have five minutes.

[James Bezan, Conservative, Selkirk—Interlake, MB]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I just want to go back to this whole issue of shared responsibility. You look at the production side, and we were talking before about having the farmer involved, having the food processor, and in the food processing area you have multiple levels of people involved in that, and you often have other companies. Especially as you move up the processing chain, there are more places where you source the product to bring it into processing. After that, you have distribution; you have food retailers, you have the food service industry, and then, ultimately, it gets to the consumers, who also have some responsibility for how they keep it at home.

And then you look at the shared responsibility from the regulatory standpoint. You have CFIA; you have the Canadian Public Health Agency; you have provincial organizations, as well as municipal ones. You were already talking about how the Toronto health board was involved in this as well. You have so many people at play here that the question really becomes, who's in charge? Who's the lead agency? And even if CFIA is the lead, are you independent or are you still dependent upon your processes, in collaboration with all these other agencies?

Dr. Evans or Ms. Swan, would you like to answer?

[Carole Swan]

Thank you.

Let me start by talking about the independence of CFIA, because it's something we really haven't discussed with this committee today in terms of the food recall.

We have an Office of Food Safety and Recall that is in charge of doing our food safety recall when we have a suspicion that a food is the reason for a food-borne illness. That office operates independently. They have protocols that require them to take action as soon as they suspect something. They have sampling plans, go out to industry, and make sure that as quickly as possible, when we are involved in a food safety investigation, the CFIA is on the case.

We talked earlier about standards, and standards for recall. When there is a food safety recall we try to make sure information goes to consumers that allows them to take some kind of reasonable action. We heard from colleagues that in the past there have been occasions when misinformation has gone out. There was the example of the possibility of infection of strawberries. Consumers were alerted early, although no specific product at that point had been identified as a source of the food-borne illness. There was a change in behaviour from strawberries to raspberries, and it turned out at the end of the day that raspberries were the culprit. So we take our responsibility very seriously.

There is an issue on which we look forward to receiving guidance from this committee. At what point is it appropriate, reasonable, and in the best interests of the consumer--which is our angle on this--to make sure there is notification and that information that is actionable is given out? As the food safety regulator, the CFIA has done that when we can identify a food and say to the consumer, “This is contaminated.” However, we think we can have a good dialogue about the point at which we should enter into that kind of discussion with the consumer, and we look forward to the advice of the committee.

[James Bezan, Conservative, Selkirk—Interlake, MB]

So right now you have established protocols with provinces like Ontario to respond to food-borne illnesses. In the situation of the Maple Leaf listeriosis contamination, could the Ontario public health agency have issued their own food recall, as long as it involved the CFIA food safety and recall office?

[Carole Swan]

There are many players who could have issued information. “Recall” implies that you know what specific food you're recalling, and you're able to tell consumers, “It is this product with this best-before date.” But there are many other opportunities for issuing information advisories to consumers.

[James Bezan, Conservative, Selkirk—Interlake, MB]

So who would have been the lead on issuing those advisories? Could the Ontario Chief Medical Officer of Health have provided those advisories, done all the press conferences, and been the lead spokesperson on such an outbreak?

[Dr. Brian Evans]

Certainly the authorities do exist and have been exercised in the past. Recently, most people would recognize what occurred in North Bay at one of the restaurant chains. It was local, but was subsequently found to be in other parts of Ontario. Ontario was the lead face in managing that because it remained constrained to Ontario at that time.

As indicated here, advisories to the public are an important tool, and we all recognize that. It is extremely important to establish what that threshold is.

In this circumstance, through daily calls that took place from August 13 to 15, we aspired to have that dialogue between public health units, Ontario Public Health, PHAC, Health Canada, and ourselves. That was an important element of the discussions each and every day, so no decisions were being taken in isolation. But on the basis of those calls we all agreed we needed to go further so we could provide a level of information that would allow the consumers to take an appropriate defence posture.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Your time has expired, Mr. Bezan.

Mr. Easter.

[Wayne Easter, Liberal, Malpeque, PE]

When you came in with your new protocols on listeriosis, one of your expert advisers, Rick Holley, was quoted in an article on CanWest news services on the new testing rules on ready-to-eat meats. He said this:

From a regulatory perspective, yes, I think that it serves as a clear indication to industry that government is serious about this.

But he believes, and states in the article:

In a large operation, such as we see in companies the size of Maple Leaf, they would be well advised to increase food-contact surface sampling frequencies beyond the description and the scaffold that has been given by this document.

He was talking about your announced plan. Maple Leaf clearly indicated to us earlier that for a considerable time they have tended to go beyond established rules or practices.

What are your thoughts on that statement, Brian?

[Dr. Brian Evans]

I have tremendous respect for Dr. Holley, his colleagues at the University of Manitoba, and the good work they do in food safety. Dr. Holley raises a valid point—one size does not fit all. What we've attempted to do, with the introduction of mandatory testing under HACCP, is to establish a baseline with which the company assessments and our more frequent assessments can be related. What we're keen to do in this process, now that we have that established and we know there's a consistent way of looking at this, is to take it to the next level. This will mean looking at the individual risk profiles of plants—volume, type of product, destination of marketing, use of food processing aids that inhibit microbial growth, adoption of sodium diacetate. I think there was some media coverage recently about an operation in Ontario that has introduced a new packaging technology in which there's high pressure applied to the packaging following the cook stage and the filling of the packaging. This technology will also reduce or inhibit the growth of listeria.

Having that baseline—and I think this is fully in line with what Dr. Holley is saying—we can adjust it over time to incorporate best practices. If we find a problem, either through our testing or through the trends analysis in the company testing, we have the authority to ratchet that up immediately and go further. So it doesn't mean that it's static at any time, and I think this is in keeping with where Dr. Holley is going. You can't be dependent on environmental testing alone. There are other things you have to be able to do. But with respect to environmental testing, it's important that we have a threshold, and that we have the capacity to go further. This will include environmental testing in other areas and it will be based on compliance, performance, and consideration of other factors in the plant, such as new technologies, that would reduce the level of regulatory intervention but still achieve the food safety outcome.

[Wayne Easter, Liberal, Malpeque, PE]

I think it's accurate to say one size doesn't fit all. With regard to David's earlier question on some of the smaller plants across the country, if we impose the same rules on all the plants based on size, then we could jeopardize the economic livelihood of some smaller plants across the country.

The bottom line has to be food safety, no question about it. But one size doesn't fit all. There are different criteria that may meet the same objective, depending on the size of a plant and the products that the operation handles.

[Dr. Brian Evans]

I concur, and I hope my comments reflected your summation. Food safety comes first. But in any good inspection system, in any good regulatory system, if new information comes forward, based on the level of monitoring we're doing, and it doesn't appear that other factors in the plant are adequately controlling, there are other authorities that we can exercise. We can stop production. We can suspend the licence. We can do any number of things. At the same time, we can also look at other ways of helping to get them back into compliance. Ultimately, food safety does come first and we have to exercise our authority in the public interest, while recognizing that other dynamics come into play.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Mr. Anderson.

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

I want to affirm what Mr. Easter said. I think it's important for this committee—particularly for those of us who have an agricultural background—that a baseline be set that protects people without being unrealistic for smaller operators. Earlier tonight, Mr. McCain was suggesting that one size would fit all. I agree with you that this is not the case. So we look for some wisdom from you in that area.

I want to talk a bit about your lessons learned and then I will ask a few questions. Some of these you may have partly answered before. In your report, you stated that you should have activated the National Emergency Operations Centre. You also have CFIA's Office of Food Safety and Recall. Can you tell me about those two parts of your operation? How do they work together, or how should they have worked together in this situation?

[Dr. Brian Evans]

Thank you for the question.

I think people need to understand what the lessons learned really were intended to achieve. As President Swan has indicated, in effect we have this Office of Food Safety and Recall. It operates 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. It doesn't stop. It works full time all the time. Therefore, it is in itself an operational centre that is equipped to handle most emergencies as they occur.

Once we were into the circumstances in the week of August 14 and the information was starting to build that it was beyond one or two facilities and one or two people...the reality was that we had discussions with the Public Health Agency, who were activating their emergency centre, because on August 14 it was recognized that in fact there were illnesses outside of Ontario. This had moved from a provincial focus to a national focus. So we embedded ourselves in their operation centre. We had people deployed to be with them full time to make sure we were coordinated, sharing information, understanding what the needs were that we could supply directly to them.

What we realized in hindsight by doing this is that it's still the right thing to do, and we would do it again, but by not activating our own emergency operations centre, what we lost was an internal capacity to track the information, to document the information in real time. Again, it had no impact whatsoever in terms of speeding up recall. It had no impact whatsoever in speeding up the investigation. But when we went back to do the lessons learned, we had to go to multiple places to get the consolidated history. If we had operated a national emergency centre...you operate then with what's called the “war diary”, so it's minute by minute, who spoke to who, what was said, and if there was a decision taken, what information did you know at that time on which to base the decision.

In hindsight, that type of compilation, which is very important in terms of when you do go back and do lessons learned...we had to rebuild that to some extent, so that's what that issue gets at. Even though we were embedded with PHAC and operating very closely within their operation centre, the fact that we didn't have our own internal single point of information gathering meant that when we went back to do the review, we had to pull that all back together again.

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

I'm going to cut you off there.

[Dr. Brian Evans]

I'm done.

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

I appreciate that answer.

Secondly, you've taken some steps to try to prevent a similar outbreak in the future. How do our new listeria prevention mechanisms stack up to other countries? Are they as good? Do they compare well with other countries?

Then I have one other question, because we're going to run out of time. Have you cooperated with the independent investigator, and do you believe from what you've seen of her work that she's doing a thorough examination?

[Dr. Brian Evans]

For respect of brevity, honourable member, I'll ask Paul to answer the first question and perhaps the president to answer the second.

[Paul Mayers]

Thank you very much.

Our controls would be characterized as being consistent with or exceeding the controls in any of the developed countries that have similar food safety systems. The combination of environmental testing and end product testing conducted by the industry, complemented and overseen by the verification testing that the Government of Canada does through the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, provides a set of controls that now in some cases exceed the requirements elsewhere.

Did I miss a part of the question?