Wednesday, June 18, 2014

CFIA to audit itself

The Canadian Food Inspection Agency has a $16-million budget to audit its own inspectors over the next three years.

The agency announced on its website that six teams of three “verification inspectors” each will begin checking federally-inspected food-processing companies.

They will be checking things such as plant sanitation and company protocols for food recalls.
Four more teams will be added this fall.

Meanwhile, one of the most effective audits of meat production and processing and CFIA inspection is teams that come from other countries, such as the United States and the European Union.

The foreign inspection teams are accompanied by senior staff of the CFIA.

Yet they still fail to identify some grievous shortcomings, such as a litany of issues revealed on closer inspection after the largest beef recall in Canadian history at the XL Foods Ltd. plant at Brooks, Alta.

Does anybody, such as CFIA's supervising veterinarians, lose employment when the audits reveal these major shortcomings? I haven't seen a single firing over 40 years of reporting horrendous situations.