Health Minister Rona Ambrose is sending a special team to check the work of nearly 40 Canadian Food Inspection Agency inspectors at a meat processing plant in Alberta.
“I’m going to send them in to make sure everything is okay,” Ambrose said during question period Thursday, after NDP MP Laurin Liu said Canadians are at risk because of inadequate E. coli testing.
CTV News first reported Wednesday on government documents that show meat tainted with E. coli bacteria from the plant in Brooks, Alta., was detected by U.S. food inspectors in 2014.
That was two years after the government shut down the plant – formerly operated by XL Foods – after at least 18 people were sickened by meat containing the bacteria.
The documents also noted hygiene concerns, including employees standing in “two to three inches of pooling blood and contaminated water,” lack of running water in the bathroom sinks, and unflushed toilets with fecal matter.
JBS Foods, the Brazil-based company that now owns the plant, said any problems indicated in the inspections have been resolved.
Ambrose also said Thursday that “corrective action” was taken to deal with issues “that happened in 2014 and before” and that “there are no outstanding issues.”
Ambrose said that a 2014 Conference Board of Canada report that ranked Canada’s food inspection system first among 17 industrialized countries is proof the CFIA is “doing an excellent job.”
Part of the ranking was based on the number of cases of illnesses from food-borne pathogens per 100,000 people. Although Canada received a “superior” rating overall, it was rated only “average” for E. coli.
Canada had 1.94 cases per 100,000, compared to 0.32 per 100,000 in France (the lowest among 17 countries), 1.12 in the U.S. and 8.99 in Ireland (the highest among 17 countries).
Canada was one of seven countries that improved on the food-borne pathogens metric between 2010 and 2014, according to the ranking.
CFIA’s Chief Food Safety Officer Martine Dubuc also cited the Conference Board of Canada study in an interview Thursday.
“We are diminishing the number of E. coli case that we have across the country,” she said.
When asked why unsafe meat had left the Brooks, Alta., plant again, she said that the inspectors’ work involves sampling, which “is not foolproof.”
Dubuc said the possible sanitation problems noted in the government documents are abnormal. “Each time we find something wrong like this, it needs to be corrected,” she said.
Dubuc said that the plant had taken the corrective actions needed to ensure safety.
Dubuc also said it’s normal to send in special teams of inspectors to verify the work of CFIA agents, as Ambrose has ordered.
Liberal public safety critic, Wayne Easter, said the CFIA needs to conduct more spot checks to keep Canada’s food supply safe.
Easter also said he shares the concerns of the union that represents CFIA workers at the Brooks, Alta., plant.
Agriculture Union President Bob Kingston told CTV News that the union believes the government is planning to cut staff.
But Dubuc said the union is mistaken.
“We have no intention, actually, of changing the number of inspectors that we have in this meat plant,” she said. “They are conducting very important work for us.”
With a report from CTV's Ottawa Bureau Chief Robert Fife and files from CTV's Philip Ling
