The new Verification Inspection Teams that are going to cost taxpayers $16 million over the next three years are a waste of money, according to one industry food-safety watcher.
What's required is Canadian Food Inspection Agency inspectors actually doing the job they were hired and paid to perform, the university professor told CBC after Agriculture Minister announced the plan.
But what the critic did not acknowledge is that front-line inspectors have been failing to ensure the safety of the Canadian food supply for as long as they have been on the federal government payroll.
I have been detailing the failures since the mid-1970s, and the same old problems keep turning up.
What's new now is revelations that the situation is even worse in the egg industry.
Today I got a package of documents I hired an Ottawa agent to obtain from the federal court in Ottawa, and they show that despite results of random-sample audits, Ontario's dominant egg graders continue to consistently fail to pack only Grade A eggs in their cartons for sale to the public.
Not one of the samples drawn had a perfect score. In some cases more than 11 per cent of the eggs failed.
Yet I find no record that the companies were fined or even tapped on the wrists.
They ought to be shut down if they don't set their automatic grading machines to cull out all cracks, dirts and undergrades.
As the report from the XL Foods Inc. inquiry says, what's required is a "culture of food safety" at the companies and among the CFIA inspection staff.
It's simply not there. And the Egg Farmers of Ontario marketing board, which has the fate of its members at stake, has done absolutely nothing about the documented failures by the two egg-grading companies.
Nor, for that matter, has the Ontario Farm Products Marketing Commission which is finally going to hire somebody to conduct an "investigation" but that will, incredibly, not take a look into egg grading.
In the meantime, Canadians are at high risk of food poisoning if they eat raw eggs from all of the major supermarkets in Ontario.
With such determination to "see no evil, hear no evil and do nothing," I unfortunately predict that Ritz's Verification Inspection Teams will make no difference.
