Evidence of meeting #5 for Subcommittee on Food Safety in the 40th Parliament, 2nd Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was food.
A recording is available from Parliament.
6:05 p.m.
Liberal
Wayne Easter Liberal Malpeque, PE
Good point. One of the problems is these guys make announcements but never deliver.
6:05 p.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Larry Miller
Thank you, Mr. Easter.
I would like to thank our witnesses very much for coming, especially on such short notice. There never seems to be enough time. But we very much appreciate your coming here, and we look forward to seeing you again. Thank you very much.
We'll suspend for a few minutes.
6:10 p.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Larry Miller
I believe we now have quorum at the table.
I'd like to again thank our witnesses, Mr. Ron Usborne and Mr. Rick Holley. Thank you very much, gentlemen, for coming here. As is our usual procedure, I ask each of you to keep your opening remarks to ten minutes or less, and then we turn it over to questioning.
Who's first?
Mr. Usborne, you go ahead.
6:10 p.m.
Ron Usborne Food Safety and Quality Systems Specialist, As an Individual
Thank you very much for the privilege and honour of appearing before this subcommittee to share some of my thoughts on food safety. I've included—and I guess it will go with the transcript—a little biography, because I didn't want to take up too much time, but I do have to mention that I'm a professional meat scientist and also work in food safety and quality. I should mention that I'm one of the few PhDs in the country, and that stands for “packing house doctor”.
I have more than 50 years of experience associated with the meat industry, most of that in Canada. I actually learned to cut meat and butcher, make sausage, cure, and all that at a university, something that is hard to do in this country. I've worked both in academia and in industry. I worked in industry for the last 15 years as vice-president of food safety and technical services before I retired in 2004. And I retired not by choice, but our company was bought by a large multinational.
I continue to do food safety audits and evaluations and advise on the related problems.
So what I'm going to try to tell you—it's a little different tack here—is a little bit about Caravelle Foods, the company I worked for, because it has some unique characteristics. Initially, Caravelle Foods went to Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada--at that time, in 1989, there was no CFIA—and we asked for help in finding high-quality raw materials for our hamburgers, which we made for our one customer, which happened to be McDonald's. We made all the hamburgers for McDonald's in Canada. We had trouble finding high-quality raw material, and one of the reasons was that in the summers of 1987 and 1988, MAPAQ, which is the department of agriculture, fisheries, and food in Quebec, did some surveys on some of the hamburgers at McDonald's restaurants and found that one year they were high in salmonella and in another year they were high in E. coli. This information got back to McDonald's, who went to the owners of Caravelle Foods and told us to clean up our act or they were going to find another supplier.
Anyway, we asked for several meetings with Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, and over a seven-year period we had many discussions with them. I have no proof of this, but I have a feeling we were probably the major player here that sort of pushed Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada at the time into developing a food safety program, and this is in the early nineties.
So my story is about Caravelle Foods. We had these discussions, and interestingly enough, a lot of this was taking place before the jack-in-the-box situation that happened in 1993 in the U.S. Caravelle Foods was the first plant recognized in Canada by CFIA for its food safety enhancement program. I'm sure you've heard of FSEP and you know what that is from previous discussions. In fact, we were the first meat plant in North America to be officially recognized with a HACCP plan. We did much of the early testing and, for Mr. Easter, we did pilot program work over a four-year period with CFIA, and our program was recognized in November of 1996.
I'd like to give you some highlights of our program, which impacts some of the activities that have happened over the last year. We started with a well-organized and effective manual of operating procedures, which included a sanitation monitoring program. This was not required at the time, but we decided we needed to do this, because we did find some of these organisms in our drains, on tables, and on other contact surfaces. We analyzed and monitored trends from the data we collected. So we were doing this in the middle to late nineties to identify problem areas on a regular basis. These results were reported and discussed at weekly management meetings—that is, with our top management, and they wanted to know if we were having any problems. As well, we discussed these in production meetings. Deviations were corrected as quickly as possible. We also met with our sanitation chemical supplier, who we found to be a wealth of information in solving some of our problems.
We required all our raw material suppliers to have a HACCP program. And remember that we didn't cook our product, so our finished product was only as good as our raw material. So we had to have high-quality safe raw materials in order to produce a high-quality safe finished product, even though it was cooked at the McDonald's restaurants. At that time there were over a thousand in Canada, and sometimes there were problems in getting standardized cooking procedures. They've worked on that, and that takes place now. I personally audited all our suppliers. We started out with 28 suppliers in Canada and, a sign of the times, when I retired we only had six suppliers. We notified our suppliers when there were deviations in raw materials and expected them to correct the deficiencies in a timely manner.
We notified our CFIA inspector when we had a result that significantly impacted the quality or safety of our raw material or finished product. It was understood that our inspector, who was responsible for several plants—and you've heard this before, that one inspector has several plants—would know that we would contact her even if she was not present in our plant.
Our one and only customer, McDonald's, spent less and less time in the plant over the course of the 15 years I was with the company because they knew our food safety and quality program worked and was successful.
A food safety culture was established at Caravelle Foods. You need a well-written and executed program. We have these in Canada, but you have to have the support of all employees. This is where the employees participate and take some responsibility in executing the program. This took some time to establish but was key in the development of a successful program. I've listed some of the attributes, which included supportive and committed management; excellent leadership with a value of trust; consistent behaviour among all employees; education of employees, which is very important so they know why you're doing things as well as training them to know how to do it; team effort.... We worked together for example in cleaning our patty machines, which were as complicated as the slicers, and we had a team of maintenance, production people as well as our sanitation crew, work of these on a nightly basis to make sure the equipment was cleaned properly. We had empowerment and engagement of all employees who shared responsibilities and ideas and communicated openly and freely. Of course, we had cooperation; we had open and effective communication. And we had a rewards system to recognize performance and support. Praise is the grease that kindles the human spirit. It went a long way to contributing to the success of our program, and it doesn't cost much.
The crowning feature was Caravelle Foods was recognized with the Black Pearl Award for outstanding commitment to and achievement of corporate excellence in food quality and safety in 1999. This was presented by the International Association for Food Protection. It was the very first company in Canada to win this award.
What do we need to improve Canada's food safety system? I'm sure you're all waiting to hear what my comments are on that.
We need to encourage the development of a food safety culture in all our plants as well as in the CFIA organization.
We need better-trained inspectors. We used to train our inspectors by either sending them into the plant to work a while or they used to have short courses throughout the year. I remember training some inspectors in how to clean a band saw and how to make sausage so they had hands-on experience. This is very important, I think, if you're going to do a good job of inspecting. It would be advantageous for all of us to have a post-secondary educational background, but all need not be veterinarians. There should be opportunities for animal scientists, food scientists, microbiologists, and biologists. Some could also be graduates of community colleges in specially designed technical support programs for the food industry.
Baseline studies are needed to measure the occurrence of indicator and pathogenic organisms in our raw materials and finished products. This will help us evaluate our food chain food safety systems, such as on the farm that we've heard about, all the way through to the consumer, and would include traceability.
6:20 p.m.
Conservative
6:20 p.m.
Conservative
David Anderson Conservative Cypress Hills—Grasslands, SK
I'm just wondering, can you go over that point again? I was writing it down and I got behind you there. Just the beginning of your third point.
6:20 p.m.
Food Safety and Quality Systems Specialist, As an Individual
Baseline studies.
6:20 p.m.
Food Safety and Quality Systems Specialist, As an Individual
How am I on time? I'm almost done.
6:20 p.m.
Conservative
6:20 p.m.
Food Safety and Quality Systems Specialist, As an Individual
Baseline studies are needed to measure the occurrence of indicator and pathogenic organisms in our raw materials and finished products. This will help evaluate our food-chain food safety systems, including traceability.
Summaries of epidemiological data--type of pathogen, number of cases, where outbreaks occur, and commodity type--following the model of Dr. Ewen Todd, formerly of Health Canada, are needed. Unfortunately Dr. Todd's program was never carried on after he left for work in the United States. This will help us evaluate how our programs are working to combat food-borne disease and allow continuous improvement in an already well-designed program.
Better coordination and cooperation in food safety activities among the various jurisdictions are needed.
Finally, bigger is not necessarily better. Smaller plants often do a better job than larger plants in both producing quality products and food safety. We need a system to support a range of types and sizes of meat processing plants. Discussions should continue with the federal-provincial-territorial committee on developing an outcome-based meat safety system, with recognition of provincial programs like Ontario's HACCP advantage program.
Food safety is a journey; it is not a destination.
Thank you.
6:25 p.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Larry Miller
Thank you very much. Mr. Usborne, maybe you can provide those suggestions to the committee.
6:25 p.m.
Food Safety and Quality Systems Specialist, As an Individual
I have submitted my notes to be transcribed.
6:25 p.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Larry Miller
You're one ahead of me. Thank you very much.
Mr. Holley, you have ten minutes or less.
6:25 p.m.
Richard Rick) Holley (Professor, Department of Food Science, University of Manitoba, As an Individual
What do you mean less? I'm a university professor.
6:25 p.m.
Conservative
6:25 p.m.
Richard (Rick) Holley
God bless you.
Ladies and gentlemen, it's a pleasure for me to actually walk the halls of this building. It's been a long time since I've been in this building.
By way of background, I've been at the University of Manitoba as a professor in food microbiology and food safety for going on 15 years now. I had a little bit of industry experience with Labatt's. I was fighting listeria in dairy operations in the northeast U.S. for five years. And I worked for Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada for well over 12 years in Saint-Hyacinthe and also here in Ottawa.
I come to you to encourage and participate in this debate to improve the level of food safety in this country. I will take advantage of any and every opportunity I have to address issues associated with food safety.
When I heard that we had an “independent” investigator appointed to look into the issues around the listeriosis outbreak, I was extremely disappointed that it might represent a partisan approach by the federal government to address that particular issue. I've since met with Ms. Weatherill and was very pleased to understand that her interests also lie in uncovering as much information about deficiencies in the food safety system in this country as she can within the allotted time available. I am going to be very disappointed if at the end of this process, at the end of the activity of this committee, we continue to have serious needs with respect to solving food safety issues in this country.
The barn door is wide open, folks. I just sat here and listened to on-farm food safety systems. On-farm food safety systems don't work. They don't work. And they don't work because we don't control the recycling of pathogens from animal feed to animals. They're building up in the animal supply. I have numbers. I can give them to you. I'm sorry that I don't have a brief to present to the committee, but if there's any interest in having written words from me, I'd be more than happy to provide them to you--that's on-farm food safety issues.
The animal feed industry is a very large lobby and a very big industry. They are very concerned about specified risk material being fed to ruminant animals and then raising the whole spectre of the transmission of mad cow disease. Mad cow disease is not a food safety issue. That's not blasphemous; it's true. There's no solid evidence. A number of us believe that the organism that causes BSE does not cause vCJD in humans.
Where have interventions been useful in terms of preventing recycling of pathogenic organisms in animal feed to animals and then along the food chain to humans? It was as early as 1955, when it was decided, wisely, not to feed pigs uncooked feed. Cooking of feed has prevented large numbers of people from getting ill as a result of trichinosis. That's one example of what can happen. I have many others that I can give you, but time just won't allow me to do it.
The main issues associated with food safety in this country are the following. Dr. Usborne referred to one of them.
On food-borne illness surveillance systems, we don't have one that works. We have two systems in this country. We have the national notifiable infectious disease reporting system, and we have the NESP, the national enteric surveillance program. They don't capture the information that is generated when outbreaks occur.
The NESP pools laboratory reports from people who got sick from drinking water and eating food and puts them all together in one place. I can influence the results of those data simply by sending the laboratory some isolates that I get out of food, and it skews the results. The national infectious disease reporting system varies across the country. All organisms that cause food-borne illness in British Columbia, and I think in Quebec--and I can be corrected on that--are reportable.
At the federal level, food-borne illness that is caused by Staphylococcus aureus and Costridium perfringens, which are number five and number six in terms of causing food-borne illness, aren't reportable. When people get sick with reportable diseases in six of our provinces, the data are pooled together, they're aggregated. Other provinces don't aggregate the data. They come to Ottawa and you can't make any sense of them. We don't know what makes us sick and we don't know what foods containing those unknown organisms cause greater frequencies of illnesses. We can't say with any realistic certainty that we know what foods are more risky than others. If we don't know what the risk is, how in God's name can we manage the risk?
Food-borne illness surveillance programs need to be re-established, just as Dr. Usborne said a few minutes ago. We did it back in the late 1980s, early nineties, and we stopped doing it. It cost money. You have to make an evaluation on the basis of how important it is to you as the people who have decisions on where money is spent by the government. Food-borne illness costs $10 billion a year in this country. One out of three or one out of four people will come down with food-borne illnesses. We don't know how many die. We have no idea. We just use American data.
If we want to continue to do that, that's fine, but we eat different things from what the Americans eat. We have a different ethnic population background.
We have two tiers of food-borne inspection in this country that operate at the provincially and federally registered plants. We also have municipal governments and we have departments of health that are involved in inspection of food service. The standards are different, the level of training is different, and the result is utter confusion. There are gaps and overlaps in the system that are an embarrassment. We're not alone, because the Americans have a worse system. They do exactly the same kinds of things that we do. It's the same with the Mexicans.
It's time for better coordination among the various groups that are responsible for food inspection in this country. We don't need more inspection. We may need more inspectors in some instances, but we don't need more inspection. We need smarter inspection. We need better-trained inspectors who understand where the problems are in the food process. They get their hands around that.
Food-borne illness outbreak management.... If you have cared to take a look at the reports, the lessons learned that came out last week, they are a repetition of the kinds of sabre-rattling and political gesturing at the federal-provincial levels that occurred back in 1999, when Schneiders spread salmonella-contaminated cheese from one end of this country to the other and caused—and get this, folks—820 illnesses, and many of those were kids.
Thank you very much for your attention.
6:35 p.m.
Conservative
6:35 p.m.
Liberal
Wayne Easter Liberal Malpeque, PE
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you, gentlemen.
I hardly know where to start, to be honest with you.
Anyway, let me start with you, Mr. Holley. You've said that the lessons learned are basically a repetition of the past. We don't need more inspectors; we need smarter and better inspection. I'm not going to disagree with that. Food safety is certainly in everybody's interest, be it government, be it the food industry, be it whoever.
On the points that you're raising on food-borne illnesses in Canada and how we handle it here and the approach that you're saying we need to take—and this could be a question to both of you in your experience in the industry—what countries around the world do food safety inspections in the way you're proposing to do them? Are there other countries that do that? From your perspective, why have we gone the way we've gone in this country over the last 20, I think you said, years?
6:35 p.m.
Richard (Rick) Holley
Please don't misunderstand; I don't think we do a bad job in Canada in terms of food safety. I don't have a problem eating either domestically grown food or food from other countries, too, for that matter.
I think we want to do food inspection in a mature and intelligent fashion in Canada, but historically, the way in which inspection has been done.... It makes it easy, because it's very measurable, that food inspection is done against standards. You're able to calculate compliance.
The things that are easily measured, such as label type size, label information, fill weights, and species identification, are the kinds of things that get addressed first. They're the economic issues. The food safety issues are far more complex. They require training in terms of food safety systems, such as HACCP or the CVS, compliance verification. The inspection takes longer and requires a greater understanding of the systems.
Dr. Usborne was saying how, in his day, he was actually an employee who was training the inspectors. I think the CFIA has developed programs that attempt to address these issues. I don't think it would be too terribly difficult to do a better job than they do in the United States.
Both Ron and I sit on the academic advisory panel for the CFIA. We've asked these kinds of questions--i.e., what training programs have you got going? I sense that there's significant interest in making sure that the new generation of inspectors who are coming online are given the kind of training that goes beyond label compliance and the economic features and that addresses the food safety features that get into the mechanics of manufacturing the food.
6:40 p.m.
Liberal
Wayne Easter Liberal Malpeque, PE
You raise an interesting point, and I've made note of it. Inspection for label compliance versus inspection for food safety--those are two huge, different issues that maybe we need to drill down into at some point.
Mr. Usborne mentioned as well having better-trained inspectors. We do know of an incident here recently when CFIA decided to change the monitoring for listeriosis. It was found out that the inspectors were not trained. They had to be sent back to Ottawa to be retrained. In fact, Maple Leaf found out, in terms of watching them, observing them, that these folks didn't really know what they were doing.
So that is a problem, although not intentional. Is part of the problem there that inspectors within CFIA now are not specialized in one area, that they will...? I don't know what you'd call it; let's say they inspect different systems, or commodities, I guess. Would it be better to have them more specialized?
6:40 p.m.
Food Safety and Quality Systems Specialist, As an Individual
I'd like to address that.
Of course, you have different plants. I have no problem with veterinarians inspecting in slaughterhouses, because they're trained that way, but they're not trained in processing. Those trained in Canada are lucky to get half a course in any type of food safety. Those inspectors who go to processing plants like Maple Leaf should have backgrounds in meat science, food science, so that they understand the science of inspection. That's what I'm saying.
Or, if CFIA chooses to do some training, then the training should be done in the plants. You don't bring them to Ottawa. You take them out to the different areas and train them out there. I think each area should have a trainer out there responsible for training the inspectors out in that area.
6:40 p.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Larry Miller
Your time has expired, Mr. Easter.
Mr. Bellavance, for seven minutes.
6:40 p.m.
Bloc
André Bellavance Bloc Richmond—Arthabaska, QC
Thank you very much, gentlemen, for your testimony.
I would like to tell you about some comments I read in the Canadian Medical Association Journal when the listeriosis crisis hit. In fact, the editorial was written before the crisis was even over. You have worked in the field for a long time and have expertise not only in the area of listeria but also, in your case Mr. Holley, in biology. I would therefore like to ask some questions that are somewhat more technical.
The editorial states that the Government of Canada had agreed to national standards for listeria that were lower than those in many other countries. It also stipulated that Health Canada tolerates up to 100 bacteria per gram of ready-to-eat foods at the start of the product's life, even though the dose of listeria ultimately ingested may be higher.
I need your expertise here because I am not really that knowledgeable about this issue. We are being told that the bacteria can replicate during the product's life, even if it is refrigerated. We have agreed to this standard of 100 bacteria per gram, at the start of the product's life, even though we know that the product may contain more bacteria by its expiry date, or in other words, during the product's stated shelf life. In contrast, the United Nations and the World Health Organization Codex Alimentarius Commission tolerates 100 bacteria per gram, but only at the end of the product's shelf life.
The United States government is tougher still and tolerates no bacteria at all. I would like to ask you a specific question on this last point and I would also ask you to respond to other comments made in the Canadian Medical Association Journal. Would it be possible to have a policy of zero tolerance as is the case in the United States? I always thought that listeria was in the soil and that we could not eradicate it completely.
So I would first of all like to hear your comments on the fact that this standard is being enforced in the United States and, secondly, I would like to know whether you feel that our standard is really lower than the one enforced by other countries.
6:45 p.m.
Richard (Rick) Holley
Your question is very perceptive.
The issue of permission with respect to 100 listeria per gram is generally qualified with a statement that the listeria cannot grow in the products in which 100 are allowable, so whether it's 100 at the beginning of shelf life or 10 days later, it's only going to be 100. For those products in which listeria can grow, the Canadian regulation is exactly the same as the American regulation--zero.
Now, as of the first week of February 2008, the USDA published in the Federal Register a notice that it would allow the presence of 100 listeria in ready-to-eat products in which the organism would not grow. In the United States, as you well know, they have two agencies responsible for inspection. We only have one, thank God, at the federal level, the CFIA. They have the FDA and the USDA. The USDA is responsible for meat and poultry, and the FDA is responsible for dairy and fish, so in USDA-approved products, or registered products, you can have 100 listeria per gram, but not in FDA products.
As for the threat associated with that number of organisms, I think the Canadian position was far more mature, because when you consider a zero tolerance for listeria in food, it's just as you said: wherever you look, you'll find listeria. In fact, if we have more than 10 people in here, one of us--well, maybe more than one of us--is carrying listeria. What?
You know, this really annoys me. We are moving more and more and more towards end-product testing. We cannot inspect safety into food. We can't test safety into food. We have to synthesize it into food. We have to produce the food that we know is safe. The American car manufacturers learned a long time ago that preventive programs that they put in place--the Japanese learned it very well--yielded cars that were safe when they hit the road. That's the way the food has to be produced, by using HACCP programs. That way, you know when the product comes off the line that the product is safe to eat.
In terms of end-product testing, when you have an organism like listeria that occurs in foods at 0.1%, in order for end-product testing to be of any value whatsoever, you have to test at least a thousand in order to find one.
What the devil is that going to tell you? Stop the problems from developing in the food safety system, so that the end products are safe to eat. When you don't suspect there's a problem, you're not going to be able to test those products and get any indication of what proportion of the total is likely to be contaminated.
This traceability issue is another one that's not an excuse for laxity in food safety systems. Recalls and traceability are after the fact, folks. Let's build safety into the food we manufacture, each and every day.
Did I answer your question?