Good evening, and thank you for inviting us to speak to you today on food safety in the meat sector. My name is Jim Laws and I'm the executive director of the Canadian Meat Council in Ottawa. With me today is Martin Michaud, vice-president of technical services at Olymel, one of Canada's largest processors of pork and pork products, headquartered in St-Hyacinthe, Quebec.
Our sector is the largest of the food processing industries, employing some 67,000 people, with gross sales of over $20.3 billion. We have 43 regular members who operate 134 federally registered establishments across Canada. We also have 74 associate supplier members who provide equipment, rendering, storage, ingredients, packaging materials, and services such as laboratory testing for the regular members. Altogether there are some 772 registered federal establishments that slaughter, process, render, debone, package, can, or offer storage for meat and are inspected by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency.
Every day in Canada, over 100 million meals are eaten. A significant number of those meals contain meat eaten in Canada each and every day. Major illnesses and deaths due to meat are rare events in Canada. The number of meat recalls in proportion to the volume of Canada's total meat production is quite small. Most meat recalls are issued voluntarily by meat processors as a precautionary measure. Very few meat recalls in Canada are a direct result of illness. Many Canadians who travel abroad to countries around the world know that they have to be very careful about what they eat. Getting sick from something that we have eaten here in Canada is something we rarely worry about.
Nevertheless, Canada's meat sector has been challenged with several major food safety events over the past few years. Canada's meat industy takes full responsibility for the safety of the meat it produces. Maple Leaf Foods did the right thing. They stepped up and accepted full responsibility for the products from their Bartor Road facility.
We need to get on with this subcommittee's work and the work of the listeria investigation so that all the lessons learned can be shared with the entire industry so that this type of outbreak does not happen again. Yes, we still have work to do.
We actively participated in the CFIA consultations on the new listeria control measures that came into effect on April 1, 2009. We welcome those new measures; however, we still have many questions about the policy. We believe the policy should be amended to set the rate of testing based on the risk of the product produced. For instance, dried and salted deli meats, such as salami and pepperoni, generally do not support the growth of listeria. Others with higher moisture, like deli hams, do. We also believe that the rate of testing should reflect the investment in brand-new state-of-the-art buildings and equipment, combined with the company's proven track record of excellent lab results. In addition, we have asked the CFIA to let industry have access to the entire rapid assay tests for listeria that appear in Health Canada's The Compendium of Analytical Methods and those that are permitted in the United States.
Over the years, meat processors have been continually improving their food safety systems. Millions of dollars have been invested by companies in upgrading their equipment and reformulating their products to include newly approved antimicrobials such as the new high-pressure pasteurization technology and the addition of sodium diacetate. Hundreds of thousands of dollars on additional listeria testing and countless more hours by sanitation management and quality control personnel have been invested. Meat processing facilities employ highly professional food science and microbiology experts to manage their food safety programs, and many firms have Ph.D.s on staff.
Canada's meat industry is already the most regulated sector of the food industry. In addition to the requirements applicable to meat and food under the Food and Drugs Act and regulations and the Consumer Packaging and Labelling Act, we must comply with Canada's Meat Inspection Act and regulations and the highly prescriptive and comprehensive manual of procedures.
When we print out all the acts and regulations, there are over 1,500 pages of regulations that we are dealing with. This is the Meat Inspection Act, and then we pull out the manual of procedures. As you can see, it is a very large stack of paper that Canada's meat industry is faced with.
Complete sectors of our grocery supplies, such as bakery goods, cereals, and spices, are rarely inspected and do not have all the additional manuals of procedures that we are faced with in the meat and poultry sector.
Despite the recent events in the meat industry, we believe that our food safety system is not broken. As CFIA correctly points out on their website, the safety of food products produced in Canada is ultimately the responsibility of the food industry. Food inspection programs administered by the CFIA confirmed that establishments have taken the appropriate steps to produce safe food products. In the past, food manufacturers relied almost entirely on end-product testing to determine the safety of their products. Now industry representatives and government together have developed scientifically sound principles, including the HACCP system, to control production. Hazard analysis critical control point, as you all heard before, was conceived in the 1960s when the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration asked Pillsbury to design and manufacture our first foods for space flights.
Our HACCP is a standardized, internationally recognized approach to food safety. Under HACCP, manufacturers identify stages and production processes at which problems are most likely to occur and they take actions to prevent them. After last year's listeriosis outbreak, the Canadian Meat Council immediately formed a listeria working group as a joint effort with other industry associations and their members from the Canadian meat and poultry industry. Our objective is to develop and promote the adoption of best practices for the control of listeria, to advocate for the approval of listeria-controlled interventions, to assist the regulators in developing sound listeria control regulations, and, above all else, to encourage complete sharing of information on food safety between competing processors of ready-to-eat meats.
In addition, we will, of course, continue to deliver regular educational seminars and technical symposia for our members.
I'll pass it on to my colleague, Martin Michaud, who will describe our eight recommendations.