The Canadian Food Inspection Agency’s system for keeping invasive and destructive foreign plants and pests out of Canada is an inadequate mess, federal auditor general Sheila Fraser has complained.
She told Parliament in a Feb. 5 report that the agency has to improve its inspection process, improve communications and co-ordination between branches and other agencies involved in border control, and develop an ability to assess its own effectiveness.
Potentially dangerous plants that should be inspected sometimes are not. Records are being lost.
The overall approach to assessing how well the system is working is inadequate.
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She said her office has been making similar recommendations about CFIA practices since 1996 with little effect.
“Overall, the Plant Health Program lacks quality management processes in import-related activities key to keeping invasive alien species from entering and becoming established in Canada,” she wrote.
“As a result, management has no systematic way of knowing if its procedures are adequately designed and operating effectively.”
At a news conference, Fraser said inadequate control of the border puts more than $100 billion worth of annual plant production at risk.
“The findings of our audit are serious,” she told reporters.
“The impacts that invasive species can have either on biodiversity or on the economy of the country are potentially very significant.”
The CFIA said it accepted all the findings and recommendations and will try to do better.
In Ontario, farm and chemical company opponents of provincial proposals to ban urban pesticide use immediately added Fraser’s condemning report to their arsenal of arguments.
They said pesticides and herbicides are necessary to control unwanted intruders because federal regulations clearly are not doing the job.
Investigators from Fraser’s office uncovered a litany of procedural lapses.
- The backlog: CFIA has a backlog of proposed import assessments that would take a year to clear up even if there were no new applications.
- The lack of inspection: Imports that should be inspected before release into the country sometimes are not.
“High-risk imported commodities which are subject to 100 percent inspection are sometimes released for distribution without being inspected,” said the report.
“Of the 27 approved import application packages we selected where inspection had been necessary, 10 were released for distribution without inspection.”
For six others, there was no record that an import request was ever received.
Fraser said the CFIA should concentrate more resources in high-risk areas because all the 84,000 shipments landing on the border each year cannot be inspected.
“The other thing which they should be doing as well, which they aren’t, is just random tests, inspections on shipments coming into the country that have not been judged as high risk to make sure that their risk profiling is actually working correctly,” she said.
- The paper trail: When an importer declares that a shipment contains plants that would be subject to CFIA inspection, the Canadian Border Inspection Agency will not release the shipment without agency approval and getting that approval is cumbersome and old-fashioned in an electronic age.
Applications, approvals or recommendations are faxed to and from CFIA import service centres.
- Communications confusion: The audit concluded that instructions on what should be inspected and how often is imprecise both within CFIA and between the agency and border officials.
