Agriculture Minister Gerry Ritz is once again out to lunch
while a meat packer undergoes a huge recall of tainted products.
When it was Maple Leaf Foods Inc. recalling processed meats,
many of them cold cuts, because of Listeria monocytogenes, Ritz said it was
death by a thousand cold cuts.
That went over really well with the families of the 21
people who died and others who were sickened.
Now in the midst of a massive and growing recall of ground
beef and steaks from XL Foods Inc. of Edmonton, he is quoted in Hansard saying “The people at CFIA have done an exemplary
job.”
Yeah, right!
So wonderful that
they missed all of those deficiencies and failures to conduct adequate testing
and to keep adequate food-safety records.
That only surfaced
after the massive recall began, when, in farmer language, the horse had escaped
from the barn.
And why, pray tell,
has the CFIA failed to require the company to keep good enough records that
there could, and should, have been only one recall. We’re now up to eight and
still counting.
Ritz said the CFIA
is working hard to regain the confidence of the United States meat packers and
Food Safety and Inspection Service and “to get back into that lucrative
American market.”
I guess the
Canadian market doesn’t count.
Ritz is once again
out to lunch, apparently oblivious to the hit that beef consumption is taking
because Canadians are afraid to buy hamburger from any of the major supermarket
chains. I have encountered a number of people who say they’ve stopped buying
hamburger at supermarkets. Maybe also the fast-food restaurant chains, although
I haven’t personally heard any comments about them.
Ritz said “I
reiterate that none of the product made it to store shelves and no illnesses
have been linked back to this particular strain of E. coli.
“We have actually
done a tremendous job."
I guess the
Calgary famlly whose little girl is in hospital with, the parents say, E. coli food poisoning, are really
impressed with this “tremendous job.”
The food
inspection service at the Canadian Food Inspection Agency is in dire need of a
shakeup, or shakedown.
And it’s not only
meats that require a total overhaul.
Eggs are another
product where the CFIA track record is abysmal, as revealed in court documents
related to the lawsuits against Ontario’s two dominant egg graders and the
general manager of the Egg Farmers of Ontario marketing board.
Eggs that passed
CFIA inspection at the two dominant egg-grading company plants, and that were
requested by the general manager of the egg board, arrived at another
egg-grading station dirty, so cracked and broken that they were leaking all
over. These were supposedly Grade A eggs.
And if you
believe the claims of the dominant egg grading companies that the eggs were
Grade A when they left their premises and must have become dirty, cracked and
broken in transit, then I’d like to interest you in investing in some swamp
land in Florida.
And if they did
get dirty, cracked and broken in transit, what does that say about those
companies’ trucking performance?
But the obvious
need for major changes to food inspection at the CFIA are not going to happen
under Ritz who says they are doing “a tremendous job” or “an exemplary job.”
He’s out to
lunch. Maybe of a thousand cold cuts.
Meanwhile beef
farmers and the entire meat-packing industry suffers a loss of consumer
confidence.
