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.