The rhetoric surrounding Ottawa’s recent meat inspection decision is like the fog emitted by a meat locker when the door is left open too long.
The rhetoric didn’t dissipate as fast as the fog.
The Conservative government recently announced it will no longer provide federal meat inspectors to provincially regulated plants in Saskatchewan, Manitoba and British Columbia.
A fee-for-service arrangement will be phased out and by early 2014, those provinces will be expected to develop and staff their own meat inspection systems, as has been done in Alberta, Ontario and Quebec.
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The plan was quickly denounced by the Public Service Alliance of Canada, which represents Canadian Food Inspection Agency meat inspectors, some of whom will be out of work come 2014.
PSAC agriculture union president Bob Kingston asserted that food safety would be put in jeopardy and new standards would be “beneath the standards and meat inspection practices enjoyed by Canadians elsewhere.”
NDP opposition members said the changes would put consumers at risk of illness from contaminated meat and would create a two-tiered food safety system because federal inspectors would no longer be able to “fill a gap in federal-provincial standards.”
Food safety and meat inspection are serious matters. Canadians learned just how serious in the summer of 2008 when 22 people died as a result of listeriosis contamination in meat from a federally inspected plant.
So critics are right to be concerned about meat inspection and to insist that food safety gets the attention it deserves. Doubtless the governing party shares that concern and insistence. That much is cut and wrapped.
However, meat from both provincially and federally inspected plants has to meet federal Food and Drugs Act standards. The new structures set up by Saskatchewan, Manitoba and B.C. will have to meet those standards as well.
To suggest that new meat inspection systems set up by these provinces would automatically be substandard and dangerous to consumers is fear mongering and perhaps even insulting to existing provincial inspection systems.
The rhetoric also seems to ignore the fact that CFIA inspectors working in provincial plants are inspecting to provincial standards, not federal ones. Inspectors in the new provincial systems will be doing the same thing.
In fact, they might even be the same inspectors, if CFIA staff who live in those provinces choose to change jobs.
Provinces that now have their own meat inspection system have been mum on the subject, but they might be forgiven for being a bit miffed over suggestions that provincial meat inspection is inherently inferior to that offered by the CFIA.
Meat safety problems are rare in Canada, regardless of whether the product was inspected to provincial or federal standards.
The idea that a two-tiered system will be created from this change is also an example of meat locker fog. The provincial-federal inspection system has been around for decades. Meat from provincially inspected plants cannot be exported to other provinces or countries. Meat from federally inspected plants can.
And although the rules between the two inspection systems are different, one has not been shown as superior to the other. There is no statistical proof that meat from provincial plants causes a greater number of health problems. In fact, some provincial plants argue they are safer because of their smaller size, volume and speed, so inspectors can spend more time.
PSAC makes one suggestion that bears consideration. It believes a 2014 timeline is not sufficient for the three provinces to develop their own systems, hire staff and adequately train them. If that is true, the timeline should be extended so there is no jeopardy to meat safety.
Bruce Dyck, Terry Fries, Barb Glen, D’Arce McMillan and Joanne Paulson collaborate in the writing of Western Producer editorials.
