Subcommittee on Food Safety Committee on April 20th, 2009

[Carole Swan]

Government is responsible for setting strong standards, monitoring industry, and holding them to account. Industry is responsible for producing safe food in this country.

[Wayne Easter, Liberal, Malpeque, PE]

Ms. Swan, I respectfully disagree, and I disagree strenuously.

You answered a question earlier--and I think it was to Mr. Bellavance--and you said it was quite clearly industry's responsibility for the safety of food. Ultimately, I believe it to be the Government of Canada and the Canadian Food Inspection Agency. I submit, Ms. Swan, it is your responsibility, as president, to oversee food safety in this country.

Ms. Swan, I don't pull any punches. Based on your response to that question, I really have to question whether or not you, as president, are up to the task of being in charge of the food safety system of this country. I'll just lay it right out on the table right now, because I am shocked by that answer. I am shocked that the president of the Canadian Food Inspection Agency would sit here and transfer blame to industry. I'm shocked.

Now, what happened in the listeriosis crisis...and Mr. McCain accepted full responsibility at the time. He did here today. What would have happened if it had been ABC Meat Packing Company with 40 employees? Would that individual have had the resources or been capable of going out there to be the face for food safety in the public arena?

You and the minister were both missing in action last year. The Canadian public wanted some transparency and honesty from the government and they never got it. And I submit here today, I'm questioning whether we're getting it from you.

I'm shocked by that answer. Would you reconsider?

[Carole Swan]

Mr. Easter, responsibility for food safety does not reside in one person or one institution. There is a network of people and organizations responsible. Government has an important responsibility. We are responsible for setting strong standards and holding industry to account. But ultimately industry has responsibilities as well. They have responsibilities for producing safe food.

[Wayne Easter, Liberal, Malpeque, PE]

I believe the buck stops here someplace, Ms. Swan, and I believe it stops at your desk. I'm shocked, but anyway, we'll set that aside for the moment.

In terms of the chronology of events, when asked a question in the House today, the Ontario Chief Medical Officer of Health confirmed that CFIA was involved in a conference call on July 30 concerning the listeriosis outbreak, yet documents released on Friday by the CFIA—and you said it here again, Mr. Evans—indicated it first became aware of the crisis on August 6.

Why the discrepancy in terms of the dates? We have the Williams report. The date is in there. Why that discrepancy?

[Dr. Brian Evans]

Honourable member, if I could say, I spoke with Dr. David Williams earlier today, and one of the areas I identified with Dr. Williams was the fact that we did not have an alignment in our understanding. We've gone to great lengths to try to determine who from CFIA might have been involved in any call that occurred on July 30. We have the point of contact established—the recall coordinators in Ontario. They are the primary point of contact for district health units and the Ontario Ministry of Health and Long-term Care and the Office of the Chief Medical Officer of Health. There was no verification from their level that they participated in such a call.

The Public Health Agency of Canada, which has indicated that they in fact coordinated that call on behalf of the Ontario Ministry of Health and Long-term Care to assess and get a better understanding of the small spike in listeriosis cases they had seen and to work with them to provide a common investigative protocol, has clearly indicated to us that their records show they did not invite CFIA to the call, and they have no record of CFIA participating in the call.

When I spoke with Dr. David Williams this afternoon about this particular issue, and others—because it is an important issue of fact—he commented that there were multiple calls taking place with multiple people on the line, and that it's very difficult to know who was there. They legitimately thought it was a federal call, which would have incorporated that family, but he has no definitive evidence to suggest that we were in fact on that call.

So between verifying with the organizers of the call and the roll call and verifying with our contacts both in the Office of Food Safety and Recall here in Ottawa and our people on the ground in Ontario, we have tried desperately to get to the bottom of that circumstance. At this point, all the evidence we've been able to come up with points to the fact that we were not on the call on July 30.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Your time has expired, Mr. Easter.

Mr. Bezan, for five minutes.

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

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I also want to thank our witnesses for showing up.

I have to take exception to Mr. Easter's comments. He wants to lay all of the blame on the federal minister and the federal departments, and he's essentially saying that people are missing in action. Well, the Minister of Agriculture was holding press conferences every day from August 24 to September 5 to relate to the public exactly what was happening.

So if Mr. Easter wants to sit around and start pointing fingers, maybe he needs to look in the mirror. When he was parliamentary secretary to the Minister of Agriculture back in 2005, they were the ones who cut the funding for mandatory testing of listeriosis through an environmental test. So if he really wants to start thinking about the big picture here, he also needs to put himself in the group of suspects so that we can actually get down to the basis of this.

I want to go back to the comments Dr. Evans was making. I think it's important that you made the comment about HACCP. I know that through this process last summer there were a lot of stories in the media and a lot of issues that were coming up from the opposition about HACCP being an example of privatization. I'm glad you said that it does not actually involve privatization. This approach has been going on for 15 to 20 years, when the HACCP protocol was first developed and brought into the meat processing industry and the food processing industry. We were even talking about it at the farm gate, of doing these things as well as farm HACCP, noting that it essentially increased accountability and provided a paper trail.

So if HACCP weren't in place, would listeriosis and this situation have been caught sooner, or would there have been someone else looking at this? Would this just have fallen through the cracks and actually made your job more difficult?

[Dr. Brian Evans]

Thank you for the question.

Again, it is well known to the members of this committee and others that the HACCP application to food safety was actually developed several decades ago in the United States by the Pillsbury Company, when they were contracted by NASA to develop food safety programs for astronauts, because obviously it would be catastrophic if an astronaut developed a food-borne illness in space in the absence of medical attention. The development of that programming, as was indicated, has been adapted. It is the gold standard, as referenced by the United Nations groups on food safety, Codex Alimentarius, and the World Health Organization. It is advocated globally as the best standard or the best way, because it allows you to map known risks, to map and document, as you've indicated, how you will manage that risk, and then to document—through verification—that you did what you said you would do. When things don't work out properly, it then provides the framework to go back and verify properly where the breakdown was. It's real-time analysis and a real-time response. It doesn't wait for someone to find the problem later on.

I'm a firm believer that in the absence of HACCP this issue would not have been identified. I suspect that some of the very important work done by Maple Leaf Foods in their internal assessment was to relook at their HACCP plan, to look at the unidentified risk and try to come to a.... It was actually the HACCP that said to them that if they were getting positives in the environment and then getting negatives after sanitation, but it kept persisting, there was then something in their HACCP plan saying there was something about the location they needed to rethink.

So I think HACCP helped them arrive at a conclusion much earlier than would otherwise have been the case.

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

So you hear the stories in the media and people talking about how we need to have an army of white-coat inspectors right through every food processing facility, but that would not have made one iota of difference probably, because we already had the HACCP in place; we had the certified compliance verification system in place. There's already been a lot done that helped us get to the results in a timely manner.

[Dr. Brian Evans]

Again, this is not me speaking as a member of the Food Inspection Agency, but certainly in our discussions with our academic panel, certainly in our discussions with experts outside of Canada, there is this recognition collectively across the board that you cannot inspect, you cannot test your way to food safety. Food safety is a culture. Food safety, as you've indicated, starts at the farm. It starts with input. It starts with everybody along the chain having that opportunity to identify risk, whether it's E. coli or something else, and to mitigate it to the best extent possible. It's not about risk transfer, it's not about consequence transfer; it's about managing it at the earliest opportunity that you can identify it and having effective mitigation.

The presence of a massive inspection regime, in and of itself.... Again, on the basis of what we learned out of this, there was a previously unknown risk factor that would not have changed, I believe, the timeliness of the discovery. This was a concerted team effort across a number of jurisdictions to get to the bottom of the circumstance, for sure. As we said, traditional inspection, organoleptic inspection, which was largely physical presence--looking, tasting, testing, and poking--is not effective in dealing with these types of risks as they continue to evolve within the food system, and it does take our continuous efforts to improve inspection technologies to figure out how we find them as quickly as possible and how we respond to them as quickly as possible.

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

Now, I agree with you that--

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Your time is up, Mr. Bezan. You're well over. I have to treat everybody the same.

Before we move on to our second round--and I meant to read this at the start--Mr. Allen, you had a motion that was presented before the committee just before the break in regard to some documents from the minister's office. I understand those documents were delivered to the clerk's office earlier today, and I understand they'll be sent for translation and will be ready, hopefully, for our meeting on Wednesday.

[Malcolm Allen, NDP, Welland, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Okay, we're on to our next round.

Ms. Duncan, again, for seven minutes.

[An hon. member]

[Inaudible--editor]

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

No, we finished our first round, everybody, so we're going to start our second round--our first full round, I'll put it that way.

Ms. Duncan, seven minutes--no, five minutes, sorry.

[Kirsty Duncan, Liberal, Etobicoke North, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I'm going to present a number of questions. The first will focus on laboratory testing.

Is there any way for the federal government to streamline the steps involved in testing for listeriosis from hospital and private labs to, for example, the Ontario public health laboratory and the National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg for fingerprinting? What backup systems exist if one or more labs are unavailable? What action might the federal government take to increase greater regional laboratory capacity?

I now have some specific questions. Why was there a delay--August 13--in requesting unopened samples of food from Maple Leaf when the first food results were available on August 6?

Why didn't the CFIA or, better yet, the Chief Medical Officer of Health order a recall of packaged meat products? Why was it left to the corporation to do, and why was it voluntary?

I'm wondering if there is a minimum standard, i.e. number of cases, contaminated food samples, deaths, higher-than-average number of cases, that would have triggered concern regarding listeriosis and then triggered subsequent health advisories to the public.

If I may add one last question, I think we all appreciate very much how Maple Leaf responded. There's one inconsistency. Maple Leaf undertook a voluntary recall, temporarily shut down the plant, and made a public apology when government failed to do so. Why did Maple Leaf not go public on August 13 when it notified selected customers asking them not to use products with the same product codes as the Toronto sample? What did “selected customers” mean? Did it include all customers? If not, who were left out? What systems were in place to identify the number of locations and establishments that received product during the outbreak?

Thank you.

[The Vice-Chair, Liberal, Wayne Easter]

Ms. Swan or Mr. Evans.

[Dr. Brian Evans]

I'd like to address the first issue, on lab capacity, and then I would ask Paul Mayers if he could respond to the subsequent questions posed by the member.

With respect to lab capacity, streamlining tests, etc., this comes back largely to part of your coordination opportunity question. As we've said, we've tried to be very frank in our report, because the circumstance warrants us being very frank, in light of what happened.

We have lab capacity regionally. We have a food lab in Scarborough since the events in this particular circumstance, and it was critical to some of the food sampling once CFIA was actively engaged, as of the 6th, because it has the capacity to do culture for listeria. In fact, it was the sample submitted to them on the 12th, which was returned to us on the 16th, four days later, that triggered our advisory and the voluntary recall.

On the issue of backup systems, since that time not only have we expanded our lab capacity, but the lab has always been available to operate on a 24/7 basis, and it does operate on a 24/7 basis when we're involved in active investigation mode. Over and above that, we've also expanded it to the extent of getting it certified to do the PFGE or the fingerprint testing again so it can be done in one site, as opposed to multiple sites. So we believe we do provide federal regional support in the area if the provincial jurisdiction chooses to pursue that.

Again, we will continue at CFIA to work in parallel with Health Canada, because part of this also says that we need to continue to invest in test methods development. We need to get the tests that can be used either in food products or on contact surfaces that give us earlier results than the current gold standard of a culture test.

[Kirsty Duncan, Liberal, Etobicoke North, ON]

So this is a real change since the outbreak?

[Dr. Brian Evans]

That's correct.

If you're okay with that, I would ask Paul if he could respond to your other points.

[Paul Mayers, Associate Vice-President, Programs, Canadian Food Inspection Agency]

Thank you very much.

Let me start with the issue of a minimum standard to trigger concern, because it is an extremely important consideration.

My colleague earlier noted that what we seek to do is to be in a position to provide information to Canadians that allows them to take action in their own interest. In order to do that, there is a certain minimum amount of information that we need. We need to be able to point them to a food that we have a reasonable certainty is associated, so that we don't modify behaviour in a way that might have negative consequences for the public. That becomes very important, and frankly characterizes our minimum standard.

What that means is, once informed on the 6th, we launched multiple lines of inquiry in order to reach that point, that minimum standard, that would allow us to communicate that to Canadians. Unfortunately, the information we received on the 6th didn't specifically identify the products associated with the sample, as you heard Brian explain. That was the focus, in fact, of our investigative activities, to get to a point where we could rule out contamination in the preparation facility and identify, if indeed a particular plant was involved, what particular products, so that Canadians could be informed. That is the minimum standard.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Thank you very much, Mr. Mayers.

Mr. Bellavance, five minutes.

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

Thank you very much.

Despite what the government claims, when we talk about the investigation headed by Ms. Weatherhill, we are not questioning her competency, but rather the lack of transparency regarding the inquiry implemented by the government. This individual, who will conduct her investigation in private, is accountable only to the Minister of Agriculture and Agri-Food), or the Prime Minister's Office. That is who she will submit her report to in July, apparently. However, neither the public nor parliamentarians will really know what is happening. I want to clarify this because transparency is the reason for this subcommittee.

With regard to the files that have been established since the beginning of the listeriosis crisis, questions, grey zones persist with regard to the role of the agency and the meetings that it held and information that is still unknown. You are here, Mr. Evans, and that is a good thing because you have been at the centre of a controversy in this regard. In fact, a meeting with Maple Leaf took place on July 24, 2008. This controversy might not have gotten bigger if you and Maple Leaf had admitted that listeriosis was discussed during that meeting. This meeting took place two weeks before we learned about this pathogen discovered at the Maple Leaf plant in Toronto.

Based on the articles I have here, two parties, meaning the agency and the company, denied from the start that Listeria and bacteria in general had been discussed during that meeting. First, I wonder why you denied this only to later admit that it had been discussed, but that the discussion did not focus fully on that issue. The public still believes however that you denied that this discussion had taken place.

Furthermore, information was made public following media request under the Access to Information Act, but the Canadian Food Inspection Agency had hidden some information. I would like to know whether you are prepared today to ensure transparency by telling us what that information was and why it was hidden. Someone in the agency made some comments, but then refused to say any more. Minister Ritz's office refused to make the slightest comment. We are talking about transparency. We are talking about an event that caused the death of 21 individuals and eroded public confidence in our food safety system, which has been undermined as a result of what has happened.

The subcommittee is trying to determine what happened, but we are also trying to ensure that insofar as possible, this never happens again. We want everyone to be able to admit their mistakes and their responsibilities. That is why I'm asking you today whether you can tell us what was discussed at the July 24 meeting and, if information is still hidden, then why so. I want to know if you are able to divulge that information. I am telling you that if we obtain a satisfactory answer, we will move on.

[Dr. Brian Evans]

Thank you, Monsieur Bellavance. It's a very important question.

I've appeared before committee on multiple occasions. My commitment to public service and my commitment to Canadians is not in doubt, I hope, with this committee.

I would point out very clearly that, yes, there was a meeting on July 24 with one of the representatives from Maple Leaf Foods. In the disclosure it was indicated very clearly that this meeting had been originally scheduled for February, earlier in the year, but because of other commitments it had had to be postponed and cancelled because I was not available. This was also part of the ATIP release. In fact, this was a deferred meeting. I was contacted by Maple Leaf officials about a week before July 24. They indicated they were coming into town for other meetings and asked if we could re-engage on those issues that we hadn't been able to talk about in February.

In the Access to Information Act and the Privacy Act there are provisions that indicate issues that might relate to corporate interests and issues that might relate to.... In effect, we talked about seven different topics, and it was clearly indicated in the meeting notes that we talked about seven different topics. Some of those topics dealt with internal Maple Leaf restructuring, which was deemed by those people responsible for ATIP to be information private to the company, and at CFIA we did not have the option to disclose that.

The Access to Information Act also looks at issues as they relate to other departments. In our discussions with Maple Leaf we also talked about some of the technical negotiations that we, as Canada, were involved with on food safety at the global level. We and Maple Leaf have been very clear about this. Because the discussion made specific reference to engagement with other countries, it was deemed by Foreign Affairs and by other officials to be confidential government-to-government information.

There was never a denial that we talked about microbial issues. The inference in the press was that we talked about listeria and the Canadian circumstance with listeria. We were very clear, when pressed on that issue, that listeria specifically was not mentioned. What we did talk about--and I think Mr. McCain raised it here as well--was that it's very important for Canada to ensure that whatever standards apply to domestic industry in this country also apply to imports.

Members of this committee will recall that at that particular time we had gone through a circumstance with one of our trading partners in which it had increased border testing, or import testing, of Canadian products, and the nature of that discussion was to outline to them some of the activities we were undertaking to ensure reciprocity in microbial testing. It covered listeria, E. coli, campylobacter, and salmonella. That was the only context in which listeria was mentioned.

I personally apologize to this committee, I personally apologize to Canadians, and I personally apologize to any media if there's any inference from what we discussed that there was any information provided to us at that time by Maple Leaf that gave us any early indication of a problem in the plant. As we've indicated, we did not become aware of an issue of listeria operating in Canada that could have a food source until August 6.