Federal agriculture minister Gerry Ritz said he is determined to improve the Canadian food safety system in light of last summer’s tragic listeria outbreak that killed at least 22 people.
He rejected opposition accusations that the outbreak was made worse because the Conservative government was trying to do pre-election damage control instead of dealing with the crisis.
And he said Canadians want politicians to move beyond politics on the food safety issue.
“The government of Canada accepts its share of responsibility for what happened last summer,” Ritz told a House of Commons subcommittee on food safety studying the listeriosis outbreak April 29.
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“Like you, food safety is important to me on a deeper level. As a father and a grandfather, I want to know we are serving safe food to our families. That’s why our government is working so hard to learn the lessons of last summer’s outbreak.”
He said the government has ordered tougher environmental testing in ready-to-eat meat processing plants by companies and the Canadian Food Inspection Agency.
As well, the government will act on recommendations that come from the committee report and a report expected this summer from Sheila Weatherill, who was appointed by prime minister Stephen Harper to lead an investigation of what went wrong last year and how to avoid a repeat.
She will not be able to assign blame, an issue that opposition MPs and government critics say is a way to protect the government from findings of political interference or government bungling.
Last week, Liberal agriculture critic Wayne Easter suggested the government response in August 2008 was guided by an attempt to limit public relations damage in the weeks before an election call.
Ritz denied political involvement on his part. Meanwhile, CFIA last week found itself being accused of retroactively doctoring inspection reports from the Maple Leaf plant where the problem occurred.
Inspection reports obtained under access-to-information rules showed that on Aug. 26, 2008, weeks or months after the initial inspection report was filed, inspectors added handwritten notes asserting that all had been well.
CFIA operations vice-president Cameron Prince told MPs that the handwritten updates were requested by food safety auditors who reviewed the inspection reports, interviewed the inspectors and decided the reports did not fully correspond to inspector memories of all that they had seen.
“The purpose of this was not to alter, change in any way,” Prince told MPs.
He said the agency will pursue the issue with the inspectors’ union.
“The purpose was to provide further clarification and be completely in line with the recollection of the inspector at the time.”
