Subcommittee on Food Safety Committee on April 20th, 2009

[Michael H. McCain]

I think that is accurate. I can understand why people would sometimes become concerned about the term “voluntary requirement” when mandatory requirements are certainly implied. I reiterate that nobody is under any misconception that if it is not voluntary, very shortly it will be mandatory. But in our case, we did take the steps, as you articulated.

The second part of your question is on collaboration. It's imperative that we have a working relationship with the CFIA every day. Our plant staff and our technical staff each and every day have to work collaboratively with a regulator. That's an important consideration to an effective food safety system.

That doesn't mean that people don't understand their job. The job of the regulator is to set the rules. The job of the regulator is to make sure the rules are being adhered to in the strictest way and to enforce them when they're not. The role of the operator is to produce safe food.

We do have that type of a collaborative relationship. And that's a very constructive thing for the industry--any industry--to be able to achieve: safer food for Canadians.

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

Right. Very good.

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Your time has expired, Mr. Lemieux.

Before we move on to the next round, Mr. McCain, I was wondering what direction CFIA has given your company on changes to record-keeping and what changes or recommendations you have made to assist CFIA in regard to future recalls. Did you touch on that at all?

[Michael H. McCain]

I'm not sure I understand. Are you asking about changes to their record-keeping requirements of us?

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Yes. What direction, if any, has CFIA given you on changes to record-keeping and what have you, and what changes have you made to assist CFIA with future recalls? Have you come up with anything on that?

[Michael H. McCain]

Is it with respect to environmental monitoring programs, or with respect to recalls themselves?

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Well, I think to recalls. Obviously, you've had to go through this; you did this voluntarily. I'm just inquisitive, wondering if you've come up with any recommendations that you've suggested, whether you're suggesting them here or have already suggested them to CFIA.

[Michael H. McCain]

On the recall record-keeping that we've had, although we're not perfect, we don't think we're a significant contributor to the timelines here, maybe down to the sake of a few hours. I think our data collection on recall actually performed reasonably well. I don't think that's been the top priority for the CFIA in addressing it. I think most of their focus has been on improving the record-keeping and reporting and analysis and the rigour I referred to earlier around the food safety systems themselves, and the processes inside the facility. What we describe as an environmental monitoring program I think they would describe as their new listeria management policy. Unless I'm misinterpreting the question....

Is there anything you would add to that?

[Randall Huffman]

I would only add, Mr. Miller, that we just received the “Lessons Learned” report, as I assume you did as well, over the weekend. As our food safety team reads through and analyzes the lessons learned from CFIA and the other agencies, we'll look for the take-away lessons from that and assess what we can do better as a company and as an industry.

I think traceability was one issue that was raised. Certainly we support enhanced abilities to trace our products. We think we're reasonably good right now, but we know there's room for improvement. Our food safety team is assessing how we can become even better at tracing our products throughout the system.

We'll take the “Lessons Learned” report and look for opportunities for us to enhance our ability on that.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Thank you very much.

Mr. Easter, for five minutes.

[Wayne Easter, Liberal, Malpeque, PE]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

You can answer this in the course of your answers, whoever may be able to. It's more a point of clarification. You kind of left the impression that there were no environmental regulations in place up until a short while ago, and I would like you to clarify what was there as compared to the new overall environment protocols that are in place now.

The more I listen to you, in fact, the more I'm concerned about government agencies not doing their jobs. There's no question industry has a responsibility, but government ministers and agencies have the overall authority and responsibility for public health in this country. So let's not lose sight of that fact. We were in a time-set--and Mr. McCain, you were part of this time-set as well--that there's a view from the government side to deregulate, and the industry side wanted to reduce costs, so if deregulation was part of that, then that was great. That's kind of changed in the very recent past.

I'll come back to my earlier question on the slicer. A witness who will be coming before the committee was an auditor of the auditors of CFIA. He will be before this committee. He maintains that if CFIA was doing its job, they would not be looking just at the manufacturer's specifications on the slicer; they would have detected that potential problem before it occurred, if CFIA had been on the job doing the proper audits in a preventive sense that they ought to have been doing.

Do you believe that to be a way we ought to be going? Is there a way of better prevention here, by better foresight, by CFIA as an overall authority doing its due diligence to protect the Canadian public, but also to protect you in industry from running into the kinds of consequences that you faced as a result of the listeriosis outbreak?

I know you're accepting responsibility, but I think a higher authority has a responsibility here, and that maybe this could have been prevented if CFIA had been on their job.

[Michael H. McCain]

There is a higher authority in food safety, and that rests with a regulatory agency. I don't believe that means they are the primary responsible party here. I think we've accepted that because this occurred in our facility and on our watch.

I've articulated what we believe the role of government and the regulator should be going forward, and I'll reiterate that. First is to define the expectations of an operator in tremendous specificity and detail, as reflected in a food safety protocol. Second is to have the resources and processes in place to validate and verify that those regulations are being complied with. Third is to ensure the consistency of implementation across the country. Fourth is to encourage responsible behaviour by the operators. We believe that mandate will require more resources by the regulator, not less.

A great deal of this has been reflected in what we're doing today that we weren't doing before and in the new listeria policy in place today that wasn't there before. Now it's down to the quality of the implementation across the country to make sure it gets implemented well.

But your question is really about whether or not there was an obligation, and if somebody had been doing something different previously, whether it would have been detected. At the end of the day, with something as scientifically difficult as this, I don't know if anybody could go back and say what looks obvious today. Things of this nature, in retrospect, look incredibly obvious to us and to anybody else who might examine that data and say, “If I'd known that at the time I would have been able to do something.”

Goodness knows we were collecting a mountain of data at that time. We think the operative regulatory question is that no data was required to be collected at all, not how that data was being interpreted at the time. But could somebody go in after the fact and say they could have analyzed the data if they had the time, the resources, the skills, the training, and come to a conclusion? Maybe they could have; maybe they couldn't. I know it's voluminous, very scientific, and highly interpretative data. You have to spend the time and energy to examine it all, and in retrospect we've said we should have known that. We should have had the systems in place to see that. Others could have come to the same conclusion.

[Wayne Easter, Liberal, Malpeque, PE]

My point being--

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Sorry, Mr. Easter, your time has expired. You're well over it.

Mr. Bellavance is next for five minutes, please.

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

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

For a few moments, I would like everyone to put themselves in the shoes of consumers, which is not difficult, as we are all consumers. We eat your products and those of your competitors. We eat products that come from Quebec, Canada, and other countries. So we have reason to be concerned when events like the one last August and others occur. Listeria is one strain of bacteria, but there is also E. coli. There is no doubt that several products were inspected, but some of them made it through the inspections and controls and ended up on store shelves, causing diseases and, unfortunately, death. I am not just talking about your products. There was the case of spinach from the United States as well as carrot and pear juice. At one point, a host of products were contaminated in one way or another and made people sick and some cases, caused death, unfortunately.

Consumers who follow the work of this committee or who read the papers are entitled to question the number of inspections and inspectors. Unfortunately, we will never be able to prevent such unfortunate events from occurring and certain products from being missed. People tell themselves that they pay taxes to the government so that the government will protect them. But sometimes there is no such protection.

When people read in the papers that some inspectors whose work involves protecting them spend the bulk of their time in an office with paperwork instead of inspecting food, they are entitled to question whether their safety is in jeopardy. When people read that an employee at the Canadian Food Inspection Agency claims the government wants companies to regulate themselves by doing their own inspections, they are entitled to wonder whether they are adequately protected.

You say you are accepting responsibility because these events occurred under your watch. I want to correct you, Mr. McCain: they also occurred under the government's watch. Employees and inspectors from the Canadian Food Inspection Agency must be involved. They must work in conjunction with the industry in order to prevent these kinds of problems.

Here's another aspect that raises questions in people's minds. Up until April 2008, federally accredited meat facilities were required to undergo a full verification. Monitoring in that area has been relaxed. At the Maple Leaf plant where the listeriosis contamination broke out last summer, there had not been a complete verification of the systems for at least a year prior to the Listeria outbreak.

I will repeat that responsibility must be shared. I would like you to put yourselves in the shoes of the people who see these events and who will be better informed following the meetings of this committee. They will know a lot more following the investigation demanded by the government and conducted by Ms. Weatherill, which was done without our knowing exactly what happened. If you put yourself in the place of consumers, you will understand that they are entitled to ask questions about public health, their health and the health of their families.

[Michael H. McCain]

That is an area and a topic that is most important to us. We are a consumer-facing organization. We have built our trust with consumers over a hundred years of history, and as you well know, trust built over a hundred years of history can be broken in minutes.

We know that Canadian consumers have the concerns you describe. We feel those concerns very deeply. Certainly out of respect for and recognition of those concerns, we took the actions we did in this very tragic situation, putting the interests of consumers first.

We recognize that trust will take time to rebuild. Their trust in the whole food safety system in Canada has been impaired, and we feel very sorry for that. We certainly played the dominant role in that impairment, and we feel very sorry for that outcome.

Of course, everybody has a role to play in capturing the lessons learned. We've tried to be clear on what we believe those lessons are for the regulator. We've tried to articulate what we feel is an appropriate regulatory framework going forward, and we've been very clear that we regret the fact that...had we known then what we know now, we might have saved 21 lives. Under the circumstances, I think we are responding to consumers by putting their interests first and taking the steps to improve going forward, as I think the regulators are as well.

Just to complete my answer, on your question specifically around the inspection that was dropped, I believe--if I'm not mistaken, and I hope I've understood your question appropriately--you are referring to the annual inspection that used to be engaged by the CFIA. A best practice in quality assurance and food safety is globally recognized as what's described by hazard analysis and critical control points, or HACCP, programs. HACCP programs replace annual one-time inspections with inspections that are implemented each and every day.

Dr. Huffman can respond more articulately than I as to why that's so, but I believe the regulatory approach was replacing annual one-time inspections with the implementation of what is recognized as global best practice, effectively, in the form of daily and weekly HACCP programs, that for all intents and purposes replace annual one-time audits with daily and weekly audits and inspections.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Thank you very much.

You have five minutes, Mr. Allen.

[Malcolm Allen, NDP, Welland, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Let me just quote back to you what the Auditor General said in 2000, Mr. McCain, about CFIA, in particular, and about HACCP, since you've just raised it. This is the CFIA they're talking about: “...the Agency did not maintain sufficient dialogue with stakeholders, particularly Parliament and the public”, including on the implementation of the hazard analysis critical control points, or HACCP, food safety systems. And there has always been considerable debate about the role being left to the private sector, in particular with respect to implementation of HACCP systems.

So as you talked about the HACCP system, the part of that that I think the public has some concerns about—and they may or may not be entirely justified, depending on where the situation and the plant is and who the operator is—is that the third-party inspector, CFIA, reduces its actual inspection role and allows, as you call them, the global best practices under HACCP to be done by the operators themselves. Sometimes there can be a disconnect between the public's faith in the operators, justified or not—and I'm saying this in a broad-based food process across North America, not at Maple Leaf in particular. So that becomes one of the points of contention, I think, around the HACCP issue: it's not so much that HACCP may indeed be more testing, because you can say, “Well, we only had one audit before, we may have multiple testing now during the year”, but it's who is actually doing the testing, who verifies it, who audits, and who does all those subsequent steps in the process. That's part of the question.

But let me go back to some of the things that I see in your opening remarks and the paper you put together. It talks about advocating, and I assume you mean by Maple Leaf, and I appreciate the leadership role that you're taking around this: “advocating and participating in industry-wide initiatives designed to raise”—and I emphasize the word “raise”—“the level of food safety practice among all companies”, and the leadership role you want to play in that. That's to be commended, and I think all of us want to see that happen right across all the food industries that provide us with food and manufacture it. But you go on to say that you're “not experts in government processes, and making policy is the responsibility of Parliament, but if these responsibilities”—one of which I just mentioned, and you have some others there as well—“require more resources for the CFIA, we would certainly support that”, which brings me to the nub, if you will, of the whole situation.

You talk about third-party inspection and audits that help your company. I'm not so sure if you meant CFIA, around a third party. You mentioned that someone does a third-party audit for you. I didn't know if that was in addition to CFIA, an outside party as well. But it seems to me that one of the things in all of this that we could get to, which actually takes some ownership away from the corporation, in the sense of inspection duty, and gives confidence back to the public, is this whole sense of third-party audit.

Now it may be unfair for the public to sometimes think that companies don't necessarily do it the way they're supposed to. There is a certain element of faith in a third-party audit, which says we don't have any distinct gain to be made by saying whatever about an inspection, whereas a company obviously has, around certain issues it produces. Whether that be in the auto sector or in the food sector, it doesn't really matter the sector, a company has an intrinsic value in saying, “We're the best at whatever”, whereas when we're inspecting something as delicate as food—and I use the word “delicate” in the sense of a car won't poison you, necessarily, but food can—we engage in a process....

I think what you're saying to us here, and I may be mistaken, when you talk about companies coming together to share their knowledge and to truly get global best practices—and I hope this country can be a leader in this, to be truthful—is that the only way you get trust back with the public is really through third-party verification at the beginning and at the end of that process, not somewhere in between, sort of taking snapshot samples here or there as the process goes by.

But I'm not so sure, even with your leadership, Mr. McCain, that your competitors may necessarily all come to this table of food safety and want to share all their best practices. Policy, through government, can indeed make them do that, whereas you don't have the ability, sir. And I know you probably wish you could, but you don't actually have that authority, as you mentioned earlier, but we do.

I know that's sort of a wide-ranging topic. If you could make some comments, I'd appreciate it.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

You used the whole five minutes.

If you could comment as briefly as possible, I'd appreciate it.

[Michael H. McCain]

I think on the debate about the relative role and resources in a world-class, global, best practice, food safety outcome as to who has the greater responsibility for food safety, government or industry, the evidence is not either/or, it's not one or the other. In fact, I think if the policies of the government or industry go down the path of either/or, then the Canadian consumer will lose. The appropriate best answer is “both”.

Mr. Allen, I have been living in a food manufacturing environment for my 30 years in this business. We have an ambition to produce great-quality product. I have a manufacturing group and I have a quality assurance group. Any time I've tried to make that responsibility for producing safe food or high-quality food as one or the other, it's never had a satisfactory outcome. The right answer is “both”, in our view, and there's a role for each. I think finding the right balance and the integrity of the role for each, for both the regulator and the operator, is critically important for this committee and for the regulator and policy-making going forward.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Thank you very much.

Mr. Tweed, five minutes.

[Merv Tweed, Conservative, Brandon—Souris, MB]

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Thank you for being here today.

Like the others, I would like to say it, too, but I think I'll say it on behalf of the people of Brandon, which hosts one of the largest Maple Leaf hog processing plants, I suspect, in North America. I pass on the message, Mr. McCain, that the community of Brandon is very proud of you for your acceptance of the responsibility and for your company's acceptance of the responsibility. I think in today's economic crisis we see executives running away from problems. I think in this case we've seen the chairman step up and try to resolve them.

I have four questions, and I'll just maybe read them off and let you answer. I know we have limited time.

It's been suggested by some that maybe more inspectors is the answer. My first question would be, do you believe that more inspection of your specific incident would have found the root cause on that particular day? You mentioned that you think resources for the inspection should be more available. Would processing companies such as yours be willing to partner in that cost?

You mentioned guidelines in your presentation, about these guidelines being applied provincially as well as federally to all ready-to-eat plants. There are two points. I'm wondering how many that would impact. Do you see that eventually being spread into the complete slaughterhouse industry?

The last question I have is this. You did mention, and it was mentioned in the “Lessons Learned” report, that there was some difficulty transferring the information from your corporation to CFIA and it created a delay. I guess more than anything I'm hoping...and I'll ask you to tell us that those things have been corrected and obviously the record-keeping is compatible now. I'll ask you if they are and if you've done that.

[Michael H. McCain]

I'll try to answer your questions as succinctly as possible.

We think one of the more difficult things to conclude here is that there was no one single cause. We believe it was a failure of the total food safety system inside our plant, as I referred to earlier. So on one hand, I can easily say that additional inspectors would not necessarily have contributed to a solution, but on the other hand, I can say that to fulfill the mandate going forward, I believe the CFIA needs more resources. I'm not sure if I'm adequately explaining that point of difference because I do believe those are very compatible observations.

On the second question, with respect to partnering the cost, frankly, we've not even considered that. We've looked at doing the right thing and we've just not paid attention to the cost. I don't think that should be anybody's interest in the short term. How we divide up the pie going forward is something that should be a future consideration. Our primary concern has been public health and improving the food safety systems in Canada.

Your third question was as it relates to provincial versus federal. We recognize that will be a very contentious issue. We do believe that bacteria does not know borders, and consumers in Canada do not fully recognize the different standards between provincial inspection and federal inspection. They deserve to know, and we think the time has come to put an end to that.

On your last question, with respect to the transfer of information and did it case any delays, I'm not sure I understood the question.

Do you know the answer to that one?

[Randall Huffman]

As I responded to Mr. Miller earlier, our team has assessed the “Lessons Learned” document. There is one reference to the transfer of information in PDF format versus an Excel spreadsheet that would be more readable during a crisis situation, and certainly we can put in systems to address that need. As I said earlier, we're taking a look at all the documents that were provided over the weekend, and we'll learn from those as well and implement everything we can.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Ms. Duncan, five minutes.