Evidence of meeting #7 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.
5:35 p.m.
Liberal
Carolyn Bennett Liberal St. Paul's, ON
On the quality of information you would have liked to have had earlier, can you describe what just didn't happen?
5:35 p.m.
Acting Program Director, Food Protection Services, BC Centre for Disease Control
Again, I can't really speak for what happened in Ontario. We weren't involved at that level.
5:35 p.m.
Liberal
Carolyn Bennett Liberal St. Paul's, ON
Since that time, now that you're there, have there been any tabletop exercises or training in tabletop exercises to try to do it better in a virtual way since last summer?
5:35 p.m.
Acting Program Director, Food Protection Services, BC Centre for Disease Control
We have gone through a tabletop exercise with CFIA, and I can say things have improved somewhat. But we still feel there could be a lot more improvement with regard to communication and getting that early information from the CFIA.
5:35 p.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Larry Miller
Your time has expired.
I apologize to our witnesses, but votes happen around this place and we all have to be there. We're going to suspend the meeting now.
I want to invite our witnesses.... We have some food that was brought in for the committee, but we have you here through the dinner hour, so I'm going to ask you to please help yourselves back there while we're gone. We have five votes, which will take a bit of time, but we will be back here soon.
I would ask the members to please come here immediately after the votes, and we'll get back at it. Thank you.
6:40 p.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Larry Miller
We'll call the meeting back to order. Again, we apologize for having to slip away, but we have to do those things.
We'll move back to questioning. Mr. Shipley, for five minutes.
6:40 p.m.
Conservative
Bev Shipley Conservative Lambton—Kent—Middlesex, ON
Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and I thank the witnesses for helping out with our dinner. We appreciate that. The votes do take some time.
Oh, Brenda is not here. I had--
6:40 p.m.
Director, Canadian Partnership for Consumer Food Safety Education
I'll try to substitute.
6:40 p.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Larry Miller
I should have mentioned that. I understand Mr. Jennery had to leave, and Ms. Watson did indicate to me when we left that she had to go at 6:30, and Mr. Fuller of course. Every group is still represented.
6:40 p.m.
Conservative
Bev Shipley Conservative Lambton—Kent—Middlesex, ON
That's great. When I looked up, I just saw the vacant chair.
Mr. de Valk, it's good to see you again.
In terms of the Canadian partnership, Canadian food safety, your education, what we're talking about here--aside from Mr. Easter, who is trying to find blame--is about actually moving ahead. How are we going to prevent something like this from happening?
When I listened to Mr. Wilcott, I think we got a pretty clear understanding of the complexities and the issues around getting to something like listeria, which you can't actually taste, you can't smell, you can't feel, you can't find, hardly. In fact, had we not done things that Mr. Easter and his government had cancelled, we still might not have the answers for that. We want to keep moving ahead with steps in place to prevent it.
Ms. Watson talked about how in a recent campaign you were able to reach over 12 million Canadians with our food safety handling message over the year. One of the things that's in here is that there is a considerable number of people who actually do just the basics. You and I, likely, at our homes don't do what we should do. And if you're going to change the culture of Canadians.... You used the example of how bad it is in terms of smoking, how bad it is in terms of drunk driving, to get that message actually out.
When you talk about reaching over 12 million Canadians in terms of trying to promote the food safety issue, how do you benchmark that in terms of its success? Do you have any ideas?
6:45 p.m.
Director, Canadian Partnership for Consumer Food Safety Education
That's probably the number one question we had at the partnership right from the beginning, how to benchmark, because as you make more people aware of food safety, the incidents relating to food safety also increase because people become more aware and they therefore report.
It's a double-edged sword. Even though you might be reaching consumers and getting them to change their behaviour, they're also becoming more conscious and reporting to their doctors that they have had something that might be traced back to food safety. You have both things going on at the same time.
The message we're getting, though, is that we have to work with the idea that the consumer has to be reminded of a message about seven times, if not more, before it really sinks in. We get that from our advertising folks. As a result, we work closely with all our partnership members, especially the retailers, where consumers often find themselves at least once a week. If we can get them to put the message out on a regular basis during the summer, for example, then we know we're reaching consumers maybe seven times over a period of a month.
That's the way we think we can influence behaviour, especially right now. Just washing hands, for instance, would be very helpful.
6:45 p.m.
Conservative
Bev Shipley Conservative Lambton—Kent—Middlesex, ON
I think you'll see that in this building, and in all of our government buildings, the portable handwashing things.
Mr. McCain actually accepted full responsibility for it because it was in his plant, but it raises the issue that we have 11 million to 13 million cases per year of food-borne illness--this comes from Health Canada and the Public Health Agency of Canada.
So we have a situation now with listeria, which is one that would fall under this 11 million to 13 million cases of food-borne illness. Can somebody help me with that? Is that true?
6:45 p.m.
Director, Canadian Partnership for Consumer Food Safety Education
Yes. I think any outbreak is included in those statistics.
That statistic is much like an iceberg. It's built up from the type of data that Mr. Wilcott collects in his province and that every other health agency collects. They feel this is a glimpse of what might be the reportable possibilities and what consumers are experiencing. We never have that 11 million or 12 million cases reported, but we do have the tip of the iceberg. We extrapolate from there that it's probably what's happening out in the population.
6:45 p.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Larry Miller
Your time has expired. We'll come back to you.
Mr. Easter, for five minutes.
6:45 p.m.
Liberal
Wayne Easter Liberal Malpeque, PE
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
The program that Mr. Shipley talks about being cancelled is I think environmental testing. Mr. Evans said in response to questions that there really never were mandatory requirements for environmental testing, but I wonder about this going forward.
Some of the people I've talked to are really the auditors of the auditors in these plants, and hopefully they'll be before the committee at some point in time. In these plants, if there should be environmental testing.... As I understand it, for the slicing machine that was involved here, the manufacturer's specifications were followed. Do we need more stringent requirements around that by government inspectors as well? Does anybody have any ideas?
Mr. de Valk.
6:45 p.m.
Director, Canadian Partnership for Consumer Food Safety Education
I think the message you're getting from the industry is that where there might have been something amiss is that the pattern the particular environmental testing was revealing in its test results wasn't being looked at closely enough.
I mean, you can certainly mandate that all equipment be cleaned properly, and that's already on the books. It's not until you go through that cleaning procedure and do your environmental testing and your food contact surface testing that you can start to get a picture of how good you are. If you get a picture that suggests there is an area of concern, then you take further action.
We now have a policy in place whereby additional environmental testing is being done and additional food contact surface testing is being done. As we collect that data, we're going to have a much better opportunity to answer your question on whether we need further regulations.
One of the things that's happening right now is that the CFIA and the industry have agreed that we need better data on how this whole thing works in a plant. Then we can probably make some better judgments on what policies are needed.
6:50 p.m.
Liberal
Wayne Easter Liberal Malpeque, PE
There is an area that I would ask the farm groups about, whether it's the beef or chicken groups or KAP. HACCP is a much misunderstood system. In my experience, it has worked well.
The reason I ask this question is that in the report we have to do at the end of the day, these areas have to be explained, so that the report itself develops some better understanding, both for those who may read the report and, in going forward, on how the system as a whole operates. I would like someone to explain the system fairly briefly if they can. We never got a chance to ask this question of CFIA.
There's one other point that I don't want to lose here.
In the Canadian Council of Grocery Distributors presentation you said that “media must not be provided with the information ahead of industry”. I wrote “media”. Has that happened? The scare factor in these kinds of situations is awful. We're seeing that right now with the H1N1 virus. A scare factor can destroy an industry for all the wrong reasons.
Can you comment on that? What has to be done to prevent that from happening? Again, I would come back to the point that somebody has to be in charge and be responsible. This shared responsibility, in my view, is part of the problem.
6:50 p.m.
Vice-President, Food Safety and Labelling, Canadian Council of Grocery Distributors
From the standpoint of media communication, what we're saying is that the communication to media and industry should be at the same time and not one ahead of the other. It should be one to many, which is the current system through the CFIA webmaster, whereby it goes out electronically to anyone who chooses to subscribe to the webmaster, including any consumer who wishes to do so. We just feel that it needs to be ensured that this is the way communication does happen, that it is the one to many, and that it is occurring at the same time, as opposed to perhaps one group hearing it ahead of the other.
6:50 p.m.
Mike Dungate General Manager, Chicken Farmers of Canada
It's a slightly different perspective and it depends on what is going on. I'll go back to not a listeriosis outbreak but an avian influenza outbreak.
I think what was beneficial in 2004--and we came out of there and we did a post-mortem and a lessons learned--was the fact that there was a briefing by CFIA with industry before it went public, and we were collaborating on how to contain the disease.
We also knew that we had to share media lines, in a certain sense, because as soon as the media got a press release from CFIA they were going to start making every contact possible to try to get a different angle on a story. Then the one to many becomes a one to many and a different message out there, and we're trying to support each other in the messaging. I think there's a team and a collaborative relationship that needs to be established there. I think it's very important if we're to manage and know what we have to do.
6:50 p.m.
Conservative
6:50 p.m.
Bloc
André Bellavance Bloc Richmond—Arthabaska, QC
Mr. Wilcott, my question is to you again. Earlier, I didn't have time in my seven minutes to put all the questions I had for you.
Mr. Dungate was just speaking about the events in 2004, in British Columbia, to which you referred also. Because of avian flu, a great many birds—poultry—had to be destroyed.
I imagine that the British Columbia Centre for Disease Control was directly involved in those events. You were certainly on the front line then. Is that not so?