Mr. Speaker, I rise to speak to this motion, which is a timely one, It follows up on the emergency debate the Liberals had asked for a few nights ago.
This is all about the responsibility for the safety of the food that Canadians eat. Canadians need to know they can buy food, eat it and not get sick when they buy it from a reputable grocery store or from a place where they know the food has been inspected and has a CFIA stamp. That is how the system is supposed to work. The responsibility of governments is all about that.
In the case of food-borne illness, in the case of food safety, there are three groups in the government that are responsible to ensure there is safe food in our country. The first is the Minister of Agriculture and Agri-Food. The second is the Minister of Health. The third is the Public Health Agency of Canada. The three of them, working together, are responsible to ensure that the food we eat is safe.
There is even a written protocol. When there is any question of the safety of food, when there is any hint of contamination of food, this protocol kicks in and implicates these three departments. It gives them very clear guidelines as what their role is and what they are supposed to do.
Ultimately, this issue is about the health and safety of Canadians and their confidence that the government, which is responsible for that, is on the job and on the watch.
Let us look at how the Minister of Agriculture and Agri-Food, who is one of the people responsible for the safety of the food we eat, has handled this.
The minister has mishandled the file from the word go, and for very many reasons.The minister could not give us clear answers. He loves to stand in the House and blame everyone for ratcheting up the noise and for creating anxiety among Canadians. Canadians are anxious because they are not getting answers, because they are not getting very clear assurances about the food they eat. This is at the heart of the problem.
The three groups responsible, the Public Health Agency, the Minister of Health and the Minister of Agriculture and Agri-Food, should be out there every day, if necessary. We saw that happen with the SARS outbreak and with the BSE incident. The Liberal minister of agriculture and agri-food at the time was out there telling people what was going on, everything that was being done and keeping Canadians in the loop. This is at the heart of the problem. Not only could we not get any answers, we could not get the truth. We could not get any rationale for why there were no answers and how and why this happened.
I want to look at the facts.
This was not the first time that the U.S. Food Safety and Inspection Service had to notify CFIA about Canada's food safety, especially with regard to beef, chicken, et cetera. It seems that Canada cannot not take care of this problem. We have to depend on the Americans to help us out.
Reports show that the CFIA was sent reports by the United States Food Safety and Inspection Service several times in the last 10 years regarding deficiencies found in Canada's meat processing plants, including XL Foods.
The Liberals were in power when this problem was flagged in July 2003. We immediately delisted XL Foods and told it that it had to fix things. Then, when it fixed things in 2004, it was reinstated and put back on the list.
In 2004 the CFIA and the United States looked at the plant and found there were some new problems. At that time, the Liberal government minister warned the plant and told it that it had 30 days to fix it. It was reinstated again in 2005 and everything seemed to be going right.
The U.S. was concerned at the time, and still is, that we were not tracking the trends. Everybody knows that in food processing there is always going to be E. coli and various contaminants because of the nature of the product itself. One is supposed to trend track.
There should always be random testing to make sure there are no sudden rises in super-shedders within the cattle, which are suddenly bringing in large amounts of pathogenic E. coli. That is supposed to be done on a regular basis. The U.S. does it. We do not, even though we have been asked to do it. Of American processing companies, 75% do that. We do not. Why did the CFIA not begin to take action when the government came on the watch in 2006 and the American food safety group told it that this was continuing to happen? It did nothing.
In May of this year, the United States told the CFIA that it was not tracking the trends for E. coli, and we got no answer for that. Here we found that it continued to ask the question and had to do the tracking itself. Having done that tracking itself, that is how it found out that we were having problems on September 4 and flagged it for us because we were not on the watch. The government was not doing its job. It was not watching what was going on.
Therefore, it took 13 days for the government to pay attention after the September 4 notification by the U.S. inspectors. We did not even find that it did bracketing in those 13 days. When it did the recall on September 16, which was 13 days later, it did not bracket. That is an important part of recalling a food. The shipments that went prior to and after the knowledge that the food was contaminated are recalled so that people do not buy it, put it in their fridges and freezers and leave it there not knowing, thinking that it was only from the date the recall was given and onwards that there was a problem. That was not done.
Then it was another two full weeks before the plant was shut down, by which time that food had gone out into the retail grocery chains and was in people's fridges, in small butcher shops and everywhere. People were buying it continuing to believe, as Canadians do, that the government was on the watch and that their food was safe.
I want to hear an answer from the Minister of Agriculture and Agri-Food as to why it took him two weeks—and we still have not got that answer—why he did not bracket, and why he allowed that food to go out into the food chain, where we do not know who has that food in their freezers right now. It is not a good enough answer to say that people should cook the food properly or, as we heard in the last debate from the parliamentary secretary across the way, that if everyone washes their hands everything will be fine. This is the kind of stuff we are hearing. There is no question here of a sense of responsibility for Canadians, none at all.
That was the Minister of Agriculture and Agri-Food who completely mismanaged the whole thing. Now we will look at the role of the Minister of Health and the Public Health Agency of Canada.
What should have happened was this. Health Canada is responsible for something called a health risk assessment, which states that it must be completed “in a rapid and timely manner in order to ensure that appropriate risk management decisions are taken to prevent contaminated food from reaching the consumer”. The Canadian mom and dad out there who are cooking steaks on the barbecue must be prevented from getting that contaminated food. That is from the Foodborne Illness Outbreak Response Protocol, which is normally called FIORP. So when I mention FIORP from now on, members will know that I am talking about a protocol written up, agreed upon and signed by those three departments that were responsible.
There was no rapid and timely manner in which that appropriate risk management was taken, or if it was taken it did not get out to the consumer at all. We did not hear about it until September 26, which was two weeks later. We suddenly heard on the Health Canada and Public Health Agency of Canada websites that there was a problem. In the meantime, 15 people had become ill.
What immediately triggers the Minister of Health and the Public Health Agency of Canada to get involved is that a person gets sick. One person has to get sick. It does not say that a person dies; it says a person gets sick and there is reason to believe or to suspect that there is a potential for more people to get sick.
We know that XL Foods processes 40% of the food in this country. We know it took two weeks for the Minister of Agriculture and Agri-Food to actually even recall. We know it took him a further two weeks, in which this was all over the food retail stores.
Why is it that the Minister of Health did not get out there? The Minister of Health remains silent. There is a deafening silence from the Minister of Health and the Public Health Agency. They get in when a person gets sick. They get in when there is reason to believe that an illness will go across the country, not when people die, not when we have 25 or 30 people sick; there is no magic number. It is said that it is when it reaches over one province. Well, we know that the extent of that food going out in the food chain was across this country. It was not limited to Alberta alone. So the word here is “potential” and we have no explanation at all as to why the silence and as to why this was not done. There is a four-year-old child with kidney failure. As far as we know right now, 15 people are sick from this E. coli outbreak.
The point is this. If we have seniors, young children and immunocompromised people eating that food, they have a higher risk of dying. Healthy people eating it can get very sick and hopefully get better. So it is only a matter of sheer luck that no one died. It is not because of good care. It is not because of good handling on the file. It is simply sheer luck as to who ate this. The Minister of Health was slow to respond and she was silent. She knew about the contamination.
The minute someone gets sick, does not die but just gets sick, and it crosses over one province, the Public Health Agency of Canada takes the lead right away as per the FIORP. The protocol says:
Once a potential multi-jurisdictional food-borne illness outbreak has come to the attention of public health or food regulatory agencies, there is a requirement...
That is a requirement, not a “maybe should”. It goes on:
...to examine the current available information and determine if it is sufficient to indicate the presence of a potential multi-jurisdictional food-borne illness outbreak that requires a collaborative and coordinated investigation and the activation of an OICC....
That is an Outbreak Investigation Coordinating Committee.
The FIORP OICC should be activated when the investigation and response to the identified potential multi-jurisdictional risk of human contamination “...is known or has the potential to be related to a widely-distributed food product”. Read: XL, 40% of the processing of food. How much wider can we get when that food goes all across this country?
We are saying that they have mismanaged the file as well, from the perspectives of the Minister of Health and the Public Health Agency of Canada. The reason the Public Health Agency has to take the lead as soon as a person gets sick is that it has been given the funding to have the capacity and the resources that can be mobilized immediately to assist in the investigation of food-borne illness outbreaks and for surveillance and tracking.
Surveillance and tracking is not just about checking where the meat went. It is in letting every emergency department and all the health professionals and hospitals across this country know that anybody who presents with an illness that is an enteric illness in this case, abdominal illness caused by food, gastroenteritis or whatever we want to call it, that those cases should be reported immediately to decide whether they are linked to this particular thing. That is what surveillance is, and it did not happen, or if it did happen, nobody knew about it, including the people who were supposed to be informed. This again is mismanagement of the file.
Has the current government learned nothing from Walkerton? I say the “current government” because there are three ministers currently on the front benches of the government who were there and had responsibility for what went on with Walkerton. The Minister of Finance, the Minister of Foreign Affairs and the President of the Treasury Board were there. What the audit on Walkerton says, from the O'Connor inquiry, is that Walkerton happened because of government cuts to food inspection, government cuts to water inspection and privatizing of the system in order to save money. This is what we are talking about. We have to save money when we have a deficit, but we have to save it in places where we know people are not going to get sick, and we do not put Canadians at risk. Did the Conservatives learn nothing from the listeriosis outbreak that occurred in 2008?
We got all of the information from the Weatherill report after that listeriosis outbreak, and the Weatherill report said the same thing that the Walkerton inquiry said. It said that there should be tracking, that the three ministers have to be involved, et cetera. Nothing happened. Four years later, we are facing the same problem because the government went ahead and laid off 200 inspectors since March. The Parliamentary Budget Officer tells us that $16 million is being directly cut from food safety and that there has been a $56.1 million cut to CFIA. This is from the Parliamentary Budget Office; I am not making this up.
The point is that not only did the government not learn from Walkerton but it ignored the Weatherill report that talked about tracking. It did not track the trends in any of the food systems looking for blips and outbreaks. It did not do any of that. It refused to listen to the U.S. that was warning it. We listened when it warned us in 2003, 2004 and 2005. We recalled, we pulled back and de-listed the company. As soon as 2006 came along and the Conservatives became government, they started to ignore it.
We listened to the minister say that everything is great and the government did a wonderful job. There is a saying in medicine. The greatest hospital in the world can have all the right equipment and the most well-trained doctors, surgeons, physicians, nurses and anesthetists who operate on a patient. People can say, “What a successful operation; look at the beauty of the work that was done and all the equipment we have”, but if the operation was a success and the patient died, then the operation was not a success.
The minister can say he has 46 people, 6 veterinarians, has added 200 people to the list and we have all the bells and whistles. It did not work. The operation might have been a success, but the patient died. Even though no one died, the outcome was a failure. That is what we are talking about: the outcome of what was being done. If it failed, it did not work. I do not know how else to say it. If it failed, it failed. If it did not work, it did not work. I do not care what there is in an operating room or anywhere else. If a patient dies, the operation was not a success. Therefore, this is not a success and we do not have answers.
We have snarky comments, snide remarks, smart-alecky, drive-by little insults being used, when the Minister of Agriculture and Agri-Food and the Minister of Health should be standing in the House and giving some form of apology with some humility and saying, “We fell down on the job, we are sorry, mea culpa, and we are going to make sure it does not happen again”. That is what we want from a government.
We saw what the Liberals did when they were in power with the BSE crisis. The minister was out there taking it on the chin but, at the same time, informing the public about what was going on. That is called responsible government; that is called transparency; that is actually caring about what one's department is supposed to do, caring about the outcomes and not constantly hiding behind all kinds of language and excuses. The mistake was made. Parliament should know what happened and the people of Canada should know, because confidence in food safety in this country has taken a blow. Not only that. It has hurt the food processing industry in this country; it has hurt farmers who now do not have the ability to get their steers to the processing plants. They are, therefore, paying the cost of leaving them in the field. They are also finding that the price of grain has gone up. That is costing them.
We are saying that everyone is hurting because of the lack of ability of the government to take responsibility, be up front and tell people so we can get the confidence back in our meat processing system and so the United States will know that we are on the ball, because it does not think we are, and we have not been for a length of time. They have to look over us like a parent looking over a recalcitrant child who is not doing what he or she is told. This is unacceptable. The Minister of Health's silence is unacceptable. The fact is that no one has stood up and assured the people of Canada that the CFIA will enforce the same rigorous food safety standards that everyone should expect of a government.
The Minister of Agriculture and Agri-Food stated:
Canadian consumers can be assured that the Canadian Food Inspection Agency will enforce the same rigorous food safety standards at Lakeside facility regardless of the management.
He said “the same rigorous food safety standards”. I have to sit down at that and ask what same rigorous food safety standards. I do not have any confidence. The same problems are going to be repeated.