Canada’s multi-billion dollar meat industry is sitting on a “time bomb” because not all meat getting to the consumer has been adequately inspected, says the new president of the Canadian Meat Council.
Bill Mulock, president of a Toronto company that produces back bacon, said in an interview the problem is the variation in inspection standards between jurisdictions, depending on the government responsible.
Federally inspected meat plants, including all CMC members, must meet standards that allow sales across provincial and international borders.
Plants that produce just for a provincial market often have less stringent provincial inspection.
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In some provinces, small plants producing for local municipal markets can fall under municipal control, which often has no or little inspection.
“From a consumer safety standpoint, I don’t think it is telling tales out of school to say that in Ontario at least, where I know it’s a fact, provincially inspected plants are lucky to get one visit a year,” Mulock said in a March 4 interview.
“That’s a time bomb. It will affect all of us someday because someone’s going to get real sick on a sausage they bought outside the Skydome (in Toronto) and because that was from a provincial plant, it’s going to hit the headlines that ‘meat guys screw up again’. “
Mulock said he will make creation of a “uniform national system of meat inspection” based on federal standards a theme of his year as president of the country’s largest meat packer lobby.
However, the president of Tasty Chip Steak Products Ltd., a plant dedicated to specializing in back bacon production, which often is sold as private brands to larger companies for sale as their product, conceded that smaller plants might balk at spending money to meet higher standards,
“We know that if the provincial plants see what it requires to become federally inspected, a lot of them are going to go underground or out of business,” said Mulock.
He suggested the answer will be a national, and mandatory, Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point system in Canada that will force all plants to meet federal standards and internationally accepted standards for meat imported or exported.
And he said it would be appropriate for governments to encourage plants to upgrade by offering tax or other incentives.
Mulock said it is not a question of the bigger plants trying to force the smaller plants into expensive upgrades.
“I expect we would hear that but the real issue is that sooner or later, someone’s going to get real sick on one of these things and it’s going to affect us all,” he said. “One incident and meat sales take a real hit. I think we have a legitimate reason to recommend federal standards.”
The Canadian Food Inspection Agency is working with provinces to develop national standards for food inspection across the country.
A national dairy code already has been negotiated and talks continue in other areas.
“The problem has been to politically and financially and comfortably bring all the provinces and the feds together,” said the CMC president. “It is a great idea.”
