Subcommittee on Food Safety Committee on May 6th, 2009

[Mike Dungate]

In a way, it's a matter of educating people. We mentioned that in the current system, there is a gap between the moment the consumer buys the product and the moment he eats it, and that this gap has to be covered. That is why we are contributing to an education partnership. The government must play a very important role as part of this exercise.

As for the poultry rejection project, a number of issues were raised in the media. We believe that this is not about a food safety problem and we wanted CFIA to demonstrate this so as to convince people that the problem was due to something else. Frankly, I think that this issue is primarily between CFIA and the workers. All the same, the media and our consumers were wondering if there was a problem with the slaughtering of poultry. But that was not the case. The perception of consumers and the media just need to be corrected.

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

Thank you. In the final analysis, that is your criticism of the agency. Mr. Fuller also mentioned the media coverage of these problems. He said that the agency had not taken the necessary measures to downplay the concerns, on the contrary, and that the problem had taken on greater dimensions. The farmers did not want this, of course, and no doubt the other stakeholders in the food chain did not want this either.

[Mike Dungate]

That's right.

[Lynn Wilcott]

I want to make a few comments on what you're talking about.

Fears are generated by the public when they either don't have all the information or think they don't have all the information. That's when the public gets most concerned, in my experience.

On regulatory agencies releasing information to the public, we've seen a trend in B.C. with restaurant inspections, and I think it's similar across the country. They're now posted on the health authority's website. So people can go to the website and see what the inspection service was for the restaurant. They can choose to go to that restaurant or not.

At the time, the restaurant industry basically said the world was going to end if this happened--and it never did. What happened was the poor restaurants had to improve, and the public felt better about going to restaurants.

I don't think it's that different with processing plants. We underestimate the intelligence of the average consumer. The more information they have, the better decisions they're going to make, and the better they'll feel about them. They'll feel confident about buying products.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Thank you very much.

Mr. Allen, do you have any questions? Five minutes.

[Malcolm Allen, NDP, Welland, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair. My friend Mr. Shipley raised the issue about a witness who was here earlier this week, Mr. Charlebois, who used the analogy of the hospital and an abattoir—I think erroneously so, to be honest. I think he does a disservice by doing that, because the assumption is that somehow food safety should be considered less than a hospital stay.

I don't agree with that, because ultimately a hospital is about sanitation and looking after those who are chronically ill. They're unfortunate to be in that situation, but it's still about sanitation. Why should we suggest that somehow the food system should be less sanitized than the hospital situation? More folks died last year than died in the average hospital, when you think about it. Ultimately when we're thinking of sanitation, I think to use the analogy sets up, as Mr. Wilcott said, this sense in people's minds that you are inferring that it's harder to run an abattoir than it is to run a hospital. Well, first of all, an abattoir doesn't have surgeries. We don't confine the hogs or cows to a ward. It's a processing plant. So I think that analogy was flawed from the get-go.

Nonetheless it raises an interesting point when people repeat it, because it assumes we should think about food safety differently than we do about the health care system, and somehow that's here and this is here. I don't think that's true when it comes to sanitation. It should be on par. One of the things we did learn and that I'm hearing from all of the witnesses is that the system needs to be, from producer to fork, safe. One of the things that does happen all the way through the system is handling. Everyone's handling the product all the way along.

Whether it be the farmer, who is doing an excellent job, whether it's the trucker or the stocker of the shelves, whether it's in the abattoir or in the poultry processing plant, everything's being handled. So why aren't we saying that their sanitation standards should be equal to the standards for those who are handling patients? They're simply transmitting different types of pathogens one way or the other. I think we do a disservice when we do that. I'm not suggesting, Mr. Dungate, that you did that. You didn't, just to make that clear.

You talked about the regulations and the burden. I would suggest to you that there are producers in this world who are looking at us and saying that we raised the bar and kept them out. We're saying to them, “You raised the bar some other place and kept us out.” But here's what the industry has said to us so far during this committee. Whether it was Michael McCain or some of the other bigger producers, they are saying in testimony that the voluntary standards in their plant are higher than what the CFIA requires.

I may be wrong. Maybe I'm hearing it wrong, Mr. Dungate, that somehow the CFIA's standards are higher than what the plants feel they should be doing. Was I being misled when I heard that? Was it spin or is it factual?

[Mike Dungate]

I would put our system and what we do in our industry up against anyone—absolutely anyone in terms of what we do. I work at a farm. I know what the regulations are, and I would say that certainly what we do on farm... We've gone through...and as you heard from Mr. Fuller, 83% of our farms are already certified on a HACCP program. Frankly, we're waiting for the next step from CFIA so that we can approve this overall system. We're concerned about the stall on that basis, because we want to be there.

I will say this. No matter what the standards are—and it may be a standard that has to go into another country or a standard that has to be for the purchasers of our product, particularly the consumers of our product—it doesn't matter if it's science or not. If they won't buy it because we don't have an animal care program, because we don't have a food safety program, or because we're not doing exactly what we said we were going to do, we won't sell product.

So at a certain point, there is a regulatory bar, but there's a marketing bar as well. Believe me—and I think that's where you're getting Michael McCain—we meet a marketing bar. In most cases, it will be above, and it has to be above, the regulatory bar, because the regulatory bar should be the minimum.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Thank you very much, Mr. Allen. I did cut you off about six seconds, but it was very close.

Mr. Storseth, five minutes.

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

He certainly is very generous.

I do want to note for the record, thank goodness we don't have television cameras here as Mr. Easter wanted, or they'd note that there are no Liberals here today.

I would like to talk to Mr. Masswohl about something. We're here today talking about a very serious issue on food safety. South of the border there's something going on that I think is being veiled in the cover of food safety but has very little to do with food safety. You know very well what I'm talking about, the COOL legislation.

As a chance to put the Canadian Cattlemen's Association's position on the record on the COOL legislation in the U.S., can you give me your position on this? Do you believe it has anything to do with food safety standards in the United States?

[John Masswohl]

It has nothing to do with food safety. It's a marketing initiative. It has been described by the administration that was in place when the law was passed as basically a marketing initiative and having nothing to do with food safety. Since the new administration has come in they've started to waiver, and they don't seem sure whether it's marketing or food safety. We're not getting a lot of sense that the issue is moving in the right direction.

The problem is that they've passed a law that requires meat, whether it's beef, pork, lamb, or other products, to be labelled with the origin of the country where the animal was born. That is a violation of the NAFTA. It is a violation of the WTO. There's a principle of substantial transformation in both those agreements that says that meat has the origin of the country where the animal was transferred into meat. That law violates that principle, and we think the case needs to be pursued at the WTO. Minister Day said as much last week while he was in Washington. We appreciate that. I guess we're waiting for the legal steps to be taken.

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

I agree with you.

One of the things that I hear sometimes from people around the Standing Committee on Agriculture table when we bring witnesses forward is that they're advocating for COOL legislation from the Canadian perspective. I think this would not only have nothing to do with food safety, as is the case in the U.S., but I think it could be potentially very harmful to our industry.

Would you agree with that?

[John Masswohl]

I think people have to be careful what they ask for. There's nothing wrong with the concept of country of origin labelling per se, but our problem with the U.S. law is how they did it, labelling the meat with where the animal was born. With the Canadian approach, which is a product of Canada standard, a voluntary standard, maybe there's still some work to be done on how that's defined, but I think what we're doing here in Canada is a much more appropriate approach, on a voluntary basis.

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

I couldn't agree with you more there.

If the chair will permit, we talked a little bit earlier, Mr. Masswohl, about regulatory burden and the burden that some of the additional steps we've had to take, as a government and as a country, have put on the producers in our country.

I would like you to put on the record some of the regulatory burden and how you would like to see it addressed in Canada, the differences between the U.S. and Canada. How would your organization like to see us go about addressing some of the differential in the regulatory burden that we're seeing?

[John Masswohl]

There's a number of things. I heard the debate about hospitals versus slaughter facilities. I don't know anything about hospitals, but the point on slaughter facilities might be moot, because nobody wants to build a slaughter facility in Canada.

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

Exactly.

[John Masswohl]

In fact, it's the opposite. We're worried about the ones that we have built over the last few years and that are closing down because they're not competitive.

For a long time, we have been an advocate of regulatory harmonization. Regulatory harmonization is not all about food safety. A lot of it is about competitiveness. What would top my list would be the enhanced feed ban, the SRM removals. Canada needed to enhance our feed ban and we did it. I think we went a little far on it, in that we've basically oversold it.

The Americans are starting to catch up. They're implementing their enhanced feed ban. In fact, they have technically implemented it. It is in force, but they're not enforcing it for another six months, I believe, and even when it is fully enforced, they don't have to remove all the materials that we do, and they can still use them in fertilizer.

One of the requests that we have made is for the minister to work towards harmonizing with the U.S. and to give us the ability for fertilizer to come back. We're not convinced that there's going to be a lot of transmission from people who are spreading the fertilizer they buy at Home Depot on their backyards in Toronto. It would be very valuable to have that back.

There are issues related to veterinary drug approvals. I think one of the witnesses talked about veterinary drugs that can be used in other countries, but not necessarily here. There are a lot of veterinary drug companies that don't bother to apply for approvals in Canada because of the length of time and the cost to get them approved in Canada. For the size of the market that Canada is, it's sometimes not even worth the bother of applying.

It doesn't mean that those products aren't safe. Our competitors are using them. If we had a regulatory system that could facilitate or streamline that approval process without sacrificing.... I'm not talking about making any concessions or doing anything to jeopardize safety. But if other countries have approved certain products, maybe we don't have to start at square one all the time.

Another issue is user fees, for example, to have food safety officials in Canadian slaughter facilities. They're providing a public service to do that food safety inspection, and those slaughter facilities in Canada pay the cost of those food safety inspectors back to the government, whereas in the U.S. that is deemed as a public service and the U.S. government provides that service. So again we have a cost imbalance.

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

How much in user fees are you looking at there?

[John Masswohl]

It's been hard to break it down in total. We understand that the total user fees paid for all meat inspection in Canada--so that's all meats--is approximately $20 million per year. We're a subset of that.

[The Chair, Conservative, Larry Miller]

Thank you, Mr. Masswohl.

We'll go to the official opposition. I don't believe they have any questions.

Mr. Shipley? No?

Well, seeing as we've had four full rounds and there isn't enough time to complete another one, I think we've had a pretty good meeting with a lot of questions answered.

I'd like to thank all of you very much, lady and gentlemen, for coming here today. It was very informative.

The meeting is adjourned.