The federal government is proposing to update the legislation that governs the Canadian Food Inspection Agency to standardize rules for food inspectors and give them more power to investigate companies suspected of violations.
It also will make Canadian rules more compatible with American rules.
Parliamentary debate on the bill, C-27, is expected to start within days and opposition critics will suggest the new rules would give CFIA inspectors too much arbitrary power to enter a premise suspected of violations and close it down regardless of the damage done if the allegations prove unfounded.
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“I think our major criticism is that there needs to be more accountability, from the level of inspector right through the bureaucracy,” Conservative agriculture critic Diane Finley said. “We also wonder, if this change in rules is so important, why it took them since 1999 to bring it forward.”
Agriculture minister Andy Mitchell said Dec. 3 he will welcome criticism during debate but a revamping of the CFIA rules is long overdue.
“The design of the bill is to give appropriate power to inspectors to do their job around food health and safety,” he said. “It is not about closing down a business.”
This is a government attempt to resurrect a limited version of food safety legislation first proposed in 1999 but dropped when critics were focusing on the issue of regulating genetically modified foods and the relationship between the food trade promotion function of Agriculture Canada and the inspection function of CFIA that reports to the same minister and Health Canada.
Mitchell said the latest version of the bill is more focused on CFIA rules and functions.
The proposed legislation will give all food inspectors the same powers as well as to powers to hold and test any regulated product, to shut down plants while investigations are under way and to take photographs inside plants.
Mitchell said the agency needs a more modern and U.S.-compatible legislative base because of developments in recent years including BSE, threats of foot-and-mouth disease and bio-terrorism concerns that arose after the terrorist attacks on the United States Sept. 11, 2001.
Canadian Meat Council president Jim Laws said he was not prepared to comment on the bill last week in the absence of a complete analysis.
Canadian Cattlemen’s Association official Rob McNabb said his group had not yet done a thorough analysis but nothing in the proposed legislation seemed to be an affront to the beef industry.
“This looks like a consolidation of what was there in various pieces of legislation and at first reading, no red flags jumped out for us,” he said.
