Tensions between Canada’s health minister and the head of the federal government’s national agriculture union have mounted again, after union president Bob Kingston accused Rona Ambrose of misleading a parliamentary committee earlier this month.
In a May 15 letter to House health committee chair and Conservative Member of Parliament Ben Lobb, Kingston urged the committee to summon frontline inspectors to testify on the state of Canada’s food safety system.
“The minister’s testimony stretches the truth to the breaking point,” Kingston wrote. “I urge your committee to dig deeper. If you do, you will find a food inspection program that is critically short staffed.”
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The decision to cut back on inspection, particularly sanitation inspections, the union leader said, is a political decision.
“The CFIA (Canadian Food Inspection Agency) would have you believe that it is a science-based department and that all of its decision have been risk assessed,” Kingston told Lobb.
“If asked, I believe CFIA officials would be unable to produce an assessment of the risk associated with cutting sanitation and pre-operation inspections by 50 percent at all meat processing plants in Northern Alberta.”
According to the union president, “that risk has never been assessed. It was a decision taken to cope with a shortage of inspectors.”
Kingston’s dismissal of a Conference Board of Canada report, which ranked Canada’s food safety system as the best out of 17 countries in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, drew ire from the minister’s office, which said in an email that “Mr. Kingston is just confirming his grandstanding as union leader.”
When asked about the union’s accusation that Ambrose misled the committee, the minister’s office stood behind her testimony.
“The minster’s comments at committee stand,” her spokesperson said via email.
Ambrose and Kingston have been publicly at odds with each other over cuts to meat inspections since the union released heavily redacted documents in March showing since Jan. 5 reductions had been made to meat inspections at Northern Alberta processing plants.
iPolitics, an online news service covering federal politics, later obtained complete, unredacted versions of those documents, which the agency insists is simply a contingency plan, that reduction in the number of inspections had been put in place because of a staffing shortage and financial constraints.
Since then the union has also warned about serious staffing shortages in Quebec, where Kingston said every federal meat inspection team in the province was understaffed.
An Alberta inspector, meanwhile, has warned of low morale within the department and said officials in Ottawa are lying about the situation on the ground.
Both Ambrose and CFIA president Dr. Bruce Archibald have denied any cuts to the agency.
The concerns raised by the union, Ambrose told both the committee and reporters, is nothing more than union grandstanding, an accusation Kingston denies.
The minister’s assurances that no cuts have been made to meat inspections in Canada, Kingston has said, are not true and the minister’s stubbornness in refusing to admit there is a staff shortage is putting Canadians at risk.
“Playing politics with food safety like this is a dangerous game. Canadian lives are at stake,” he wrote in a recent op-ed to iPolitics. “But it seems that’s a risk this government is prepared to take.
“After all, what could possible go wrong in the few short months before Canadians vote?,” the op-ed reads, referring to the federal election set for Oct. 19.
The answer to that question, Kingston says, is plenty, especially when it comes to listeria contamination, the same bacteria that killed 22 people in 2008 after an outbreak struck a Maple Leaf processing plant in Toronto.
There have been five times as many cases of listeria contamination in 2014 than there were in 2013, the union president said in his op-ed “an indication that food processors are letting down their guard.”
“Only another significant food-borne illness outbreak will press this government into action,” he said. “Canadians should worry.”
