A panel investigating last year’s tainted food outbreak at XL Foods blames both the company and federal regulators for the fiasco that followed.
“We found a weak food safety system culture at the Brooks plant shared by both plant management and Canadian Food Inspection Agency staff,” said the expert panel, which agriculture minister Gerry Ritz appointed to get to the bottom of the incident that shook consumer and market confidence.
“And it was all preventable.”
E. coli-tainted beef from the XL Foods plant in Brooks, Alta., sickened 18 consumers and led to the largest beef recall in Canadian history.
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Last week, Ritz quickly announced a new three-year, $16 million investment to fund 30 new CFIA positions to form inspection verification teams that will have the power to swoop unannounced into any plant to test systems and check CFIA inspector performance.
Ritz and CFIA executives also promised to strengthen front-line inspector training as recommended by the panel.
Ritz told a Parliament Hill news conference and later the House of Commons agriculture committee late last week that the government has been implementing the panel recommendations and strengthening the system through the Safe Food for Canadians Act passed last year.
He insisted that the panel recommendations reflect much of what the government has been doing, which is “a clear indication and validation that our government is taking the right steps to keep consumers safe.”
Opposition MPs scoffed at the claim. They said a 2009 report that was written after contaminated meat from a Maple Leaf plant in Toronto killed more than 20 people recommended better training for CFIA inspectors.
Announcing a new system of inspection verification teams to check the work of the inspectors simply proves the 2009 recommendations have not been implemented despite government claims, MPs charged.
Ritz rejected the claims but continued to dodge calls for a third-party comprehensive audit of CFIA resources as called for by Sheila Weatherill in 2009.
The expert panel, which was chaired by former British Columbia chief veterinary officer Ronald Lewis and also included food industry expert W. Ronald Usborne and Dr. André Corriveau, chief public health officer in the Northwest Territories, acknowledged Canada’s food safety system is well regarded in the world.
It said the XL incident showed some of the system’s strengths, including surveillance, the recall of 4,000 pounds of beef and beef products and management of the issue once the crisis was recognized.
However, it also found flaws and “inadequate responses” by two of the two main players in the incident: Canada’s second largest beef processor, which was unprepared, and CFIA staff, which at times seemed inattentive.
