Subcommittee on Food Safety Committee on May 6th, 2009

[John Masswohl]

Absolutely. You want to make sure you're doing all the things necessary to ensure that it's safe, without going as far as doing things that are purely cosmetic, that add costs and affect your competitiveness.

[Brian Storseth, Conservative, Westlock—St. Paul, AB]

Absolutely.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Mr. Storseth, your time has expired.

Mr. Masswohl, you did mention something there—

[Brian Storseth, Conservative, Westlock—St. Paul, AB]

Do I have more time, Mr. Chair?

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

No, you don't.

[Brian Storseth, Conservative, Westlock—St. Paul, AB]

I'm starting to agree with Mr. Easter when it comes to some of this.

[Voices]

Oh, oh!

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Everybody gets treated the same.

You referred, Mr. Masswohl, to what happened in the BSE crisis. I actually made a statement in the House today in which I mentioned that very same thing. The last thing we need right now is fear-mongering or misinformation out there about the safety of the pork industry. You're right, I think they're probably on pins and needles hoping they don't go through the same thing that those of us involved in the beef industry did. So I thought that was a very good point.

But to Mr. McLean, as kind of an offshoot of that, I was wondering what's happening right now with H1N1. Do you feel there's any food safety issue at all with people eating Canadian pork, or pork in general?

[Robert McLean]

None whatsoever. But, you know, sitting through this hearing here shows us we're doing more testing, we're doing more surveillance, so there are going to be more cases that consumers will hear about. That's simply because the system is working.

Is it a food safety issue? No, not necessarily. To countries that say they don't have any problems, I question that they have the surveillance system we have. We have to keep this in perspective.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Sure. I hope the same thing happens to our pork industry as happened with the BSE, where we actually increased our consumption per capita here in Canada of Canadian beef. Only time will tell.

Mr. Easter, five minutes.

[Wayne Easter, Liberal, Malpeque, PE]

I have a couple of questions, Mr. Chair.

I note, Mike, that in your presentation you say you're not in favour of the poultry rejection project, but you don't see it as a food safety issue. Can you explain both sides of that equation? I ask that because if there is another benefit of the food poultry rejection system that we need to be considering, other than food safety, I think we need to think about it. And I think you're talking about independent third-party options there.

I have a second question for you as well. You mention in your recommendations that harmonized meat processing codes in Canada should come under a single federal standard. I think a number of us are worried about that approach, in that it would have a massive impact on some of the smaller slaughter plants. I refer especially to beef and pork and ones that produce sausages, ones that provide a safe product under federal standards, and more localized product, purchasing local beef and pork and supplying it to local residents within a fairly tight area.

Could you comment on those two points?

[Mike Dungate]

Thank you.

In terms of the poultry rejection project, what you've got is CFIA inspectors off the line, and these are birds that are identified to be pulled off the line, and you're determining what can go back on and what's salvageable in that.

In fact, the CFIA inspector will watch the line. These people are taking the product off. The inspector could let them all go, but they're looking to say “Does it meet our quality? Does it meet that?” As it comes in, if it's got a broken wing or something, that gets taken off, and the farmer doesn't get paid for it. He doesn't get paid for because CFIA regulations state that's not a sellable product. If it comes in broken, it can't go on.

We've always had CFIA inspectors who have said, “Okay, these are CFIA regulations. We're employing them; we're saying that comes off the line.” That means the farmer doesn't get paid for the weight of that or the whole bird. We now have CFIA inspectors off the line, in terms of doing that, which is not a food safety issue because you're just taking the stuff off. You're not saying what can go on the line; you're saying what's coming off.

Now you have a plant employee who is going to determine whether it is something that happened as a result of being in the plant or something that is the result of the farmer doing something wrong in the transport there.

Now you have the person who's buying the product using federal legislation to determine whether they're paying for it or the farmer is paying for it. Instead of having that third party there who was essentially adjudicating using federal legislation, the buyer is determining who's paying for this—the farmer or the processing plant.

That's why we say it's not a food safety issue, but it does become an issue in terms of a transactional nature between farmers and the processing plant and who pays. CFIA had that third-party role before when they were doing it, and now we've put it in the hands....

We agreed, partly, to do this because then the CFIA vet would come back and sign off an attestation. They would review the work done. We've since learned that now the vets do not want to sign that attestation because they didn't inspect that product, even though they're supposed to go down and look at it. So now we're worried we have no control whatsoever in this process.

[Wayne Easter, Liberal, Malpeque, PE]

Small plants, big plants, provincial, federal?

[Mike Dungate]

Quickly on that one, in terms of us...product moves everywhere across the country. More and more—and we've heard it—you've got to get enough volume to meet a buyer of this size--product. You can't do it all at once. So the product does move a lot.

It causes issues in terms of competitiveness. If the federal level is not what we need and it's supercharged, as it were, then let's find that common level that works, understanding that's what any product that would come into the country has to meet.

We're not in favour of dumbing them down below a food safety level, but we're not interested in a regulatory burden either. We would like a consistent application across the country.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Your time has expired, Mr. Easter.

Mr. Shipley, you have five minutes.

[Bev Shipley, Conservative, Lambton—Kent—Middlesex, ON]

I'll continue with that, just for a minute. There's been a lot of discussion around it. In fact, one of our individual witnesses was saying that if you're going to start to take away.... It's becoming easier to get a hospital built than it is to get a slaughterhouse built, if that is in fact a reliable comment—and I think coming from that individual it was a fair assessment. We've heard the stories about why we don't have some of the processors staying in business, and it's that the restrictions are just so high.

We always hear about how we don't have much issue. Most of us around the table here likely buy product that comes from provincial slaughterhouses. So it becomes this issue about feeding the large companies as opposed to shutting down our small community slaughterhouses, which are actually doing a great job and seem to not be caught up in many of these recalls.

Help us understand how we can politically.... As soon as we talk about changing or harmonizing or bringing together a standard that is actually a reliable standard, then the political field starts to go wild about it, saying we're losing our standards and we're not going to protect our farmers, our people.

We have the same trouble when we try to harmonize and talk about imports coming in and having to meet Canadian standards. Those that don't meet it, we've got the issue.... I'll raise that question maybe later.

Can you deal with that other one? How can you help us get through that? It's a big issue.

[Mike Dungate]

It is a big issue, and I think we're seeing it from this side as well, Mr. Shipley, in terms of some smaller provincial processors who, because they're provincially inspected, are not allowed to ship and sell their product outside the province. They may be located in a place where their natural market goes across a couple of provinces and they want that ability. They're seeing that the standard at CFIA, that investment cost, is prohibiting them from doing that.

I've heard--I can't verify it--that a lot of times what's going on with our CFIA national standards is each time a country we're interested in exporting to says there's a higher standard we have to meet here, we add it across the board in Canada. So we up it and up it, and maybe, instead of being very good negotiators with countries in terms of what we have to do to get into those markets, we meet what they say, but we're raising the bar all the time for ourselves.

[Bev Shipley, Conservative, Lambton—Kent—Middlesex, ON]

I guess, though, that could be if we had a list of 15 standards and a country says they want this one, then they may not require the other 14, but they require that one, and now we have 16.

[Mike Dungate]

Right.

[Bev Shipley, Conservative, Lambton—Kent—Middlesex, ON]

I think that's always an issue. I'm trying to work through how we can become more competitive and yet keep our small plants and our community businesses in place, which provide great service to our communities.

Mr. Wilcott, I'm wondering how it's working in terms of moving forward, steps learned, lessons learned. I think, at least I suspect, that after this event, everyone has done lessons learned. You've done it in B.C. I'm sure they've done it in Ontario and Alberta. Nationally, CFIA has done it--in fact, gone beyond that. Health Canada has looked at what's been learned, what we can do better.

How is that being coordinated from your perspective? How are the communications? How can that come together? What format would you suggest we could move to? This is all about communications, and communications, whether it's here or sometimes in our family, wherever it is, is one of the largest struggles we have.

[Lynn Wilcott]

We started a process, I think it was two years ago. An outbreak of E. coli in Alberta was connected to donairs, and we wanted distribution information of that product in British Columbia. We didn't get it and we were quite frustrated by it. Our provincial health officer was involved with the CFIA to get this information.

Out of that came a realization by us and the local CFIA folks that we had to do something to try to improve communication, so we have been working on a food-borne illness outbreak response protocol to share information. It's not finalized yet. When it is finalized, I'm hoping we will start to have more open and free communication. That's been the process we have used within British Columbia.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Thank you very much.

Mr. Dungate, you mentioned a minute ago about how other countries, when we're trying to open markets, whatever, ask for a little more. Just to be clear, are you suggesting that maybe in the whole realm of food safety it isn't really necessary, or are you saying that maybe those countries are putting extra requests in there simply to impede the amount of exports coming into their country? They would be imports from their side. Can you clarify that?

[Mike Dungate]

I'm not sure exactly why they are doing it. I know that in a lot of cases, other countries, certainly.... If we're negotiating a veterinary agreement, we've always said we should be doing an equivalency in terms of inspections, CFIA-level inspection versus the level of inspection in that country. We end up generally, however, in these bilateral veterinary agreements getting these approvals of plant-by-plant inspections. So they come over, look at our plant and say if that plant wants to ship, they're going to have to do this differently, do that differently. It may be that they're adding something unique to that plant because of how it's set up, and now that gets written into our federal standard because we only have a federal standard; we don't have it on a plant-by-plant basis. They look at it plant by plant.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Thank you.

Mr. Bellavance, do you have any questions?

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

Yes.

Mr. Dungate, Mr. Fuller was the one who made the opening statement, but I would image that you agree with what he said. Could you provide clarification or a comment about his remarks concerning the federal government? According to him, the federal government could act with greater conviction to protect the industry's credibility and the national inspection process by emphasizing effective communication with consumers. This is pretty much what other witnesses have told us, both this evening and ever since the subcommittee began its study on food safety and the Listeriosis crisis.

In your opinion, what should be done? The recommendation is to ensure more effective communication with consumers, but shouldn't we also be talking about more effective communications with the provinces concerned and the other agencies? Everyone must have the same information, everyone must know what direction we are going in and everyone must understand what we are doing. I've already used this expression at other committee meetings, but all the same, I have the impression that some people are on the side roads. As Mr. Wilcott said, and he put it very well, the result is that we are not as effective as we should be.

This is the year 2009, and we have already dealt with other problems. We are reviewing all these difficulties, and we think that these things must be understood. Unlike Mr. Shipley, I don't have the impression that most people have learned from their mistakes, be it the agencies, the departments or other institutions. Mr. Fuller tells us that communications must be improved, but how could that be done?