The federal government has appointed a panel to advise on food safety issues, trying to counter critics of its food safety record.
Led by former Canadian Food Inspection Agency president Ron Doering, the Ministerial Advisory Board will offer regular proposals and an annual report on food safety issues.
“This highly qualified and diverse advisory board builds upon our government’s increased investments, hiring of more inspectors and enhanced listeria testing,” agriculture minister Gerry Ritz told the House of Commons agriculture committee Nov. 18.
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The advisory board includes Calgary cattle industry icon David Chalack, Saskatchewan canola research pioneer Keith Downey, former Ontario Agriculture College dean Rob McLaughlin, former Agriculture Canada associate deputy minister Harold Bjarnason, prominent Quebec dairy farmer Marcel Groleau and former Nova Scotia Conservative agriculture minister Brooke Taylor.
Ritz said assembling the panel represents another government move to implement the 57 recommendations contained in Sheila Weatherill’s 2009 report on what went wrong during the 2008 listeria outbreak that killed more than 20 Canadians.
The contaminated products were traced back to a Maple Leaf plant in the Toronto area.
Meanwhile, even as Ritz promoted implementation of another food safety recommendation, opposition MPs hammered him over what they said is his failure to implement another of Weatherill’s recommendations – that an independent audit be conducted of CFIA inspection resource needs to ensure the food system is safe and enough inspectors are available.
Instead, CFIA hired PricewaterhouseCoopers to do a review of the agency’s assumptions about resources needed and it found the agency’s assumptions credible.
Critics insist that without an independent audit, that recommendation is being ignored.
Ritz and CFIA officials said they have never called the PricewaterhouseCoopers study an official audit.
So does that mean the government has not yet acted on the recommendation despite its claim that all recommendations are being addressed?
“It’s underway,” Ritz told reporters afterward. “Pricewaterhouse-Coopers was an external party. You can call it anything you want. You can split hairs. They did the job. They didn’t find the smoking gun you are looking for. We’ve put more inspectors on the front lines. We’ve put more inspection staff to back them up. We’re rebuilding laboratories. We’ve done a number of things that all build on what would be required under any kind of audit or oversight or whatever you want to call it.”
At the agriculture committee, CFIA associate vice-president Paul Mayers defended the review but conceded it was not the audit called for in the Weatherill report.
“It was a comprehensive review,” he said. “It was not a formal audit.”
In the Commons Nov. 19, Liberal agriculture critic Wayne Easter complained that the Conservatives have failed to determine how many front line inspectors are on the job and how many are needed.
Eastern Ontario Conservative Pierre Lemieux, parliamentary secretary to Ritz, read an answer that indicated a “thorough independent review” has been conducted that supported existing staffing levels and an additional 170 front-line inspectors are being hired.
The government says it has added tens of millions of dollars to the CFIA budget and hired more than 500 new inspectors since it took office.
