Mr. Speaker, the two-week delay in issuing a recall on meat contaminated with E. coli clearly shows that the Conservatives' cuts to food safety are putting Canadians at risk.
Despite repeated questions last week asking the Minister of Agriculture who Canadians can rely on to be responsible for their food safety, the only clear answer we received was that the Conservatives were not interested in providing the necessary resources to the Canadian Food Inspection Agency to prevent food-borne illnesses.
The Conservative government has created a vacuum through budget and program cuts and changes that have left the industry to police itself and Canadians responsible for their own food safety. It is endangering the health and safety of countless Canadians, threatening our ability to keep borders open to Canadian produce and trade and imperiling vulnerable farmers who have just started to get back on their feet after the BSE crisis.
On September 3, U.S. food inspectors at the border stopped a shipment of beef trimmings from XL Foods plant in Brooks, Alberta, and discovered E. coli 0157. American inspectors informed us of the contamination on September 4, two weeks before the Conservative government notified Canadians that contaminated meat was in the food supply and on store shelves across the country.
In the meantime, on September 13, still three days before the CFIA issued its first recall on meat from XL Foods, U.S. food safety inspectors delisted the XL Foods facility, preventing it from shipping food across the border. It took 13 days after becoming aware of contamination for the CFIA to finally issue a recall, which has since been expanded multiple times and now covers over 250 products. It does not take two weeks to do a confirming test for E. coli. It takes days.
When I asked the minister last week about the delay, he trivialized the issue, a brave choice given his unfortunate reaction to the listeria contamination that claimed the lives of seven Canadians in 2008 on his watch. The minister misled the public by stating that none of the meat had made it into the food supply. Clearly, he could not prove that. Food had been leaving that facility for weeks and it was only when the Americans caught our food safety lapses that a hold was placed on the meat. Now there are at least four people in Alberta who are sick.
The minister said that the recall took two weeks because of testing. That is preposterous. There is no way, as I said, that it should have taken two weeks to get a confirmation. Perhaps he should ask the 90 biologists who lost their jobs through these cuts whether we would be in a better position to protect Canada's food safety if the Conservatives had provided the necessary resources to our inspection officials.
The minister refuses to explain when he became aware of the problem with XL Foods. Why did it take a sudden crisis for the government to even realize how serious a problem there was at XL Foods, which has led to one of the largest recalls in Canadian history?
We cannot blame the inspectors. They are doing the best they can with limited resources. By removing resources and relaxing regulations, the Conservatives are creating a powder keg wherein we have a facility with inspectors who are not all trained on the compliance verification system and those who do not know are not getting all the information.
Clearly, workers were not sanitizing their stations or the meat properly. Inspectors lost the ability to keep an eye on this when the government started handing over more and more oversight to the industry itself.
It was clear from the report issued by the CFIA on September 24 that the plant was not in compliance with a substantial number of standards and requirements, prompting the agency to then shut the doors until it could come into compliance. This does not happen overnight. We are talking about considerable time where self-regulation allowed the plant to get sloppy and, when processors get sloppy, people get sick.
Dr. Richard Arsenault, director of the CFIA meat inspection program, said:
We need to do a better job of managing this data and finding these trends ahead of time...as opposed to having to respond to a crisis like this.
If the agency is already worried, how will it manage under further cuts?