moved:
That, in light of the current contaminated meat scandal at XL Foods, and considering that the Minister of Agriculture and Agri-Food has not learned the lesson from the 2008 listeriosis scandal that cost twenty-two Canadians their lives, this House call on the government to restore Canadians’ confidence in Canada's food safety system by: (a) removing the current minister from office and assigning the food safety portfolio to a minister who can restore public trust; (b) reversing budget cuts and halting the de-regulation of Canada’s food safety system; (c) directing the Auditor General to conduct an immediate assessment of food safety procedures and resources and report his findings to the Standing Committee on Agriculture and Agri-Food.
Mr. Speaker, I will be splitting my time with my colleague from Berthier—Maskinongé.
I am pleased to speak today to our opposition day motion, inasmuch as it has a very serious tone to it from the perspective that one never takes lightly the position that calls for a minister of the Crown to step aside. It should never be taken lightly and, in this case, it is with a great deal of thought and understanding of this issue that this side has come forward with a motion to this House to seek the resignation of the Minister of Agriculture and Agri-Food. It lends one back to exactly why one would want to do that.
What is the food safety system all about? It is about a chain and, as we know, the chain is only as strong as its weakest link and, in this particular case, the weakest link in the chain was at a processing facility.
Cattlemen, producers and ranchers across the country have worked extremely hard over the last number of years, and, indeed, decades, to have a first-class industry that is recognized worldwide to be the best in the world. They have continued to do that. They, just like consumers who bought from the retail stores, have found themselves the unwilling victims of a processor. Some of the blame lays at the feet of the processing plant, without a doubt, especially those who were responsible for its inspection systems and not allowing them to happen.
We watched this crisis unfold over the weeks, and in fact we still see recalls happening. As of just the other night, CFIA put out another notice that said that another batch of meat from that facility had to be taken off the retail shelves. At the end of the day, it is the minister who is ultimately responsible for food safety and the food safety system. That is his responsibility and his alone.
Where we believe he failed in the system was not ensuring the Canadian public was treated in the same manner as we would treat anyone else. We decided on September 13 to stop meat shipments going to the Americans because of safety concerns, some that the Americans had identified and some that the minister said, in the House, that we identified in this country.
It is not just a question of saying that the Americans asked us to stop. We decided that because we found E. coli on September 4. Within 10 days, we said to our American counterparts that we would not send any more of this tainted beef to them. We did not do that for Canadians and yet this is a minister of the Crown in this country. He is not in the cabinet in the U.S. He belongs here. He is responsible to the House, to his constituents and ultimately to the Canadian public to ensure that our food system is safe. He failed miserably in that case.
Not only have we been putting questions to him on a constant basis, but we have seen some of the comments he has made publicly. His most recent was here in the House yesterday, which he apologized for, when he decided to describe the emergency debate as “silly”. I am not sure why one would suggest it was silly when we have a crisis of this magnitude.
What brought on the crisis? Why is CFIA finding itself in the place where it is?
There was an ongoing back and forth about money and numbers and all of the rest of it. However, what we do know is that the minister actually signed the document of planned spending for plans and priorities for the Canadian Food Inspection Agency for this year, 2012-13, which said that its budget would decline by $46.6 million.
That is not me finding a page somewhere that someone else wrote. This is under the signature of the minister. The minister signed that $46.6 million would be taken away, would go into decline. He also said, in the same report that his signature is affixed to, that 314 full-time equivalents, FTEs in the jargon of human resource managers, will be eliminated in the next two years. It flies in the face of the government's assertions that we have 700 net new inspectors.
When we look at the absolute numbers, we can see in 2012-13 that the numbers are less than they were two years ago, as much as it pains me to say that. I know it pains the other side but the difficulty with numbers is that they are what they are. When the minister signs $46.6 million in cuts, it is his signature not this side's signature that has been tied to it.
Today it is kind of prophetic that we are getting a new implementation piece of the budget. If we look at the Conservatives' budget, we see that $56.1 million will be taken out of CFIA on a go-forward basis. That is also a decline. The minister is also responsible for that.
What other pieces and attributes of the system have gone wrong?
We know the compliance verification system is one of the backbones of the safety system. It was a pilot program started in 2005 that continued on right through 2008 when we had a listeriosis crisis. The minister today was the minister responsible then. Twenty-two people died in 2008 because of listeriosis and yet we were running a pilot program in CVS that was never verified.
There were two committees struck. One was a subcommittee of the agriculture committee of the House to study listeriosis, which I had the great pleasure of sitting on and looking at all of that. In addition, the government appointed an independent inquiry through Ms. Sheila Weatherill who decided to look at the same thing. Remarkably enough, the committee's and Ms. Weatherill's recommendations were very similar, minus a couple of differences here or there.
One of the things that Ms. Weatherill said had to happen was that there absolutely had to be an audit, not a review but an audit, of the compliance verification system for two reasons. First, it was a pilot program and it had to be proven that it actually worked. She said to make sure it does what it is supposed to do and that it will do what people think it will do. Second, figure out how much it needs to be resourced. If no one knows how much it needs to be resourced, it does not matter if it is actually the best system in the world. It would never work if it is not appropriately resourced.
What did we find out? The government will say that it had PricewaterhouseCoopers look at this. That is absolutely true; it did. It did a review. Let me quote Carole Swan, who is the former president of the Canadian Food Inspection Agency. She told reporters that Agriculture Canada did not conduct a traditional audit. “They didn't conduct it as an audit”, Carole Swan said.
If the former president of CFIA says an audit was not conducted, I have to take her at her word because she was the president of the CFIA. She was tasked with getting the audit done and she said it was not done and that they just did a review.
If that is the case, at the very least one would think the government would want to make sure that the compliance verification system actually does what it thinks it does and that it is resourced to the extent it needs to be, whatever that resource capacity is. Because it has never been audited, we do not know. We do not know how many inspectors should be in meat hygiene plants. We do not have a clue because an audit was not done. The review counted the numbers, but it only gives a number.
That is why New Democrats say we need to it from base one. We cannot wait five years to do a review. What would we measure it against? We do not know what we started with. In five years we will have a baseline. We need a baseline today that actually says what this is all about.
What is needed here is leadership and what we have seen from the minister is a lack thereof. That is why the House needs to tell the minister that it is time to leave the portfolio and put it in the hands of someone who will show true leadership. This is not a first-time event, unfortunately, for the minister. It does not give me a great deal of satisfaction to stand in my place and ask for it.
This is not about what we should do or politics. It is not. It is about ministerial accountability. The minister now needs to stand in this place and say he understands what happened and that he is, indeed, stepping aside.
