When northwestern Ontario store owner Mark Loney started to buy from a small Saskatchewan jam producer, he decided to create a label that would work in both Canadian and United States markets.
That began a bureaucratic nightmare that he says has cost tens of thousands of dollars and has trapped him in a regulatory black hole that sees him still unable to sell some of the products in Canada even though he has had approval for the U.S. market and could sell them in Canada if he brought them north from the U.S.
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He tried to model his label on one used by food giant Kraft for imports into Canada but it was rejected.
“We were warned the registration process would be long and complicated,” Loney told MPs on the House of Commons agriculture committee.
“For us, this was all too true. We entered the world of the CFIA (Canadian Food Inspection Agency) where in our opinion, vague regulations turn into moving targets.”
To make matters worse, while the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved his label quickly using e-mail communication, CFIA insists on using regular mail with about a 40-day turnaround for each response to label changes demanded, he said.
One complication has been that the agency will not allow him to list ingredient quantities in both metric and imperial to satisfy both markets, although imports often have labels that do not contain metric measure or the required French.
Another issue, said the Emo, Ont., man, is that CFIA rejected the label approved in the U.S. because tablespoon was written with a capital T.
“Regulations on both sides of the border are vague and open to interpretation,” he told sympathetic and sometimes bewildered MPs. “U.S. FDA used interpretation to our advantage. As long as the relevant information is there in a readable format and there’s truth in label, they’re satisfied. This is not how CFIA operates.”
He said the Ottawa-based agency would not allow him to deal with label changes and consultations using the internet, as an FDA official in Minneapolis did.
“They’re still back in the 16th century and they require that I mail it to them and wait the 40 days back so there’s 40 days every time I find out if my capital key T should have been a small t,” said Loney. “It’s like I come here and I expect to see people in 16th century wigs. That’s what I get from my own government and I didn’t like it.”
He said after 10 months of back-and-forth with CFIA, only three of six labels have been approved for product sale in Canada.
But if he imported back into Canada some of the product he ships across the border into Minnesota, there would be no inspection and he could sell that product in his store.
“That makes its own case,” said Liberal MP Ken Boshcoff, Loney’s MP who has been using the case as fodder for criticism of CFIA for months.
Loney said standardized labels for the Canadian and U.S. markets would save small export businesses like his thousands of dollars.
Ron Doering, founding president of the CFIA, said the answer is to end the need for premarketing label approval for jam. He said CFIA rules require that only meat products and jam require label approval before being sold.
