Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity to rise in this emergency debate. I thank the members on this side of the House, especially my colleague from Rimouski-Neigette—Témiscouata—Les Basques who is splitting his time with me. Also, I thank the staff and pages for staying tonight to be present during this debate.
I also want to commend my colleague from Welland for leading the charge to protect Canadians on this matter, to keep Canadian food safe and to get the bottom of what is happening. I have been following his work both here and on other issues and very much value his expertise on these matters.
I will take a bit of a step back and think about this from a less detailed perspective and about the kinds of things with which governments have to deal. They face all kinds of issues. Some of these issues are reactive in nature, such as natural disasters and things like that. Some of the issues are proactive in nature. Those are plans and programs governments want to introduce. Sometimes governments get these things right, sometimes they get them wrong and sometimes they get them terribly wrong. The types of policies governments get terribly wrong are often called policy disasters.
The worst kind of policy disaster we can have is one where the government gets something terribly wrong and the reason it gets it wrong or the issue that it has blown essentially is something it has initiated itself. Whether it is driven by ideology or incompetence, the worst kind of policy disaster is when the government initiates something and it results in a huge mistake and problem. It is the worst kind of government action. That is what we are facing here. The government is facing a policy disaster of its own making.
Thinking in that context, let us see where we are right now. Canada is currently experiencing the largest meat recall in our history. I do not think anyone in the House would dispute that point. We are a meat producing nation. We export meat and consume a lot of it, but we are facing the worst recall in our history.
Five cases of E. coli have been traced to the XL Foods meat processing plant in Brooks, Alberta. This Alberta plant processed about 40% of the beef in Canada. A problem with this plant is a problem for not only the entire country, but for our export market as well. Incredibly, this factory processes about 4,000 to 5,000 head of cattle per day. It is a massive undertaking.
The Canadian Food Inspection Agency has now recalled more than 1,500 beef products due to possible E. coli contamination. It is not a secret we are holding within Canada. The recall not only extends to every province and territory, but to 40 states in the U.S. and Puerto Rico.
The plant has been temporarily closed. The closure is impacting beef producers, who through no fault of their own have been caught up in this and the 2,900 employees who work at the XL Foods plant. It paints a picture of the size of the plant for Canadians who have not visited there. The hon. member for Burnaby—New Westminster has been there on a number of occasions. Twenty-nine hundred employees processing 4,000 to 5,000 head of cattle a day is a massive undertaking. Worse, some of these employees are receiving only partial paycheques.
XL Foods plant has had its licence to export to the U.S. revoked. This will have long term impacts not only on the plant itself, but on the whole industry. There are now real concerns that Canadian standards do not match American food safety expectations.
That is where we are. We are at a stage where we have a real problem, a real policy disaster. We have something that we have to address. Unfortunately, on the other side of the House we have had advice like “wash your hands, maybe that will fix it”. That is not really adequate for the type of problem we are facing.
How did we get here? We have had a lot details tonight. We have had a blow-by-blow, almost a minute-by-minute account by the hon. member for Welland. However, to look at it from a larger perspective, with a little less detail, it appears what has happened is a change in culture. It used to be that companies would slaughter and process meats. This is what they are good at. They would buy and process it, package it and ship it out. However, the government inspectors would go into these plants to ensure cleanliness and sterility. They would actually go into the plants, look at the machines, inspect them and give the okay and production would start up again.
These factories are often working on 24-hour cycles. This is an ongoing process and a very important relationship between the government inspectors and the producers.
However, there has been a change in how the Conservatives see this cycle working. It is a belief that voluntary inspections by the companies are adequate. This is not really driven by hard facts. It is driven by an ideology that less government is necessarily better.
In this case, it does not seem to be better. Relying on voluntary actions of companies to ensure they inspect their own equipment is very susceptible to problems and what happens is something is missed. Without having government inspectors doing that work, the proper inspections and enough inspectors to do that proper inspections, we have run into a large problem here.
We have also been told that the inspectors working in these plants are spending more time looking at paperwork that has been given to them by the companies rather than being on the slaughterhouse floor looking at the cleanliness of the machinery.
This is something the Conservatives have done. By cutting funding, by having fewer inspectors in these large plants, we are relying more on the companies to ensure their own processes are adequate and then turning over paperwork to what inspectors are left. It is not adequate. We have the largest meat recall in Canadian history.
At the same time, we have not only had a change in regulatory culture, we also have had a change in the process itself. I have described the XL Foods plant that has 4,000 to 5,000 head of cattle going through it a day. What we have seen is a consolidation of the industry to an unprecedented level where we have meat factories that are so big they are almost hard to imagine.
In some cases there are small boutique butcheries that still exist. That is the way food production used to work. There were butchers who would buy from local cattle producers in small quantities. They would be able to inspect all the meat themselves. They would slaughter and butcher the cattle themselves and sell it to clients in small batches. If there was a problem, meat inspectors could sort that out. Now we have huge factories that are processing at a massive speed.
I have learned a lot about this industry from my father-in-law Thomas Ashe and his very good friend Peter Markin who have been butchers their entire lives. They started in the slaughterhouses in Belfast, Northern Ireland and moved to Canada and brought their trade here. They have been doing this job for decades.
I have sat down with both of them and talked to them about the process by which they as butchers see how things have changed in Canada. They have seen the industry grow from these small butcheries to the massive plants we have today. There are no bigger advocates for adequate food inspection than these two men who have seen this industry almost spin out of control.
Tommy and Peter have told me of their concerns, about how the reduction of meat inspectors will lead to disease and how a little tiny piece of meat left in a machine overnight can spin into a very big outbreak of certain kinds of diseases, like E. coli, that can be very harmful and deadly to consumers.
They also talked about how these were worst kinds of diseases for people to get. They strike people when they are unaware. They think their food is safe, but it is not. This is the problem we are facing.
There are lessons we can learn about the slaughterhouse floor from men like Tommy and Peter.
Also, the thought of how the Conservatives are systemically altering our approach to food inspection is a big problem. I do not like to say it, but if the Conservatives continue down this path, we will see more of these kinds of outbreaks.
If we continue to reduce the number of inspectors actually on the slaughterhouse floor and in the processing plant ensuring that the things are clean, we will see more of these outbreaks. I am very scared of that. The Conservatives have not just created this one policy disaster they are in fact inviting many more to happen and it will be a systematic series of disasters that we will face.