The Canadian Food Inspection Agency and its president Richard Fadden faced Parliament Hill charges last week of arrogance and incompetence in the way the agency handled last year’s avian flu outbreak in British Columbia.
Fadden insisted that while mistakes were made, most of the criticisms were overblown and the agency would not amend its “lessons learned” report to reflect criticisms that local residents made when the House of Commons agriculture committee visited Abbotsford, B.C., in mid-January.
The report was published the day before the committee hearing in B.C., infuriating residents who had their own views of the lessons CFIA should have learned from the crisis.
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At a committee meeting Feb. 10, Fadden refused to accept criticism that the CFIA had not kept local people informed during the avian flu outbreak, which saw the destruction of millions of birds and the loss of markets.
He insisted the locals were mistaken when they said there was not enough CFIA communication. Agency staff talked to locals constantly, he said.
“We felt we spent so much time on communications we were pulling people off other duties to do it,” he told MPs.
“It looks like two ships passing in the night. We certainly talked at each other a great deal. We gave them information. They gave us views.”
MPs on the committee were unimpressed, insisting that Abbotsford complaints had been ignored.
“You are rewriting history to cover your assets,” quipped Conservative Gerry Ritz.
B.C. New Democrat Peter Julian said local residents accused the CFIA of bullying, intimidation and inhumane killing, but the agency didn’t include those comments in its “lessons learned” report because Fadden and other CFIA leaders disagreed.
“I’d submit there is a real crisis in confidence,” Julian said.
In his defense, Fadden said the flu outbreak was “one of the most complex animal disease incursions in Canada since the 1950s …. I am not going to deny there were shortcomings which included the agency.”
The CFIA has admitted misjudging the seriousness of the avian flu strain at first and improperly disposing of the infected birds from the first two farms, leading to charges that the virus spread from the publicly disposed infected carcasses to other farms downwind.
The subsequent spread of avian flu cost the B.C. poultry industry millions of dollars in slaughtered birds and lost markets.
“We won’t use the same method (of carcass disposal in future),” Fadden told MPs.
Federal law allows payment of only bird replacement value rather than compensation for lost income, a point many MPs criticized.
However, they saved their harshest criticisms for the attitude of Fadden and the CFIA.
B.C. Conservative MP Randy White complained that the agency did not seem to take local criticisms seriously enough because it would not amend its “lessons learned” report to reflect local anger.
“Because you don’t agree, it doesn’t get into your report,” he said. “There is a disconnect.”
Edmonton Liberal David Kilgour, who has crossed swords with Fadden on other issues, accused the CFIA of increasing western alienation by the way it has handled the file.
Fadden doesn’t give “a tinker’s damn” about local opinion, Kilgour said. “There’s a large degree of western alienation dealing with agencies like yours.”
