The president of the union representing Canadian Food Inspection Agency inspectors says a lack of agency resources probably contributed to last year’s listeria outbreak that killed 22 Canadians.
Bob Kingston, president of the agriculture union of the Public Service Alliance of Canada, told a parliamentary committee studying last year’s fatal food safety failure that food inspectors are being asked to do too much.
He told MPs May 25 that the inspector responsible for the Toronto-area Maple Leaf plant where the tainted meat originated was responsible for overseeing six other plants and did not have time to do the inspections required before the outbreak.
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While he stopped short of arguing more inspectors would have prevented the outbreak, he suggested it might have.
“It very likely could have made a difference,” Kingston told Bloc Québécois MP André Bellavance.
Kingston also accused the CFIA and government officials of misleading the committee.
Agriculture minister Gerry Ritz and senior agency officials have said staffing was not an issue at the Maple Leaf plant and that listeria can be found only through science and not visual inspection.
Ritz insists the government has hired 200 new inspectors or more to beef up the system.
As well, the CFIA has said the inspector at the Maple Leaf plant spent more than 50 percent of his time there despite his other responsibilities.
Kingston challenged all those assertions.
He said most of the new CFIA personnel hired are not front line inspectors, physical inspections help identify machines or plant areas where there could be a problem and the inspector was at the Maple Leaf plant more than 50 percent of his time not to do inspections but to use the computer for report filing on all of the plants he inspected.
Kingston was particularly critical of the claim that 200 new inspectors have been hired.
“That is a falsehood and should not have been stated,” he said.
Opposition MPs used their time to extract from Kingston statements that point fingers at government under-funding and political calculation during the crisis that preceded last autumn’s election.
Government MPs were generally critical, suggesting that Kingston stood alone in arguing that more on-the-ground inspections could have averted the crisis.
Conservative David Anderson argued that his government has added more resources to CFIA.
“The reality is that only the Liberals have cut.”
Several CFIA employees appeared before the committee May 25 after having first met with CFIA officials and representatives of the justice department.
It was the turn of the opposition to be suspicious, suggesting the employees had been warned to toe the government line.
The witnesses denied it.
Liberal MP Wayne Easter then asked Don Irons, a food processing supervisor in Toronto, whether the CFIA had too few resources in the months leading up to the Maple Lead Foods outbreak.
He readily agreed.
“We were grossly resource starved at that time,” he said.
