:
Thank you, and good afternoon, Mr. Chairman and members of Parliament. Thank you for the invitation to be here today to discuss food safety.
I know the primary reason you want to talk with me and my colleagues is that Maple Leaf Foods, a Canadian institution of which I am the responsible custodian, failed in our efforts to protect consumers last August and was responsible for the deaths of 21 Canadians, and illness and worry for many more.
This was by far the most awful event in the 100-year history of our company and one of the worst food-borne catastrophes in Canada. I can't properly describe the overwhelming sense of grief and responsibility we all felt and I felt personally. In the shock and grief that occurs when one is responsible for an event like this, a company has only its values to fall back on and to guide it.
Our primary concern was to do everything possible to contain further risk, including providing Canadians with as much information as possible to protect themselves and their families. That is why we immediately took full responsibility to bring clarity to a confusing and scary time for consumers. We went to extraordinary lengths, including television advertising, to inform people directly of what had happened. All major retail customers and food service head offices, distributors, and franchises—more than 15,000 in all—were personally contacted in writing and via phone to notify them of the recalled product and provided with instructions for product removal, a process that began within hours of our notification of CFIA findings.
It is no consolation to you, or certainly to us either, but we believed we had effective food safety programs in place at the time of the outbreak. We had a proprietary “40 Steps to Food Safety” program that set higher operational standards for ourselves covering every step of the supply chain, from the purchase of raw materials through to food processing, packaging, and distribution. In addition to complying with all applicable regulations, including those of CFIA and Health Canada, we invested millions to achieve these higher, self-imposed standards. And we had third-party auditors evaluate our performance annually.
Let me spend just a moment on the testing we were doing at the time, and feel free to come back to this in your questions afterwards if you like. The CFIA has recently implemented a new set of policy regulations—all of us have learned lessons from last August—that are strong upgrades from what was in place previously. Last August there was no requirement that food processors even have an environmental monitoring program in place for listeria control. Nonetheless, Maple Leaf was testing for it extensively across our packaged meat plants. We were conducting 3,000 tests per year at our Bartor Road plant alone. These test results were continuously available to the CFIA, and every time we found a test of listeria anywhere in one of our plants, we cleaned, sanitized, and retested that location. And every time we retested the site, the listeria was gone.
However, what we did not do then, and what we do do now, is apply sophisticated investigative and pattern recognition science to analyze test results to better determine root cause. This might have warned us earlier about the problems of last August.
Maple Leaf's conduct through the recall has been the subject of much commentary. Our own judgment is more self-critical than that. Our established food safety practices, as strong as they were relative to best industry practices and regulatory standards, failed us. As a result, we enhanced every element of our program.
First, we've implemented enhanced sanitization procedures, including disassembly and deep sanitization of all slicing equipment well beyond recommended guidelines.
Number two, we've doubled the amount of testing in our facilities, including more rigorous testing on food contact surfaces, which is the best early warning system we can have.
Number three, we analyze every single positive sample event looking for patterns. We look at the bigger picture every time we get a positive sample, so that we can investigate the root cause of that individual positive sample site. These may be patterns on entire lines or patterns of repeat occurrence, but our technical people study each one.
Number four, our executive staff and our technical and operating people review our food safety test results on a conference call daily. Every positive finding is chased down, with Dr. Huffman and me personally participating in these calls each and every day, with few exceptions.
Number five, we now have product quarantine procedures in place to hold product for additional testing if we have concerns.
Number six, and lastly, we have delivered comprehensive training to our employees across our packaged meat plants on our enhanced food safety protocols and standard operating procedures. Continuous training and awareness-building is critical to the effectiveness of our program.
Let me be very clear here, please. I believe that had we known then what we know now, and had we done then what we do now, we might have saved 21 lives. This tragedy was a defining moment for Maple Leaf Foods and for those of us who work there. We are determined to make a terrible wrong right. That is our obligation to those who died and to their families.
Our intention is to discharge that responsibility in three ways. First is by raising our own standards for food safety to provide consumers with the highest safety assurance possible. We had to improve, and we did immediately, and we will continuously. Second is by advocating and participating in industry-wide initiatives designed to raise the level of food safety practice amongst all companies. We believe strongly that food safety knowledge should not be the source of competitive advantage and must be shared for the benefit of all Canadians. And third is by doing what we can to educate Canadians about food safety risk, about how to assess risk, and how to minimize risk for themselves and their families through proper storage and handling and the preparation of foods.
One of the most important steps we took was to hire the gentleman to my immediate right, Dr. Randall Huffman. Last fall we created the position of chief food safety officer, I believe the first in Canada. Dr. Huffman has the mandate to ensure that Maple Leaf Foods is at the cutting edge of global food safety practices. We are better today than a year ago, but as knowledge and technologies evolve, we will be better again next year and the year after that. This is the process of continuous improvement.
Now, none of this is said proudly. The steps we took to become a food safety leader are our penance for being the company behind the worst food-borne outbreak in Canadian history. Our determination to make something good of this tragedy goes beyond our own practices. We would like to work with this committee, with the appropriate government agencies, and within our own industry to raise the standards for food safety across the board. As an industry, we are only as trusted as our weakest link.
The role of government and the role of industry in food safety are interdependent. A food-safe system cannot exist without both working within their respective jurisdictions towards the same goal: safe food for all Canadians. In fact, a strong, credible regulator administering a science-based policy is critical. If all stakeholders were candid about learning together, we believe what happened last summer was a failure of expectation, not a failure of inspection.
We believe that the role for government would be built around four key principles: one, defining with detail the requirements and expectations of an operator to deliver a strong and effective food safety program; two, building inspection and testing that is adequate to validate and verify the compliance with regulatory expectations, with tough accountability for those who are not meeting those requirements; three, ensuring consistent application and inspection nationally and at our borders; and four, developing policies that encourage responsible and proactive behaviour by operators.
We are certainly not experts in government processes, and making policy is the responsibility of Parliament, but if these responsibilities require more resources for the CFIA, we would certainly support that. When you're assessing the many potential approaches for food safety for Canadians, we would urge you to keep these perspectives in mind: first, you cannot see bacteria, so visual inspection has very limited value. You can only discover it by looking at delayed test results and data over time. Second, these bacteria don't live everywhere. They set up camp in any one of a million potential homes, and the trick is to find where they actually do live, because it's pretty easy, but often misleading, to determine where they don't live.
The revised CFIA policy on listeria that has just been put into place has indeed strengthened the approach to regulatory oversight of the industry's ability to control listeria in certain ready-to-eat foods. It describes a regulatory testing plan that will ensure that the concepts of Health Canada policy on listeria are properly implemented by industry. The Health Canada policy is based on sound scientific principles and is recognized globally as an appropriate approach to listeria control. The CFIA's new testing protocol represents a significant increase in environmental and product testing and will require many Canadian food processors to adapt and improve their approach to listeria control. These are all strong improvements, and we support them.
The key to the success of the policy will be for CFIA to enforce it consistently across the industry and to ensure that the details are properly communicated to inspection staff and the industry itself. Response to positive findings under the new testing regime must be rigorous in every facility. Interpretation of trends and patterns of environmental results over time must be carefully conducted to avoid misinterpretation.
The CFIA must also appropriately ascertain the safety of imported ready-to-eat products by equal enforcement of its revised listeria policy at the border. And we would go further to advocate that this new policy should represent the common standard for all ready-to-eat plants nationally, regardless of whether they are federally or provincially inspected.
Government food safety regulations to us are a floor. We also answer to the Canadian public, who vote with their purchase decisions daily. Our job, as industry, is to produce safe food each and every day, minimizing risk to the lowest practical level possible, and implementing best-practice food safety systems and procedures at or above the minimum requirements specified by government. We are the ones who make the food. Government should set the rules and provide oversight to ensure the rules are being complied with, but ultimately, safe food depends on the food company, and we have a very material obligation to deliver.
The final prong in our approach is consumer education. Most Canadians first heard of listeria from us, despite how common it is. However, as a string of recalls in recent months has indicated, it is hardly unique to Maple Leaf Foods. We have used and will continue to use a variety of methods to educate consumers about listeria, how to assess the risk and how to minimize the risk once the food is in the home. It's a difficult issue for us to be talking about, but we believe talking about food safety is our responsibility.
Mr. Chair, members, we are determined that Maple Leaf Foods be worthy of its great history with Canadians. We look forward to helping you with your efforts to understand both what happened to create the tragedy of last year and what lessons can be learned to improve our food safety system in Canada. To support this, we certainly would like to extend an invitation to you to tour our Bartor Road facility.
With these remarks, Dr. Huffman and I look forward to your questions and to our dialogue.
:
Okay, and we'll go until we've exhausted questions, I gather.
Mr. McCain, thank you for coming. I might say, in beginning, that I think your performance in this whole exercise, in this crisis, really shows such forthright transparency in terms of your operational concern, if I can say that, and I think honesty certainly goes to your credibility as a person and to your credibility as a company. I want to say that on the record because I'm pretty sure your lawyers were probably advising you otherwise. I think you've done the right thing for Canadians with the direct approach you've taken, and I want to congratulate you on that.
In your remarks today you've certainly accepted a lot of responsibility yourself. I understand that and I congratulate you for it. But there is another player, if I can put it that way, in this crisis, and that is the Government of Canada and the Canadian Food Inspection Agency. I guess one of my concerns is that we need to have the overall authority as the Government of Canada, through whatever agency it may be—it's supposed to be CFIA and Health Canada in this case. We need that overall authority. In your case, in your plant, in your operation, you may have been able to handle this kind of a crisis, but there are a lot of other players out there who might not be able to handle it in the way you have.
I just want to outline that in the beginning. Certainly one of my concerns is that we have to look at the industry as a whole, and not just specifically Maple Leaf.
You can answer me if I'm wrong on this, but I understand the cause of listeriosis, in the end, was in fact a slicer. As I understand it, from talking to people in the food inspection business—and you were following, no doubt, the manufacturer's specifications, and you can answer that as you see fit—at one point in time in our food inspection system, auditors would actually go in and they would go further. CFIA auditors, or whatever they were called prior to CFIA, would actually go in and do an audit, do an analysis, maybe tear the equipment apart, and maybe go above and beyond the manufacturer's specifications. That's the understanding; it's not happening now. Maybe you can inform us as to how that specific machine would have been inspected by the government authority in the past versus how it's done today, and how we propose doing it in the future so that this kind of problem doesn't occur again.
:
That is an excellent question.
I agree with you that these lessons learned should span the industry and the government, and we should look at what those lessons were prior to this. Maybe it would be helpful if I described what the protocols were prior to 2008 versus what they are today. That contrast would help illuminate the response to your question.
As I articulated in my opening remarks, prior to 2008 there was no requirement—zero—to have an environmental testing program inside a processing facility for ready-to-eat foods. Now, I respect the fact that it's possible to say, well, that's an element of deregulation. But I don't think that's an accurate or fair characterization, because that regulation never existed. It never existed and was cut; it never existed and was reduced: that regulation to have an environmental monitoring program never existed.
In the face of that, at the Maple Leaf facility we had an environmental monitoring program. We did have one of those. We were testing at the rate of 3,000 samples per year. We had our own “40 Steps to Food Safety” operating plan. We spent over $20 million on capital, including biosecure access, and we had third-party audits--but against the backdrop of no environmental monitoring program in place.
When there's no monitoring requirement--that was the expectation established not by a government but by industry and the government since the beginning of the food processing industry centuries ago, meaning never--then that becomes the foundation of that expectation. No amount of inspection, higher or lower, would have changed that outcome.
I think there are important policy questions here. There are important policy questions around the role of inspection, around the role of regulation, around product testing versus environmental testing. Those are very important questions. But if you want to go to the exact cause of this outbreak, it was not about a lack of inspection. It was not about a lack of product testing or a lack of inspectors. It was about a failure to analyze test data that we weren't even obligated to collect--a failure on our part to analyze that data and look for root cause analysis, to investigate and follow up on individual trends, to look for patterns, so that we could find the bacteria that we couldn't see inside these facilities and end up with a different result. So it was more a failure to analyze those findings for root cause and a failure of those protocols than it was a failure of inspection, per se.
We believe the CFIA should have, as they're now implementing, the new listeria policy as part of a new mandate. Now, that's not to say that there aren't very important issues in there for this committee to investigate for food safety, as Mr. Easter says, for the benefit of all Canadians and the whole industry. There are important questions in there, moving forward. But if you want to get down to the root cause, to what caused this, we don't believe that was one of them.
:
Thank you very much, Chair.
Thank you once again, Mr. McCain, for being here.
As you know, there are four separate reports that have been released in this last week with lessons learned--three by federal government agencies and of course one by the Ontario health department--and they all have their recommendations. I'm sure you're up to speed on the recommendations that have come out in each of them.
One of the criticisms that has come out in the media is that Maple Leaf did the recall and CFIA did not step in and do it for you. I would like to examine this a little bit further.
My understanding is that the minister, or CFIA, has the ability to order a mandatory recall. However, if it's not necessary, if a recall is already happening, then that's good. If they're able to work in a constructive way with a company, then in fact that is good. It shows teamwork and it shows corporate responsibility, as we've seen particularly on behalf of Maple Leaf.
I know you sent a letter out to committee members a couple of weeks ago, and it had your own statements and your timelines in there. One of the things that seemed to stand out for me, in reviewing that report, was that you were working cooperatively with CFIA, and that oftentimes CFIA would provide you with information or suggest something to Maple Leaf and Maple Leaf would be right onto it.
To give a couple of examples, I notice, for example, on August 16, Maple Leaf initiated a recall, but it was after CFIA provided confirmation that there was listeria present. On August 19, as well, Maple Leaf took further action, but once CFIA had informed you of more positive test results.
Certainly, I've been impressed with your corporate responsibility and with your personal responsibility regarding the listeriosis crisis, but I think what I'd like to get your viewpoint on is whether you agree that you and Maple Leaf followed the recall process, your own recall processes, to the best of your abilities.
You can answer this in the course of your answers, whoever may be able to. It's more a point of clarification. You kind of left the impression that there were no environmental regulations in place up until a short while ago, and I would like you to clarify what was there as compared to the new overall environment protocols that are in place now.
The more I listen to you, in fact, the more I'm concerned about government agencies not doing their jobs. There's no question industry has a responsibility, but government ministers and agencies have the overall authority and responsibility for public health in this country. So let's not lose sight of that fact. We were in a time-set--and Mr. McCain, you were part of this time-set as well--that there's a view from the government side to deregulate, and the industry side wanted to reduce costs, so if deregulation was part of that, then that was great. That's kind of changed in the very recent past.
I'll come back to my earlier question on the slicer. A witness who will be coming before the committee was an auditor of the auditors of CFIA. He will be before this committee. He maintains that if CFIA was doing its job, they would not be looking just at the manufacturer's specifications on the slicer; they would have detected that potential problem before it occurred, if CFIA had been on the job doing the proper audits in a preventive sense that they ought to have been doing.
Do you believe that to be a way we ought to be going? Is there a way of better prevention here, by better foresight, by CFIA as an overall authority doing its due diligence to protect the Canadian public, but also to protect you in industry from running into the kinds of consequences that you faced as a result of the listeriosis outbreak?
I know you're accepting responsibility, but I think a higher authority has a responsibility here, and that maybe this could have been prevented if CFIA had been on their job.
:
There is a higher authority in food safety, and that rests with a regulatory agency. I don't believe that means they are the primary responsible party here. I think we've accepted that because this occurred in our facility and on our watch.
I've articulated what we believe the role of government and the regulator should be going forward, and I'll reiterate that. First is to define the expectations of an operator in tremendous specificity and detail, as reflected in a food safety protocol. Second is to have the resources and processes in place to validate and verify that those regulations are being complied with. Third is to ensure the consistency of implementation across the country. Fourth is to encourage responsible behaviour by the operators. We believe that mandate will require more resources by the regulator, not less.
A great deal of this has been reflected in what we're doing today that we weren't doing before and in the new listeria policy in place today that wasn't there before. Now it's down to the quality of the implementation across the country to make sure it gets implemented well.
But your question is really about whether or not there was an obligation, and if somebody had been doing something different previously, whether it would have been detected. At the end of the day, with something as scientifically difficult as this, I don't know if anybody could go back and say what looks obvious today. Things of this nature, in retrospect, look incredibly obvious to us and to anybody else who might examine that data and say, “If I'd known that at the time I would have been able to do something.”
Goodness knows we were collecting a mountain of data at that time. We think the operative regulatory question is that no data was required to be collected at all, not how that data was being interpreted at the time. But could somebody go in after the fact and say they could have analyzed the data if they had the time, the resources, the skills, the training, and come to a conclusion? Maybe they could have; maybe they couldn't. I know it's voluminous, very scientific, and highly interpretative data. You have to spend the time and energy to examine it all, and in retrospect we've said we should have known that. We should have had the systems in place to see that. Others could have come to the same conclusion.
:
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
For a few moments, I would like everyone to put themselves in the shoes of consumers, which is not difficult, as we are all consumers. We eat your products and those of your competitors. We eat products that come from Quebec, Canada, and other countries. So we have reason to be concerned when events like the one last August and others occur. Listeria is one strain of bacteria, but there is also E. coli. There is no doubt that several products were inspected, but some of them made it through the inspections and controls and ended up on store shelves, causing diseases and, unfortunately, death. I am not just talking about your products. There was the case of spinach from the United States as well as carrot and pear juice. At one point, a host of products were contaminated in one way or another and made people sick and some cases, caused death, unfortunately.
Consumers who follow the work of this committee or who read the papers are entitled to question the number of inspections and inspectors. Unfortunately, we will never be able to prevent such unfortunate events from occurring and certain products from being missed. People tell themselves that they pay taxes to the government so that the government will protect them. But sometimes there is no such protection.
When people read in the papers that some inspectors whose work involves protecting them spend the bulk of their time in an office with paperwork instead of inspecting food, they are entitled to question whether their safety is in jeopardy. When people read that an employee at the Canadian Food Inspection Agency claims the government wants companies to regulate themselves by doing their own inspections, they are entitled to wonder whether they are adequately protected.
You say you are accepting responsibility because these events occurred under your watch. I want to correct you, Mr. McCain: they also occurred under the government's watch. Employees and inspectors from the Canadian Food Inspection Agency must be involved. They must work in conjunction with the industry in order to prevent these kinds of problems.
Here's another aspect that raises questions in people's minds. Up until April 2008, federally accredited meat facilities were required to undergo a full verification. Monitoring in that area has been relaxed. At the Maple Leaf plant where the listeriosis contamination broke out last summer, there had not been a complete verification of the systems for at least a year prior to the Listeria outbreak.
I will repeat that responsibility must be shared. I would like you to put yourselves in the shoes of the people who see these events and who will be better informed following the meetings of this committee. They will know a lot more following the investigation demanded by the government and conducted by Ms. Weatherill, which was done without our knowing exactly what happened. If you put yourself in the place of consumers, you will understand that they are entitled to ask questions about public health, their health and the health of their families.
:
That is an area and a topic that is most important to us. We are a consumer-facing organization. We have built our trust with consumers over a hundred years of history, and as you well know, trust built over a hundred years of history can be broken in minutes.
We know that Canadian consumers have the concerns you describe. We feel those concerns very deeply. Certainly out of respect for and recognition of those concerns, we took the actions we did in this very tragic situation, putting the interests of consumers first.
We recognize that trust will take time to rebuild. Their trust in the whole food safety system in Canada has been impaired, and we feel very sorry for that. We certainly played the dominant role in that impairment, and we feel very sorry for that outcome.
Of course, everybody has a role to play in capturing the lessons learned. We've tried to be clear on what we believe those lessons are for the regulator. We've tried to articulate what we feel is an appropriate regulatory framework going forward, and we've been very clear that we regret the fact that...had we known then what we know now, we might have saved 21 lives. Under the circumstances, I think we are responding to consumers by putting their interests first and taking the steps to improve going forward, as I think the regulators are as well.
Just to complete my answer, on your question specifically around the inspection that was dropped, I believe--if I'm not mistaken, and I hope I've understood your question appropriately--you are referring to the annual inspection that used to be engaged by the CFIA. A best practice in quality assurance and food safety is globally recognized as what's described by hazard analysis and critical control points, or HACCP, programs. HACCP programs replace annual one-time inspections with inspections that are implemented each and every day.
Dr. Huffman can respond more articulately than I as to why that's so, but I believe the regulatory approach was replacing annual one-time inspections with the implementation of what is recognized as global best practice, effectively, in the form of daily and weekly HACCP programs, that for all intents and purposes replace annual one-time audits with daily and weekly audits and inspections.
Let me just quote back to you what the Auditor General said in 2000, Mr. McCain, about CFIA, in particular, and about HACCP, since you've just raised it. This is the CFIA they're talking about: “...the Agency did not maintain sufficient dialogue with stakeholders, particularly Parliament and the public”, including on the implementation of the hazard analysis critical control points, or HACCP, food safety systems. And there has always been considerable debate about the role being left to the private sector, in particular with respect to implementation of HACCP systems.
So as you talked about the HACCP system, the part of that that I think the public has some concerns about—and they may or may not be entirely justified, depending on where the situation and the plant is and who the operator is—is that the third-party inspector, CFIA, reduces its actual inspection role and allows, as you call them, the global best practices under HACCP to be done by the operators themselves. Sometimes there can be a disconnect between the public's faith in the operators, justified or not—and I'm saying this in a broad-based food process across North America, not at Maple Leaf in particular. So that becomes one of the points of contention, I think, around the HACCP issue: it's not so much that HACCP may indeed be more testing, because you can say, “Well, we only had one audit before, we may have multiple testing now during the year”, but it's who is actually doing the testing, who verifies it, who audits, and who does all those subsequent steps in the process. That's part of the question.
But let me go back to some of the things that I see in your opening remarks and the paper you put together. It talks about advocating, and I assume you mean by Maple Leaf, and I appreciate the leadership role that you're taking around this: “advocating and participating in industry-wide initiatives designed to raise”—and I emphasize the word “raise”—“the level of food safety practice among all companies”, and the leadership role you want to play in that. That's to be commended, and I think all of us want to see that happen right across all the food industries that provide us with food and manufacture it. But you go on to say that you're “not experts in government processes, and making policy is the responsibility of Parliament, but if these responsibilities”—one of which I just mentioned, and you have some others there as well—“require more resources for the CFIA, we would certainly support that”, which brings me to the nub, if you will, of the whole situation.
You talk about third-party inspection and audits that help your company. I'm not so sure if you meant CFIA, around a third party. You mentioned that someone does a third-party audit for you. I didn't know if that was in addition to CFIA, an outside party as well. But it seems to me that one of the things in all of this that we could get to, which actually takes some ownership away from the corporation, in the sense of inspection duty, and gives confidence back to the public, is this whole sense of third-party audit.
Now it may be unfair for the public to sometimes think that companies don't necessarily do it the way they're supposed to. There is a certain element of faith in a third-party audit, which says we don't have any distinct gain to be made by saying whatever about an inspection, whereas a company obviously has, around certain issues it produces. Whether that be in the auto sector or in the food sector, it doesn't really matter the sector, a company has an intrinsic value in saying, “We're the best at whatever”, whereas when we're inspecting something as delicate as food—and I use the word “delicate” in the sense of a car won't poison you, necessarily, but food can—we engage in a process....
I think what you're saying to us here, and I may be mistaken, when you talk about companies coming together to share their knowledge and to truly get global best practices—and I hope this country can be a leader in this, to be truthful—is that the only way you get trust back with the public is really through third-party verification at the beginning and at the end of that process, not somewhere in between, sort of taking snapshot samples here or there as the process goes by.
But I'm not so sure, even with your leadership, Mr. McCain, that your competitors may necessarily all come to this table of food safety and want to share all their best practices. Policy, through government, can indeed make them do that, whereas you don't have the ability, sir. And I know you probably wish you could, but you don't actually have that authority, as you mentioned earlier, but we do.
I know that's sort of a wide-ranging topic. If you could make some comments, I'd appreciate it.
:
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Thank you for being here today.
Like the others, I would like to say it, too, but I think I'll say it on behalf of the people of Brandon, which hosts one of the largest Maple Leaf hog processing plants, I suspect, in North America. I pass on the message, Mr. McCain, that the community of Brandon is very proud of you for your acceptance of the responsibility and for your company's acceptance of the responsibility. I think in today's economic crisis we see executives running away from problems. I think in this case we've seen the chairman step up and try to resolve them.
I have four questions, and I'll just maybe read them off and let you answer. I know we have limited time.
It's been suggested by some that maybe more inspectors is the answer. My first question would be, do you believe that more inspection of your specific incident would have found the root cause on that particular day? You mentioned that you think resources for the inspection should be more available. Would processing companies such as yours be willing to partner in that cost?
You mentioned guidelines in your presentation, about these guidelines being applied provincially as well as federally to all ready-to-eat plants. There are two points. I'm wondering how many that would impact. Do you see that eventually being spread into the complete slaughterhouse industry?
The last question I have is this. You did mention, and it was mentioned in the “Lessons Learned” report, that there was some difficulty transferring the information from your corporation to CFIA and it created a delay. I guess more than anything I'm hoping...and I'll ask you to tell us that those things have been corrected and obviously the record-keeping is compatible now. I'll ask you if they are and if you've done that.
Mr. McCain, you've talked about the importance of a role for both the company and the authority, and I think that's really important.
When we look back at SARS, we had shared understanding, shared responsibility, and shared lessons learned, so one of my greatest concerns is in looking at the chronology of events and seeing the repeated delay between the time information was gathered and the time it was shared. I'll provide some examples.
There was an increase in listeriosis cases in June and July; the first notification among partners was July 29. There were delays in sending samples. Toronto Public Health sent 11 samples on July 21, Ontario received them on July 22, that lab sent them on July 23, and they were received at the reference laboratory on July 24. The public health division detected an increase in reported cases of listeriosis on July 25. They requested additional data on July 28.
On July 21, the public health division asked the listeria reference laboratory to prioritize food samples submitted a week earlier. On the 24th.... As a result of the additional information entered by public health units retrospectively, public health identified 16 cases of listeriosis in the month of July.
Was there a delay in entering data? Was there not enough data entered? What is a reasonable time in which to enter data when the delay of a day can make a tremendous difference during an outbreak?
I'll give you a few more. On August 11, Ontario's central public health reported two open packages of meat cold cuts had tested positive for listeria. The Halton regional health department issued an advisory to local homes about a possible link. There was no other warning. CFIA informed the public health division and PHAC on August 13 that Maple Leaf was the manufacturer. Why was it two days later?
I could go on and on. Why didn't CFIA post a warning to its website until August 17, five days later? What other methods did it take to inform the public?
I have many other examples. I won't continue with them. I want to bring it back to you. You said there should be shared responsibility. You've talked about your responsibility. I'm wondering if you can comment on the delays that seemed to happen in many areas.
Mr. Chairman, ladies and gentlemen, I appreciate the opportunity to appear before this committee. My name is Carole Swan and I'm the president of the Canadian Food Inspection Agency. We look forward to assisting the committee with its important work.
Let me start by saying how saddened and disheartened all of us at the CFIA are by the food-related illnesses experienced last year. We want to express our sincere sorrow to those families who lost loved ones or were otherwise affected.
Secondly, I want to state that our agency staff, be they inspectors, lab technicians, recall investigators, scientists or any other classification, are highly skilled and committed professionals dedicated to the protection of Canadians. This is an organization that cares about food safety.
Third, we're not perfect. The “Lessons Learned” documents that we released on Friday were direct and honest. We did not use that process to point fingers at others. We are focused on improvement.
In my remarks today I'd like to cover three areas: first, what the agency does; second, the challenges regulators face in a global food market; and third, what we are doing to continuously improve food safety. I will then ask Dr. Brian Evans to outline what the CFIA has done specifically in relation to the listeriosis outbreak.
[Translation]
The CFIA is a science-based regulator with a mandate to safeguard food, animal health, and plant protection. Our plant and animal mandates also relate to food safety, as foods are derived from these resources.
In support of this mandate, the CFIA works to identify and prevent risks to our food safety, whether the foods come from Canada or abroad; to identify and control animal diseases that pose a risk to human health such as BSE, or mad cow disease as it is commonly referred to, and avian influenza; and to protect the country's animal and plant resources, both in the field and in the forest, from devastating foreign pests and diseases that could negatively affect the food supply.
The CFIA has inspectors, veterinarians, scientists and other specialists in nearly 500 locations across Canada. It operates at border crossings, processing plants, slaughterhouses and in labs and research facilities throughout the country.
[English]
The CFIA is part of a national network responsible for food safety, which includes Health Canada, the Public Health Agency of Canada, provincial and territorial departments of health, and the public health units found in local municipalities.
Health Canada sets food safety policy and standards. The CFIA puts these policy and standards into effect through regulation, inspection, and enforcement. The Public Health Agency of Canada focuses on disease detection, reporting, and prevention. It is the primary federal contact with provincial public health authorities. Our work intersects with the Public Health Agency of Canada if there is an illness caused by food-borne diseases, as the Public Health Agency of Canada monitors and reports on such illnesses.
In terms of the CFIA's role in food safety, we inspect, test, audit, and review food production to verify that industry lives up to its legal requirement to produce safe food. When it doesn't, we take enforcement action to bring it into compliance. We conduct investigations when we think food safety has been compromised or when we are alerted to a problem, and we issue food recalls where necessary.
All partners in food safety have a responsibility to be constructive in their efforts to improve the protection of human health using science, international best practices, and new techniques. We look forward to hearing from other witnesses as well as to this committee's report and that of the independent investigator.
Like food regulators around the world, the CFIA is facing new challenges. The trading and processing of food has become more complex than ever due to globalization and the sourcing from all over the world of food ingredients that go into processed finished food products. This economic trend is also spurred by changing demographics and consumer preferences for fresh, convenient, exotic, and imported foods.
Since the agency was established in 1997, the nature of the challenges we face has evolved, as has the frequency of events having significant health or food safety implications. For example, in the past two years we have dealt with several significant challenges, including melamine contamination in Chinese dairy products, E. coli in Canadian and American beef, salmonella in U.S. peppers, and, currently, salmonella in U.S. peanuts and pistachios. I cite these to illustrate that the CFIA, like food inspection agencies around the world, is facing increasing pressures and challenges.
The listeriosis outbreak from contaminated Maple Leaf food product last year was the largest food recall in Canada. The events of last summer exposed vulnerabilities in collective surveillance and in the national protective network. In the agency's “Lessons Learned” review, our goal was to provide an assessment that was comprehensive, honest, and sincere. We do recognize that our work to improve is never done, that continuous improvement is key to food safety. Through the review process we determined where immediate improvements could be made and we made them. There is more to be done, and we welcome the guidance of this committee and of the independent investigator to advance this effort yet further.
Given the increased complexity of challenges in food safety, a number of steps have been taken to make improvements. Let me provide some examples. In December 2007 the government announced the food and consumer safety action plan to strengthen Canada's food and product safety system. Over the past year the agency has hired additional inspectors to provide front-line protection against food safety risks. Last year we established an academic advisory panel of independent experts to review food safety and public health protection. We have established an external audit committee to provide oversight to the operations of the agency, and for listeria control we put in place strong additional requirements for industry that will give us a better early warning system. We've stepped up our own verification testing to monitor industry compliance with those requirements. Dr. Evans will provide detail on this.
Let me conclude these brief remarks by assuring you that the CFIA is committed to food safety. Food safety is our number one priority. As an institution and as individuals, we are committed to doing the best job we can.
Following the events of last summer, we took a hard look at ourselves and immediately began to make changes. We did not wait to act. The events of last summer continue to guide our efforts to provide strengthened protection and detection. While it is important to understand the past, the job is left undone if we don't translate that understanding into action.
We appreciate the committee's guidance, as well as that of Sheila Weatherill, the independent investigator, in considering further improvements for all the partners in food safety.
Thank you. I will turn it over to Dr. Evans.
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
In full respect of the committee and their desire to question, I'll be as brief as possible.
Mr. Chairman, ladies and gentlemen, I appreciate the opportunity to appear before this committee, and I welcome your contributions to our sincere efforts to achieve the highest possible standards of health protection for Canadians.
As indicated, my name is Dr. Brian Evans. I am the executive vice-president of the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, and I serve as the Chief Veterinary Officer for Canada.
I'd also like to start by extending our profound sympathy to the families affected. It is clear that, collectively, we did not meet the expectations of Canadians.
I'll begin by giving you a brief timeline of the events of last summer related to the recall. I'll then talk a little bit about our meat inspection framework. Finally, I'd like to share with you what the CFIA and its government partners have done to strengthen our food safety system with regard to both the prevention and response to listeria to contribute to higher levels of protection.
With respect to the outbreak timeline....
[Translation]
The listeriosis outbreak began in early June and was detected by public health officials in Ontario over the ensuing seven weeks. Detailed investigative work at municipal and provincial levels led to their advising the CFIA on August 6, 2008, that a possible food link was suspected. As there has been some confusion around it, let me underline that date. It was on August 6 that the CFIA was first informed of a public health investigation into two listeriosis cases in a nursing home. Samples taken 16 days previously from meat used to make sandwiches in early July at the facility had tested positive.
Upon notification, a similar level of investigation was immediately undertaken to confirm the source of the contamination through multiple lines of inquiry. We needed to provide Canadians with credible information upon which to base their actions and decisions.
[English]
The investigation entailed determining the source of the meat products through purchasing and supply records, identification of the specific product, and the relevant lot and production codes that were used in the making of sandwiches from which the test samples had been taken. Once determined, a further search was undertaken, in cooperation with public health partners, based on distribution records to other locations in order to find an unopened package of the same type and code. This is critical in such investigations to ascertain whether the contamination of the product occurred during handling and preparation at the nursing home or whether the product had been contaminated at production.
A sample was located on August 12 and submitted to the CFIA food laboratory in Scarborough. Also on August 12, the CFIA was advised by another district health unit of two additional listeriosis illnesses in a hospital in Halton region and of positive test results on two samples of meat served at the hospital. However, the patients did not have a history of having consumed the product.
Based on these new developments, the CFIA office of food safety recall initiated a teleconference on August 13 to bring all the jurisdictions--municipal, provincial, and federal--together to review all the laboratory and epidemiological information. A detailed sampling plan to cover all products produced on the same production lines was shared with all the parties to assist in locating and collecting samples over the next two days for testing at the CFIA Scarborough laboratory. These calls continued for the next two days to facilitate information sharing and analysis, and to collectively determine if the evidence supported the conducting of an advisory or recall.
On the evening of Saturday, August 16, the CFIA laboratory confirmed that the sample collected on August 12 was positive for listeria monocytogenes. Although the molecular typing would not be available for another seven days to confirm that the isolate from the meat product matched those of the illnesses, a public health advisory was issued in the early morning hours of August 17.
l'd like to take a moment to talk about one area of our inspection activities that was frequently cited as germane to the listeria issues of last summer.
One of the techniques that governments around the world have adopted for effectively identifying and preventing food safety risks is called hazard analysis critical control points, or HACCP.
[Translation]
Its use has been mandatory in federally regulated food establishments in Canada since 2005. It is a standardized, internationally recognized system used by most of the developed world. An emphasis on prevention is absolutely critical in limiting the potential contamination of meat products with pathogens such as Listeria, given their presence in the environment. Traditional physical inspection approaches are not effective, as their presence cannot be detected by sensory means such as seeing, tasting, touching and smelling.
HACCP identifies the various stages in food production where food safety hazards are known to occur. A food safety check is inserted at these stages to detect and prevent problems early on. If a problem is found, corrective measures are immediately taken. This process puts the focus on the prevention of food safety risks rather than "after-the-fact" detection on end products.
[English]
This is not privatization. It serves to increase industry's accountability and efforts for the safety of the foods they produce. There has not, is not, and will not be any diminished role for investment by the government through the mandatory use of HACCP. The setting of standards, the verification of compliance, and the application of enforcement actions by government remain unchanged.
At the CFIA we use an inspection framework and tool set called the compliance verification system, or CVS. Essentially a detailed checklist that guides inspectors, it assures consistency and uniformity in our inspection activities and prescribes inspection frequencies. Again, the CVS does not change the government's role in establishing food safety standards, in verifying compliance with food safety requirements, or in our enforcement activities.
I would now like to provide some detail on what the CFIA has done in the aftermath of the events of last summer to strengthen food safety in the context of listeria as part of our ongoing commitment to continuous improvement. Our reviews of the events of last summer pointed to the need to enhance protocols and activities to strengthen protection against this potentially lethal pathogen. In parallel, we need to continue the same important work against other microbial threats to the food supply. This should not be a one-horse trick.
Specifically, we identified a previously unknown risk for the harbouring of organic material deep within slicers, in spite of their routine cleaning and sanitizing. We now direct industry to clean slicing equipment more thoroughly and aggressively. We have enhanced CFIA direct oversight and verification of equipment sanitation and equipment maintenance. Environmental testing for listeria in ready-to-eat meat establishments is now a mandatory component of an approved HACCP plan. Results of all environmental tests, as was previously prescribed for end product tests, are reviewed daily. We conduct trend analysis of positive test results for listeria in the plant environment. This is important, because looking at aggregate environmental tests over a period of time will provide us with early warning of potential problems so that corrective actions can be taken before a positive test is found in food. Environmental testing as part of the CFIA inspection tasks has been reintroduced, and along with government end product testing, this is occurring at a higher level of frequency. Investments have also been made at the laboratory with ongoing validation of new test methods and increased capacity to conduct genetic fingerprinting of isolates.
[Translation]
The CFIA worked with Health Canada to update directives regarding the control of Listeria in federally registered ready-to-eat meat processing plants. The improved directives focus on early detection and control of Listeria in the environment, to prevent the transfer of bacteria to contact surfaces and food. The CFIA proposed, discussed and challenged the revised directives and implementation strategies with food safety scientists, industry experts, inspection staff and relevant unions.
Full implementation of the new government product and environmental testing programs was completed on April 1, 2009. Furthermore, the CFIA will promote equivalency in these measures from our trading partners, with additional verifications of products imported into Canada.
[English]
Taken together, these actions will help reduce the chances of a similar outbreak occurring and will allow us to do a better job in the future of monitoring the shifts and trends in microbial pathogen presence in the operating environment of federal meat processing establishments.
In conclusion, listeria, as with other bacteria, is commonly present in food production environments. It can and must be controlled, but it cannot be entirely eliminated. The effort to control listeria is ongoing and requires a collective commitment. We welcome the work of this committee and its contribution to guiding additional investments to protecting Canadians.
Thank you for your time. We'd be pleased to respond.
:
Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you to all of you for coming. We appreciate your comments.
I'm struggling with the lack of coordination regarding the investigation. CFIA, Health Canada, and the Public Health Agency have all been involved in pandemic planning, for example. The basics are the same: Who takes the lead? What is the reporting structure? What is the cycle of communication? I feel we've made the same mistakes regarding listeriosis as some that were made regarding SARS.
We've just had Maple Leaf here, and they discussed shared responsibility from both the company and the government authority. When we talked about SARS, it was shared understanding, shared responsibility, and shared lessons learned. I appreciate you've been very detailed in how you will go forward. You mentioned you took a hard look at yourselves and you took immediate action. I don't hear the word “responsibility”.
My question is going to be around who was to take leadership. Where was government oversight for this? I'll give some examples. You will have to bear with us because the dates are different in different reports.
CFIA informed the public health division and PHAC on August 13 that Maple Leaf was the manufacturer. Why was it two days later when the Halton Region Health Department issued an advisory to local homes about a possible link? Why didn't CFIA post a warning on its website? On the 13th, why was there no discussion among partners or communication to the public? Why didn't CFIA post a warning on its website until four days later, on the 17th? What other methods did it take to inform the public? Why did CFIA wait until the 19th to issue a health hazard alert, advising the public not to eat 23 ready-to-eat deli meats packaged at Maple Leaf?
I know this is not CFIA, but it's again government oversight. Why did the Chief Medical Officer of Health wait until the 20th to issue a public news release? Why did the Chief Medical Officer of Health wait until the 21st to notify the LHINs to ensure products on the CFIA list were thrown out? The Chief Medical Officer of Health ordered the preparation of clinical practice guidelines for front-line physicians at a still later date. These are real concerns. This is government oversight.
I'm going to add one more to that. This is a comment in the Ontario report. Because the local and provincial public health units were not directly involved in inspecting the plant, it was difficult for them to obtain information about its production processes and the extent to which contaminated products had been distributed across the province. Why was it difficult? Who made it difficult? How could these challenges have been circumvented?
My questions are really around government oversight.
:
I apologize to the member. We'll hopefully reconnect on another round.
Again, as Carole has indicated, what is really important about this is to put in true context for everybody not just the roles that people were playing but the information we were dealing with individually and collectively. The death of 22 individuals and the illnesses of some 57 individuals, as we've all identified, are not acceptable. It's tragic. Any preventable death is unacceptable, and our policy in CFIA is that any food-borne illness is not acceptable, even though that's probably a standard that nobody could ever meet.
At the time this was unfolding, it was unfolding in real time, as has been indicated by Dr. Williams in his message on Friday. It takes time for people to consume a product, to develop clinical illness, to take the decision to seek medical attention, and then, on the part of the medical community, if they receive patients, will they pursue symptomatic treatment or will they test? If they opt to test, it takes time for those results to come back and for them to be analyzed and collated. It is a time process.
What we were aware of, as CFIA, is this. On August 6 we were approached by one public health unit to advise us of two patients ill in one facility. That was the basis on which multiple lines of investigation started. As most food safety experts would say, the largest percentage of food-borne illness occurs in preparation and handling, not normally at production. So the early assessment of that circumstance, again, even with a common food source, would say not all members in the nursing home who had consumed food of the same type were ill. So again, there was no immediate predisposition to suggest that this was something much bigger that would lead to the end result, as Public Health hopefully will share.
The first confirmed death associated with this outbreak, in fact, was confirmed on August 23, a full week after the recall had been initiated. What triggered activities in bringing the jurisdictions together, as we've indicated, was that on August 12 a second public health unit contacted CFIA from a different region to indicate they had a hospital circumstance with two patients who were also ill. Again, this did not represent, in a traditional sense, a massive outbreak across the entire population nor even within those institutions. What was critical in coming to the determination on the advisory and alerting the public was being able to give credible information to the public that allowed them to take decisions to protect themselves and their families, either through their behaviours and/or their purchasing circumstances.
To that extent, from our perspective, the decision to issue an advisory.... All jurisdictions involved had the authority at the point that they felt that trigger had been met. That was part of the day-by-day discussions, and there was not agreement around the table that we had reached this point, primarily because, in truth, that threshold also takes into account very recent experiences that we've all gone through. There was reference earlier to the salmonella Saintpaul outbreak in the United States last year, which extended for some seven months on the basis that it was a tomato-based circumstance. It ultimately turned out not to be tomatoes but peppers.
We're also informed by the circumstance several years ago when there was an epidemiological determination that strawberries from California were in fact infected with cyclospora. That changed--on the advisory--the purchasing behaviour of people. They chose to buy other products. At the end of the day, one of the products they were buying was raspberries. It was determined that the true source of the outbreak was raspberries from Guatemala.
So we do recognize the importance and the primacy of sharing information with the public at the point that we can give them information that we feel will protect their interests and allow them to take an appropriate decision, but to give them information that we can't validate and perhaps put them at greater risk or cause them to change their behaviours.... Again, this was not a decision taken in isolation but one that involved the best experts for multiple jurisdictions to reach that level of conclusion.
:
Thank you for the question.
At the Maple Leaf Bartor Road plant, we had at that time, the time you specified, two inspectors. There were two shifts. Each inspector would have been present on the day shift or on the night shift. And it is true, as you indicated, Monsieur Bellavance, that the one inspector on the day shift had seven facilities that he was looking after. His primary facility was the Maple Leaf Bartor Road plant. He had his office there. He operated from that plant. He spent most of his time at that plant.
Four of the seven facilities, in fact, were not really plants as we think of them. They were cold storages. Those cold storages are registered with the federal government, and the work at those cold storages is for export certification and the inspection of imports. It's important work. It's not as time-consuming as in-plant inspections.
As far as the workload and what they were doing in the plant, these inspectors were operating under the system Dr. Evans mentioned--the compliance verification system--which very clearly sets out tasks for each inspector and targets risk areas. It sort of rotates between certain parts of the plant and certain functions, such as sanitation, employee hygiene, and construction--all these types of things. In that plant, those tasks were completed, as prescribed by the program, by those two inspectors. They had to have been busy, I'm sure, but they did meet all those tasks, and we have that documented.
As far as time spent on the plant floor, this is something that's been talked about quite a bit since last summer. The allegation seems to be that inspectors don't have an opportunity to walk around the plant, look at the construction, talk to employees, and look at the equipment. In fact, that's an integral part of what an inspector does.
I had the opportunity last fall to go across the country and meet with more than 100 inspectors to discuss this and other really important issues and how they felt about this. The consensus was that the compliance verification system is a good system. It had some growing pains, but they were able to spend an adequate amount of time on the plant floor. Our records indicate that about 50% of their time is spent on the plant floor. They're looking at the whole system. They're looking at the plant records and making sure that they're all appropriate, and then they're going out onto the plant floor and verifying that those things are done correctly.
Thank you all for coming.
Let me just read a line from what we heard earlier: “Most Canadians first heard of Listeria from us, despite how common it is.” Those are the words of Michael McCain earlier this evening. It begs the question, at least for me, on behalf of Canadians.... Mr. McCain, by all means, as the spokesperson and CEO of Maple Leaf, has a responsibility, and may indeed want to speak about his responsibility, and he did do that. But where were we, as government agencies, whether that be Public Health, if you believe that's appropriate, the Minister of Agriculture, who is responsible for CFIA, or the Minister of Health, who is responsible for the health of the country? Where were they in all of this process?
I think if you went out this door and walked down Wellington Street and asked ten Canadians, who do you think speaks about listeriosis, they would say Maple Leaf or Michael McCain. I think that's an indictment of us, as a government, and it's an indictment of the systems we've put in place to protect Canadians that the CEO of the affected company is seen as the true spokesperson. As well intentioned as he was, as forthright as he was, and as honest as he was, that's not his responsibility. His responsibility is to speak for Maple Leaf, and he's done that. Our responsibility is to Canadians, and it seems to me we fell down on that one. I'd like a response on that.
I'll go to Mr. Prince because I see he is the operations manager. I have a couple of things. I don't know if you can answer them at the moment or not, but you can get back to us, as Mr. Bellavance has said. The information we received in the House from the minister was that 200 new inspectors were hired. Could you break that down for me as to who actually works in meat inspection and who works on the plant floor?
We also heard there is going to be an additional 58 inspectors hired. Have they been hired, and if so, are they doing meat inspection or are they doing other things? As you articulated through your opening statements, you do many other things besides simply meat inspection, which is highly important. You look at imports, you look at foreign plant material, and you look at foreign species of insects, which can have devastating effects across this country. So there are other things you do. You also have specialists who work in labs and all those sorts of different places. When folks think of CFIA, they sometimes think everybody is inspecting meat or food substances, and that's not necessarily the case.
Could I get comments on those two specifics?
:
Thank you, honourable member.
Very briefly, on the issue of what I believe Mr. Michael McCain was alluding to, the issue of consumer awareness or consumer education is a very significant element of a robust food safety system. We certainly do have an obligation to inform Canadians of risk and how those risks are being mitigated on their behalf.
With respect to listeriosis, and listeria itself, in fact there has been advice to the public, and issues on listeria have been posted on the Health Canada website for a long period of time. The issue is, are we keeping it current and are we keeping it in front of Canadians so that it resonates with them? I think that's a very honest question that we have to collectively look at. But there certainly has been information available to Canadians on the website and through the “Healthy Canadians” website that speaks to the risks associated with listeria, and the risks particularly for vulnerable populations, those who are immuno-compromised, those who are aged, women who are pregnant, and young children.
So that information is out there, but we need to keep it out there and visible at all times for people to really understand what risks do exist and what they can also be doing in terms of proper food handling to deal not just with listeria, but I would say equally with E. coli, with salmonella, and with campylobacter. As people have pointed out, these are risks that you can't see, you can't smell, you can't taste, and you can't touch. So you need to know that it's there and you need to be taking precautions at all points across that.
Again, we fully accept this obligation to educate, to inform, and to keep ourselves aware.
:
I think we all, as CFIA and Canadians, recognize the outstanding work that Mr. McCain did in terms of bringing issues forward to Canadians in a very responsible, timely, transparent way. He's to be commended for that. We encourage all industry leaders, and government leaders, to follow that model.
I can honestly indicate to the committee that efforts were made to inform the public beyond the use of the Internet, for sure. In our food recall unit, during that period of time, there were—I believe the figure is over 400—media calls that were responded to in the agency by food safety specialists to try to get information into print media. Over and above that, subsequent to the initial release, when we went to the expanded recall on August 23, I think, as the other honourable member has pointed out, from that point forward, initially technical briefings were held by Dr. David Butler-Jones, the Chief Public Health Officer, to share information about listeria and the events that were unfolding.
There was a briefing as well involving Minister Ritz and some of our technical staff, and daily technical briefings were provided for over a 14-day period from the latter part of August through until early September. So on a daily basis, officials were made available, press were notified, and we made people available to share information about how the recall itself was progressing, the steps that were being taken, the identification of the products, to help Canadians, to remind Canadians...again, at that time of year, if you've been at the cottage and somehow you've not been aware, these are the things you need to be looking for. You should be looking at your freezer at home, and on the long weekend you should be looking in the refrigerator at the cottage as well.
So while I can appreciate the views that perhaps the messages weren't picked up, certainly there was a concerted effort and a considerable investment made by a number of people both to respond to media and to be out there trying to get the information out to Canadians. Lesson learned: we obviously didn't hit the mark; we need to review why that was.
I'm going to present a number of questions. The first will focus on laboratory testing.
Is there any way for the federal government to streamline the steps involved in testing for listeriosis from hospital and private labs to, for example, the Ontario public health laboratory and the National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg for fingerprinting? What backup systems exist if one or more labs are unavailable? What action might the federal government take to increase greater regional laboratory capacity?
I now have some specific questions. Why was there a delay--August 13--in requesting unopened samples of food from Maple Leaf when the first food results were available on August 6?
Why didn't the CFIA or, better yet, the Chief Medical Officer of Health order a recall of packaged meat products? Why was it left to the corporation to do, and why was it voluntary?
I'm wondering if there is a minimum standard, i.e. number of cases, contaminated food samples, deaths, higher-than-average number of cases, that would have triggered concern regarding listeriosis and then triggered subsequent health advisories to the public.
If I may add one last question, I think we all appreciate very much how Maple Leaf responded. There's one inconsistency. Maple Leaf undertook a voluntary recall, temporarily shut down the plant, and made a public apology when government failed to do so. Why did Maple Leaf not go public on August 13 when it notified selected customers asking them not to use products with the same product codes as the Toronto sample? What did “selected customers” mean? Did it include all customers? If not, who were left out? What systems were in place to identify the number of locations and establishments that received product during the outbreak?
Thank you.
:
I'd like to address the first issue, on lab capacity, and then I would ask Paul Mayers if he could respond to the subsequent questions posed by the member.
With respect to lab capacity, streamlining tests, etc., this comes back largely to part of your coordination opportunity question. As we've said, we've tried to be very frank in our report, because the circumstance warrants us being very frank, in light of what happened.
We have lab capacity regionally. We have a food lab in Scarborough since the events in this particular circumstance, and it was critical to some of the food sampling once CFIA was actively engaged, as of the 6th, because it has the capacity to do culture for listeria. In fact, it was the sample submitted to them on the 12th, which was returned to us on the 16th, four days later, that triggered our advisory and the voluntary recall.
On the issue of backup systems, since that time not only have we expanded our lab capacity, but the lab has always been available to operate on a 24/7 basis, and it does operate on a 24/7 basis when we're involved in active investigation mode. Over and above that, we've also expanded it to the extent of getting it certified to do the PFGE or the fingerprint testing again so it can be done in one site, as opposed to multiple sites. So we believe we do provide federal regional support in the area if the provincial jurisdiction chooses to pursue that.
Again, we will continue at CFIA to work in parallel with Health Canada, because part of this also says that we need to continue to invest in test methods development. We need to get the tests that can be used either in food products or on contact surfaces that give us earlier results than the current gold standard of a culture test.
Despite what the government claims, when we talk about the investigation headed by Ms. Weatherhill, we are not questioning her competency, but rather the lack of transparency regarding the inquiry implemented by the government. This individual, who will conduct her investigation in private, is accountable only to the , or the Prime Minister's Office. That is who she will submit her report to in July, apparently. However, neither the public nor parliamentarians will really know what is happening. I want to clarify this because transparency is the reason for this subcommittee.
With regard to the files that have been established since the beginning of the listeriosis crisis, questions, grey zones persist with regard to the role of the agency and the meetings that it held and information that is still unknown. You are here, Mr. Evans, and that is a good thing because you have been at the centre of a controversy in this regard. In fact, a meeting with Maple Leaf took place on July 24, 2008. This controversy might not have gotten bigger if you and Maple Leaf had admitted that listeriosis was discussed during that meeting. This meeting took place two weeks before we learned about this pathogen discovered at the Maple Leaf plant in Toronto.
Based on the articles I have here, two parties, meaning the agency and the company, denied from the start that Listeria and bacteria in general had been discussed during that meeting. First, I wonder why you denied this only to later admit that it had been discussed, but that the discussion did not focus fully on that issue. The public still believes however that you denied that this discussion had taken place.
Furthermore, information was made public following media request under the Access to Information Act, but the Canadian Food Inspection Agency had hidden some information. I would like to know whether you are prepared today to ensure transparency by telling us what that information was and why it was hidden. Someone in the agency made some comments, but then refused to say any more. Minister Ritz's office refused to make the slightest comment. We are talking about transparency. We are talking about an event that caused the death of 21 individuals and eroded public confidence in our food safety system, which has been undermined as a result of what has happened.
The subcommittee is trying to determine what happened, but we are also trying to ensure that insofar as possible, this never happens again. We want everyone to be able to admit their mistakes and their responsibilities. That is why I'm asking you today whether you can tell us what was discussed at the July 24 meeting and, if information is still hidden, then why so. I want to know if you are able to divulge that information. I am telling you that if we obtain a satisfactory answer, we will move on.
:
Thank you, Monsieur Bellavance. It's a very important question.
I've appeared before committee on multiple occasions. My commitment to public service and my commitment to Canadians is not in doubt, I hope, with this committee.
I would point out very clearly that, yes, there was a meeting on July 24 with one of the representatives from Maple Leaf Foods. In the disclosure it was indicated very clearly that this meeting had been originally scheduled for February, earlier in the year, but because of other commitments it had had to be postponed and cancelled because I was not available. This was also part of the ATIP release. In fact, this was a deferred meeting. I was contacted by Maple Leaf officials about a week before July 24. They indicated they were coming into town for other meetings and asked if we could re-engage on those issues that we hadn't been able to talk about in February.
In the Access to Information Act and the Privacy Act there are provisions that indicate issues that might relate to corporate interests and issues that might relate to.... In effect, we talked about seven different topics, and it was clearly indicated in the meeting notes that we talked about seven different topics. Some of those topics dealt with internal Maple Leaf restructuring, which was deemed by those people responsible for ATIP to be information private to the company, and at CFIA we did not have the option to disclose that.
The Access to Information Act also looks at issues as they relate to other departments. In our discussions with Maple Leaf we also talked about some of the technical negotiations that we, as Canada, were involved with on food safety at the global level. We and Maple Leaf have been very clear about this. Because the discussion made specific reference to engagement with other countries, it was deemed by Foreign Affairs and by other officials to be confidential government-to-government information.
There was never a denial that we talked about microbial issues. The inference in the press was that we talked about listeria and the Canadian circumstance with listeria. We were very clear, when pressed on that issue, that listeria specifically was not mentioned. What we did talk about--and I think Mr. McCain raised it here as well--was that it's very important for Canada to ensure that whatever standards apply to domestic industry in this country also apply to imports.
Members of this committee will recall that at that particular time we had gone through a circumstance with one of our trading partners in which it had increased border testing, or import testing, of Canadian products, and the nature of that discussion was to outline to them some of the activities we were undertaking to ensure reciprocity in microbial testing. It covered listeria, E. coli, campylobacter, and salmonella. That was the only context in which listeria was mentioned.
I personally apologize to this committee, I personally apologize to Canadians, and I personally apologize to any media if there's any inference from what we discussed that there was any information provided to us at that time by Maple Leaf that gave us any early indication of a problem in the plant. As we've indicated, we did not become aware of an issue of listeria operating in Canada that could have a food source until August 6.
:
My response to that, honourable member, is at two levels.
In previous discussions I've had with Dr. Randy Huffman, who I believe was accompanying Mr. Michael McCain earlier today, and drawing on his broad experience again...these--for lack of a better term--slicers, because that's how they're referred to, are monstrous machines. These are computerized. These things are bigger than my car. To insinuate that we, at CFIA, would have the ability or engineering skills to dismantle or go further than the manufacturer's ability.... First and foremost, I don't think most companies would let us do that, because they might not get them back together again by the time we were done with them. These machines require a strong degree of sophistication in order to be disassembled to the point where you would find something that was contributing to this circumstance.
With respect to the audit, I can honestly say that there was a time, going back to 1999, when in fact we did annual verification audits that were quite extensive. What we determined from that, of course, was that in 1999 we would be better off to do audits quarterly than annually, because, again, doing so would give us a much more intense look, on a more frequent basis, than we would have if we waited for a year for these things to happen.
So, in fact, there was an adjustment in 1999 to go from an annual audit to quarterly FSEP and verification audits, to increase that frequency, and to find things in a faster way. So that program, in effect, ran up until the start of this year, with the quarterly audits being undertaken. And then through the piloting of CVS, the major components of that audit system were then incorporated into daily, weekly, and monthly activities through the CVS program.
To infer that in fact we, at CFIA, were somehow dismantling slicers on our own in past years I don't think is accurate, sir.
:
Thank you for the question.
I think people need to understand what the lessons learned really were intended to achieve. As President Swan has indicated, in effect we have this Office of Food Safety and Recall. It operates 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. It doesn't stop. It works full time all the time. Therefore, it is in itself an operational centre that is equipped to handle most emergencies as they occur.
Once we were into the circumstances in the week of August 14 and the information was starting to build that it was beyond one or two facilities and one or two people...the reality was that we had discussions with the Public Health Agency, who were activating their emergency centre, because on August 14 it was recognized that in fact there were illnesses outside of Ontario. This had moved from a provincial focus to a national focus. So we embedded ourselves in their operation centre. We had people deployed to be with them full time to make sure we were coordinated, sharing information, understanding what the needs were that we could supply directly to them.
What we realized in hindsight by doing this is that it's still the right thing to do, and we would do it again, but by not activating our own emergency operations centre, what we lost was an internal capacity to track the information, to document the information in real time. Again, it had no impact whatsoever in terms of speeding up recall. It had no impact whatsoever in speeding up the investigation. But when we went back to do the lessons learned, we had to go to multiple places to get the consolidated history. If we had operated a national emergency centre...you operate then with what's called the “war diary”, so it's minute by minute, who spoke to who, what was said, and if there was a decision taken, what information did you know at that time on which to base the decision.
In hindsight, that type of compilation, which is very important in terms of when you do go back and do lessons learned...we had to rebuild that to some extent, so that's what that issue gets at. Even though we were embedded with PHAC and operating very closely within their operation centre, the fact that we didn't have our own internal single point of information gathering meant that when we went back to do the review, we had to pull that all back together again.