The Canadian Food Inspection Agency has begun posting more information on its website about disciplinary actions it has taken.
For example, under the Meat Inspection Act, it suspended the licence of Oullette Packers 2000 Ltd. twice last year – from May 25 to July 9 and from Oct. 10 to Dec. 7.
Licence suspension is the second-most-severe action the agency can take; the most severe is cancellation of a licence. During a suspension, the plant has to stop production.
Another severe penalty is seizure or detention of flawed product. That happened to frozen albumen at the Global Egg Corp. plant at Elmira this January. That facility is jointly owned by Bill Gray of Gray Ridge and Aaron Kwinter.
Fines can also be levied, as happened to Nieuland Feed and Supply Ltd. when it pleaded guilty to two charges in connection with an inspection in January, 2010, at its plant at Listowel.
It was fined a total of $8,000 in district court in Stratford for failing to apply a precautionary label to some feed and for failure to register a ration it was marketing.
I have learned via Access to Information that Burnbrae Farms Ltd. had 14 product detentions at its egg-grading and egg-processing facility in Mississauga during 2009 and 2010.
In many cases, the eggs were released from detention the same day after either being re-graded or the grading changed to “nest run” eggs. That implies fraud in the original grading, but we can't know for sure because the reasons for detention have been censored. All we do know is that the detained loads, which may have been up to 28,000 dozen each to fill a tractor-trailer, were not up to snuff for the grade claimed.
Perhaps there were too many cracks and dirty eggs, similar to the data that whistleblower Norman Bourdeau has revealed about L.H. Gray and Sons Ltd. If so, it would bolster the allegations made in court documents filed by Svante Lind that Gray and Burnbrae were doing the same things.
The 84 inspection reports on the Burnbrae facility were heavily censored, but it can be seen that sometimes the egg wash water was graded only “fair” or, in French, “passable”, and once was deemed “serious” meaning it represented a food safety threat to consumers.
That would indeed be a huge risk if any of those eggs were cracked because contaminated wash water could, unknown to consumers, have been inside the eggs they bought in the belief that they were wholesome Grade A product.
