CALGARY — XL Foods will not reopen until the Canadian Food Inspection Agency has confirmed in writing that no further food safety issues persist, said federal agriculture minister Gerry Ritz at a news conference in Calgary today.
“The plant will not reopen until we have been assured that the health and safety of Canadians is not at risk,” he said.
Ritz toured the plant at Brooks earlier in the day and said CFIA has deployed additional staff to the facility for more testing and investigations. The CFIA suspended the plant’s licence to operate Sept. 27.
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Forty meat inspectors and six veterinarians are on site and more people have been added to investigate what went wrong in what is becoming Canada’s largest ever beef recall.
When asked when tougher food safety standards will be implemented following this case, Ritz said that is coming within the Safe Food for Canadians Act tabled last spring. Under current regulations, the agency is more restricted in how far it may pursue investigations and demand information from processors.
He said Canadian and U.S. food safety authorities found positive E. coli samples in batches of meat Sept. 4.
The meat was returned to the plant and destroyed.
“For those particular days, we had complete control of the product that tested positive,” said CFIA president George Da Pont.
“We immediately launched a food safety investigation to ensure there were no other problems,” he said.
The agency asked the company for information on Sept. 6 and staff at the plant started to examine points in the production line to discover what happened.
“There was a delay and that is one of the provisions that we have put in the new Safe Food for Canadians Act,” he said.
“We base our decisions on science and evidence and I believe we acted very appropriately in what we knew at the time,” he said.
As more problems were revealed, the investigation strengthened.
About 1,500 products across Canada have been recalled as of Monday, and public health authorities are working to confirm whether reported cases of illness in Alberta and Saskatchewan are linked to beef from XL Foods.
