Malcolm Allen

[Safe Food for Canadians Act, November 19th, 2012]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague from Malpeque, whom I had the great pleasure of working with on that committee in 2009.

It is bewildering why the Conservatives continue to say that they did something, when Carole Swan said that they did not. I find that absolutely astounding. I understand that the government spent some money on a particular piece when it went to PricewaterhouseCoopers. At the end of the day, they were asked to do something specific, so they did it. It was an arithmetic exercise. They counted up some people and gave the number. They did not tell them where or what they would actually do.

The only thing I can think of is that the government deluded itself into believing that it did what it thought it was supposed to do, even though we have continually said that it did not. Perhaps it does not want to hear results that mean it may have to invest more money. Instead of the $56 million it is withdrawing over the next budget year, it will actually have to put it there and maybe add more. Perhaps the government does not want to hear that either in its year of austerity. However, austerity and food safety are two terms that should never come in close contact with one another.

[Safe Food for Canadians Act, November 19th, 2012]

Mr. Speaker, there is no question that what we have seen over the last while when it comes to the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, going back to the listeriosis crisis and the lack of inspectors, is a rush to try to make some changes. There was not a holistic approach taken as to what is needed elsewhere.

When Sheila Weatherill's report came out, and in fact, when the subcommittee's recommendations came out, we said exactly the same thing about the need to do an audit of CVS to improve the program. We actually said that as parliamentarians. It was not done. If it had been done then, we would have had the folks trained and the proper resources in place. Perhaps we would not have seen another crisis.

The only good part of the crisis, if there is a good part, is that to date, no one has passed away. That cannot be said for the 2008 listeriosis crisis, when 23 people died. People cannot measure that crisis against another, nor should they. This is about a system that did not live up to its expectations. It failed. We need to fix that piece. The fix is in front of us. The issue is whether there is a willingness to take that fix and make it so that the system actually operates as it should.

The decision is the government's alone. We are simply saying to the government that it has an opportunity. It should take the opportunity. The system will be better for it. More importantly, Canadians will actually thank them for it.

[Safe Food for Canadians Act, November 19th, 2012]

Of course it does, Mr. Speaker. It is one of the fundamental questions that has been asked for quite some time.

It is true, and the government can check the facts, that not everyone in every abattoir across the country who should be compliant in CVS , the compliance verification system, is trained to be compliant in CVS. Yet CVS is the foundation, the cornerstone, the backbone of the food safety system the government is relying on. If it is the cornerstone of the system, then everyone has to be that cornerstone. We cannot have some who are not. That is the problem. A full audit would have told the government how to get it done. If the government had enacted it back then, it would be done by now.

Yes, the government has added inspectors, but what it has not done is made them all compliant with CVS. We know that to be true, and the government knows that to be true.

If we are not able to judge whether it has been done correctly, the government should just do the audit. It will cost some money. It will save a lot of heartache in the end, when there is not another crisis, because the system will have worked the way it is supposed to work.

Therefore, I would again ask the government side, through the parliamentary secretary to the minister, to just do the audit. Let us not pretend one was done. Just go ahead and quietly do the audit, show the results, and all will be well.

[Safe Food for Canadians Act, November 19th, 2012]

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise to debate Bill S-11.

Sincerely, and with great deference to the other place or at least with as much deference as I can give the other place, I believe it should have been Bill C-whatever number we would have given it. The bill should have started in this place, not the other place. The 120 days that the other place took should have been spent in this place with us studying the bill, rather than the paltry number of days that the government has decided we should have simply because the other place had it for a period of time.

Whether the other place debates it or not is of no consequence to New Democrats and it is certainly of no consequence to this member for Welland. What is of consequence at the end of the day is the House debating the people's legislation, because this is the people's House and this is indeed where the legislation should have started. That is why I have called the government to account on that particular aspect.

To get back to the bill itself, at one point in time we had an emergency debate, and I will not use the reference the minister suggested and the colourful language that he used to describe the debate. At one point in time I actually said to my friends across the way that when one cannot take yes for an answer, it is still yes. It was yes then and it is yes now.

The unfortunate part for my colleagues across the way is that they could not find a way to say yes to any of the suggestions that this side of the House had. According to the parliamentary secretary, they deferred to the “experts”, when indeed it was simply a question of someone parroting verbatim the good things that the PMO suggested they parrot.

Ultimately one gets back to Sheila Weatherill's report. I had the great pleasure of serving with my colleague from Malpeque on the subcommittee on listeriosis and that was when I first came to know about food safety. I came to know first-hand the devastating effects that food safety, when it is not followed in the way that it needs to be, can have on Canadians. We saw that with the great tragedy in 2008 when those folks died from listeriosis.

That is why it was so eminently important for us on this side to make this legislation as good as it possibly could be. That is the one shortcoming we find on this side. What we had said from the beginning was that we would be supportive, encouraging, helpful, proactive and bring forward what we believed would be good suggestions. We held to our word along the way, even though the government curtailed the amount of time we actually had to work on it.

When I was on the subcommittee during 2008, the government decided to call on Ms. Weatherill and do a parallel investigation. The irony of the investigation, which by the way cost the Canadian taxpayers millions of dollars, was that all but a handful of the recommendations were exactly the same, almost uniquely identical. We saw the same things.

One of the things that we saw in the CVS, the compliance verification system, that Sheila Weatherill also saw was that the compliance verification system was flawed and in need of “critical improvements related to its design, planning and implementation”. She went on to say it was “implemented without a detailed assessment of the resources available to take on these new [CVS] tasks”.

It was not just a question of adding up the numbers of how many people were there. Ms. Weatherill said that we had to audit the design, the planning and the implementation. That is what recommendation number seven said. It was not that we go out to PricewaterhouseCoopers, a nice place that adds them up and says, “Today, there are 22. Tomorrow there will be 24, and now we are done.”

The entire system needed to be looked at because the CVS was a pilot project. That is all that it was, leading up to 2008. It was started in 2005 by the previous government as an attempt to do food safety differently. There was nothing wrong with the pilot project. There was nothing wrong with making that attempt. What was wrong was verifying that the verification system actually verified what it was intended to work on. No one ever answered that question because no one audited it.

We are still left with the question hanging over our heads. Was the compliance verification system actually verified to see if it does what it was intended to do in the first place? We added up the number of folks who might be in it and we received a number. The government still does not really tell us the actual number. It uses this number of 700.

Let me offer a little help to the government. There are 170 new inspectors in the ready-to-eat meat sector. That came out of two places: the subcommittee that recommended that additional people were needed in that field and Sheila Weatherill who said the same thing. Since we are in the spirit of being nice, let me commend the minister for taking on and fixing the ready-to-eat meat sector and putting 170 new inspectors there.

That did not happen at XL. None of those new inspectors who went to the ready-to-eat meat sector are in those abattoirs. There are no additional inspectors in any of those abattoirs. The XL meat plant certainly has more today than two years ago. It simply filled the vacancies of the folks who left, because there is a great turnover in that plant as all of us now know. Sheila Weatherill actually went through that.

Carole Swan, who at the time was the president of the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, the actual person in charge, said about this audit, which was supposedly conducted and the one that the government stands today and still defends as an audit, that:

They didn't conduct it as an audit. An audit is a very specific process. It was a detailed review.

Number seven of Sheila Weatherill's report has not been completed. Parts of it have been done. The government counted the number of people but it did not audit the design, the plan or the implementation because it never asked PricewaterhouseCoopers to do that. It did what it was asked to do and that is fair. It is fair for the government to say that it counted the number of people but it is unfair for the government to suggest that it did a strategic audit of the recommendation, which was fundamentally critical to ensuring that the CVS actually worked. We can have as many people as we like in CVS but if it does not work, it does not mean anything.

Consequently, the government has not lived up to fulfilling all of the recommendations of the Weatherill report, let alone the recommendations coming out of the subcommittee. Some of the recommendations were done and some were not. Some of the recommendations were just left out because the government did not really like them.

When it comes to resourcing, the government loves to tell us one number and play with another one. Let me quote again for the House what we know to be true. On May 8 of this year the Minister of Agriculture said, “Planned Spending is declining by approximately $46.6 million and 314 FTE’s”, which in human resource jargon means full-time equivalences. What that means is that over the next two years there will be 314 less jobs now than the before.

The government loves to tell us about the $100 million, but it neglects to tell us that it is actually over five years, not this year. It neglects to tell us that it has actually only spent $18 million of that $100 million already. It should have spent far more than that because it has been out there for over a year. The resourcing that the Conservatives' continually talk to us about is not always wholly there because it is the jig of the number. They throw numbers out and somehow they might look similar or perhaps not.

We do know the facts because we did read the budget, although I sometimes wonder about my friends on the other side. We did read that lovely book that the government gave us in budget 2012 that says the three-year outlook for food safety indicates a projected cut of $56.1 million annually.

That is the Conservative's budget. I am not making it up. I am just reading the stuff they gave us. Of course, if the other side is now telling us the book is not true, that they no longer believe that page of the budget is going to be enacted, then I think they would have to amend it. Surely they would have to retract it and tell us something altogether different. However, they have not done that.

It is unfortunate, as this is a bill that the House seems to want to pass. I have heard my colleagues from the far end and my colleague for Guelph, who works on the committee with us in the spirit of co-operation to make food safety the priority that we all believe it is. This is about safe food for Canadians, for the children and people out there who may be immune suppressed and for the elderly who we saw get sick once before and some in fact died. We want to ensure that we do not have that happen again. All members in the House believe this to be true.

Therefore, in the spirit of co-operation, the official opposition went to committee and told the government side that we could help make the bill better. We put amendments forward because we wanted to help make the bill better. No one person or one party is blessed with all the best ideas. Unfortunately, some may think that perhaps they are. The irony is that we all know that.

I know the member but I always mispronounce his lovely riding, so I won't go down that road. It is a wonderful place in New Brunswick, Tobique—Mactaquac. Every now and again Glaswegians can get their mouths around funny words. However, it was with that spirit of working together that we entered into making sure that this legislation came back to this place in an expeditious fashion, unlike the other place that hung onto it and then went on vacation for the summer, which is how important its members thought it was. They went on vacation.

Meanwhile, some of us worked on the special co-op committee during the summer, which was our vacation. I see some of my colleagues from all sides of the House who were there working. It was the members of the House who went to work during the summer and the members of the other place could indeed have done that. If they did not want to do that, they should have passed the bill to us.

There were a number of amendments that we put forward. Some were as simple as defining a container. In the legislation it says “containers” and then goes on to define a cargo container. What is a cargo container? Is it a box car? Is it a shipping hold? We suggested that we should better define it and talk about pails, totes and baskets to give it further definition. We thought that would be understandable so that when folks saw the legislation they would get a sense of what it was about, rather than having to wait for the regulations to come out for the definitions.

The Conservatives said no, but I have to give them credit, they had a reason. For the first four amendments we put forward they had some reason why they did not like it. However, on the other seven amendments, they just voted no. They did not seem to have any reason or they ran out of reasons, I am not sure which.

Clearly, the opposition side of the agriculture committee, including the member for Guelph who was supportive, felt that the two responsible factors were the compliance verification system and the audit. We felt an audit should be done now because in five years when we go back and look at the system, the problem is that we may not know where we started.

As I said in committee, if I want to drive to Edmonton and I do not know where I am when I start, in five years from now I will be somewhere. It might Edmonton but it might be in Malpeque, which is a wonderful place in Prince Edward Island. When I get there I know the member for Malpeque will say to me, “Member for Welland, you actually drove in the wrong direction. Turn around and go back the other way and then you will get to Edmonton”. However, I would then get there in ten years instead of five years.

Therefore, doing an audit now would give us a benchmark of where we are and where we are going to start from. In five years, we would know if we were better, worse or the same, and whether we need as many inspectors. Part of the government's problem is that when we say those things, it thinks we want to have more inspectors in five years.

Maybe we need fewer. Maybe the system is working so well and is so efficient that there are too many people doing that and we need to transfer them to where they are not doing quite as well. That would be the value of the resource. That would be the value of legislation.

Of course, my friends across the way on the government side just voted no. They did not really have a reason. They just voted no. Then when we suggested whistleblower protection, their response was that the Criminal Code covers that off.

We heard the parliamentary secretary say that the Criminal Code covers tampering but that it is not the best way to do it. Instead, it should be in the legislation. We agree. We think that is the best way to do it, as we do with whistleblower protection.

In the last crisis we just faced, there were workers who said that had they been protected, they might have come forward sooner, and we may not have had a crisis. That is “may”. We are not certain. However, any opportunity that would have prevented it would have been good for the cattle ranchers across the country. They suffered needlessly because of the failure of someone in the system. Whistleblower protection may have indeed helped those ranchers not suffer the unintended consequence of what happened when it came to that crisis.

We saw the government rely on the Criminal Code, but it did not rely on it for this one aspect of the bill because it believed it was better, more expeditious and made more sense to do it that way.

As for fundamental protection for people who want to come forward and tell the government something it ought to know, it is telling them to take their chances in the courts and see if they can convince a crown attorney to go ahead with the charge and see if they can get a conviction. What the government did not talk about was whether they could get their jobs back afterwards. They are more likely to be fired while going through the court system. Of course, if people won that one, they would have to go through civil proceedings to try to get their jobs back. Therefore, they would go to court twice, and along the way, would have to pay for lawyers.

However, if the Conservatives had put simple whistleblower protection into the act, it would have talked about people who make vexatious claims against a company because they are mad at the boss. This was about real claims to help prevent another food crisis for Canadians across the country.

We want to make food safety better. We want to help this legislation be the best it can be for two simple reasons. The first is that this may be the last opportunity for quite some time to do something with respect to the food safety act as we amend three acts into one. More importantly, this is about food safety for Canadian families, children, the elderly, and all of us. All of us eat. We all eat differently. Some of us graze, and some of us do not.

At the end of the day, this was about making fundamentally good legislation. It started out as decent legislation. It could have been great legislation, because all of the hands at the committee were indeed onside to make it so. The government side brought forward a bill that in its sense was pretty decent. All sides of the House at that committee, including my friend from Guelph, were bound and determined to try to make it better. There were no egregious amendments or poking sticks in eyes. There was none of that. This was about making it better from the day it showed up at committee. The unfortunate part is that as good as it is, the bill could have been so much better than it is. That is the shame of not having all sides work together.

When the government puts a hand out and asks that all sides work together, it should recognize when the hand comes from the other side to work with it to make it better. Our hand was extended to the government to make it better. Unfortunately, it decided to say no, and that is truly unfortunate.

[Safe Food for Canadians Act, November 19th, 2012]

Mr. Speaker, I will not slip out of the Christmas spirit which seems to be emanating from the other side from the parliamentary secretary as he warmly, at least initially, was quoting me and then, of course, went on to say that we were an encumbrance. I guess the Christmas spirit began and ended and the Grinch came back.

The parliamentary secretary wants to know whether we support this legislation. For the record, as we said earlier, we are and I will be voting in favour of the legislation.

The parliamentary secretary said that tampering was addressed by the Criminal Code but, because the Criminal Code was too slow, that the government needed to address it in this legislation. However, when I put forward the amendment at committee that talked about whistleblowers, the Conservatives said that the Criminal Code would take care of that. Would that not actually slow it down? It seems to me that not only is the burden of proof that becomes judicious because it is the Criminal Code, surely would that amendment not so much encumber but would be expeditious. The parliamentary secretary told us that the Conservatives want to expeditiously deal with tampering, and he is correct, would not whistleblowers who would say they saw someone tampering be an expeditious use of that amendment, if only the government side had said yes?

If it is not good on one hand, would it also not be good on the other hand? Are we not simply taking a process to be expeditious and actually slowing it down?

[Canada-Panama Economic Growth and Prosperity Act, November 6th, 2012]

Mr. Speaker, the member for Okanagan—Coquihalla knows that the finest wines made in this country are actually in my riding. I would be happy to bring a bottle and if he wants to bring one as well, we can perhaps decide which is better, though not in the House, of course.

Let me ask a two-part question. First, the member said he could not wait to have a perfect bill. Is he suggesting that we should have imperfect legislation? Second, he talked about the wine industry in Okanagan—Coquihalla, which is a fine region without a doubt. I have been there. Is the Canadian wine industry as a whole actually increasing its market share or is foreign competition coming into this country and taking over a larger piece of the market than what it had before we saw the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement?

[Kacey Lynn Fund, October 30th, 2012]

Mr. Speaker, this past weekend, the annual Kacey Lynn Halloween dance was held in my riding. The story of the Kacey Lynn fund is one of great inspiration.

Kacey Lynn was a 5-year-old girl who battled cancer for four and a half years. The financial hardship this illness placed on her family brought the attention of the community to the need for a program to help with families in similar situations.

In 1995, a trust fund was established in Kacey-Lynn's name to assist her family and other families in Welland, Port Colborne and Pelham. This program has expanded and now assists families with sick or disabled children in all other areas of the Niagara region through the HOPE Centre. Funds for the program are made possible through local fundraisers held during the year.

The Kacey Lynn committee is also moving in other directions through its assistance for prevention and recreational programs for well children.

The Kacey Lynn fund is a great example of the amazing things communities can accomplish when they come together. I would like to recognize them today and thank all the volunteers for their years of hard work, especially Mary and Jim Dolan, for their tireless efforts since its inception.

[Points of Order, October 26th, 2012]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to seek unanimous consent to move the following motion: that notwithstanding any standing order or usual practice of the House, clauses 351 to 410 related to changes to the Canada Grain Act be removed from Bill C-45, A second act to implement certain provisions of the budget tabled in Parliament on March 29, 2012 and other measures, and do compose Bill C-47; that Bill C-47 be entitled an act to amend the Canada Grain Act; that Bill C-47 be deemed read a first time and be printed; that the order for second reading of said bill provide for the referral to the Standing Committee on Agriculture and Agri-Food; that Bill C-45 retain the status on the order paper that it had prior to the adoption of this order; that Bill C-45 be reprinted, as amended; and that the law clerk and parliamentary counsel be authorized to make any technical changes or corrections as may be necessary to give effect to this motion.

I am proposing this particular motion so that we can not only study an act to change the Grain Act but we will vote on it as a separate entity, unlike what the government did with the Canadian Wheat Board Act, where it denied farmers the ability to vote on whether they wished to keep it or not. We would indeed be then voting on behalf of farmers on the Grain Act and the Grain Act alone, so they would know what we were doing, who opposed them and who actually stood for them.

[Agriculture and Agri-Food, October 26th, 2012]

Mr. Speaker, from axing the Canadian Wheat Board to cutting AgriStability payments, the Conservatives have made it clear they are not interested in helping farmers. Changes to the Canadian Grain Commission tucked away in this monster budget would undermine the integrity of Canada's internationally renowned grain system. Discarding the present bonding requirements would hurt farmers and the industry.

Would the minister explain why these half-baked changes are being forced through this budget?

[Food Safety, October 26th, 2012]

Mr. Speaker, when challenged about what he would have done differently in handling the XL Foods recall, the agriculture minister replied, “CFIA would have been a lot harder-nosed”. Finally, we have an admission of complacency, yet still nothing to take responsibility, nothing to reverse food safety cuts, nothing to reassure Canadians that our inspectors are protecting our food.

Now Canadians have learned that unregulated in-house tenderizing processes could also be making them sick.

What is the minister going to do to ensure that the CFIA addresses the problem of the contamination from meat tenderizing?