Canada's Food No Safer Than It Was Before Maple Leaf Listeria Outbreak, Says Sun Newspaper
For its year-after editorial about the Maple Leaf listeria outbreak that killed 22 mostly elderly Canadians living in provincial long-term care facilities or hospitals, the Vancouver Sun sought out some experts.
The newspaper waned to know if Canada's food was safer after all those who died after consuming deli meats contaminated with listeria produced at a government-inspected plant.
"And on the eve of the one-year mark of the outbreak, the verdict is still out on how far we've come to improve the food-safety system in the intervening year.
"Oh, hell no," Rick Holley, University of Manitoba microbiologist and member of the academic advisory panel at the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, says bluntly when asked if we're better off.
Mansell Griffiths, director of the Canadian Research Institute for Food Safety, is more measured, but hardly makes a definitive pronouncement about the shape we're in today.
"In some respects yes, in some respects no," says Griffiths, a professor in food science at the University of Guelph.
"There's no doubt more rigorous tracking of listeria and sophisticated sanitation protocols are in place at Canada's federally regulated meat plants, where operators were shaken by the realization that steps taken at Maple Leaf Foods Inc., an industry leader in food safety, weren't as good as they needed to be to deal with the ubiquitous bacterium.
"But the agency is still wrestling with a resource problem that sees one meat inspector responsible for an average of five facilities, while struggling with a new oversight system that favours auditing of company paperwork over time on the plant floor."
Read the rest in the Sun.
There is still a very typical lack of intelligence and fortitude . . . all big business ownership of the government - dinosaurs at best... as the situation does not improve....
maple leaf - The fact that this happened at all is reprehensible and totally unforgivable. I will never again buy shopseys, schniders, ziggys, maple leaf, hygrade, etc. and the list goes on!!
It seems as though we are expected to forget, but I do believe they are so stupid and incompetent that they have never cleaned the plant and equipment before such that the original plant still is not re-opened.
Then a year later - on maple leaf's best behavior and their most diligent efforts, which are useless, arrogant, canadian know-nothing incapacities, another plant has a recall of 9 different types of hotdogs.
At the hamilton, ontario plant, huffman, said, they " have very strong food safety sanitation " ?!?!?!!?!?!? If it were true, if any of it were true and they had more brains than a bloodsucking tick, had they even had ANY food safety sanitation, they would not have had to recall 9 brands of hotdogs a year after killing 22 canadian people. Imagine a whole million dollars to replace a family member!! money grubbing butchers
Now what about that greedy little money grubbing inspector of chinese products - has an investigation been launched? Or since no one has been discovered yet to have died from it, the government has no concern or care.
In my own time, I am actively promoting the ban and boycott of maple leaf and all its multitude of name brands internationally, most especially on both side of the NA border.
The feds have done nothing to instill any confidence in their concern over our welfare.
This is the typical federal government inability to resolve anything. A year after killing 22 canadian people maple leaf is still allowed to stay in business and obviously preparing to drop the other shoe with more listeriosis poisonings.
May the government know no rest from its uncompassionate views and incompetent management.
I am a retierd worker from a Federal Inspected Meat Packing Plant in Canada and I worked there for forty years. The plant that I worked in was allowed to let the meat sit on rails in the plant that were in warm places for up to 12 hours. I emailed Steven Harper and Dion back in 2006 about this and they did not respond and I emailed Micky the new Liberal leader in 2009 and he did not respond.Do you really want any one of these two Clowns to lead Canada.G B.