CFIA’s Mission Impossible

To: Members of the Sub-Committee on Food Safety

The work you are about to undertake is critical to the safety of all Canadians. That’s why it’s important for you to know the unvarnished truth about the food safety inspection capacity shortfall at the CFIA.

When it comes to delivering the legally required oversight of Canada’s meat and food safety systems, it’s mission impossible for CFIA. The Agency simply does not have the resources to do the job Canadians expect and the CFIA’s own policies demand.

Food safety oversight will only get weaker and the risks to Canadians higher without decisive action from your committee. Consider:

• CFIA does not have an emergency fund to deal with outbreaks of food or animal-borne illnesses that are not declared as national emergencies. For the first time, CFIA is setting aside existing resources for this purpose. Sources within CFIA estimate this will result in a 10 – 15% reduction in CFIA operational budgets. This will likely delay and/or cancel plans to hire additional food inspectors, reduce industry oversight and increase risk of an emergency outbreak.
• CFIA rarely conducts Full Systems Audits of federally registered meat establishments even though this was a mandatory annual requirement until April 2008. The inspector shortage has derailed these extensive audits because they require several CFIA staff for up to five days at a time. These audits require resources the CFIA simply does not have. For example, all Full Systems Audits require a senior CFIA inspector to lead the audit. In all of Western Canada, only one CFIA staff person is qualified to fill this role.
• It’s important to note that the Maple Leaf facility, which was the source of the listeriosis outbreak last summer, was not subject to a Full Systems Audit for at least a year prior to the outbreak.
• Inspectors responsible for more than two Ready-to-Eat (RTE) meat plants do not have enough time to verify that RTE facilities under his/her oversight complying with food safety requirements, according to the following analysis of required food safety tasks.
• Yet, most RTE inspectors are responsible for three or more facilities. The inspector at the contaminated Maple Leaf plant in Toronto was responsible for seven facilities at the time of the listeriosis outbreak.

Annual Hours Required to Complete Food Safety
Inspection Tasks per RTE Facility

• The tasks and time requirements outlined above do not take into account:
  • Import/Export Requirements
    Inspectors are expected to place a priority on meat import/export inspection. This function conservatively accounts for 200 hours/year.
  • Travel
    While travel time can vary considerably, RTE facilities tend to be located in large urban centres like Toronto and Montreal where travel through metropolitan traffic can consume a considerable portion of the day and can account for hundreds of hours a year.
  • Leave
    Just like other employees, most inspectors take holidays. The typical processed meat inspector is entitled to at least 4 weeks annual leave or 150 hours a year. In addition, sick, training and other forms of eave take inspectors off the job for a period of time every year.
  • Enforcement
    It’s difficult to quantify the average time inspectors spend on enforcement actions but it can be significant.
  • Other
    We estimate inspectors spend dozens of hours every year completing tasks related to the CFIA’s own Quality Management System and Canada Labour Code health and safety requirements.
• When you add it all up, the CFIA simply does not have enough inspectors to ensure RTE meat producers are in compliance with food safety protocols.
• Faced with budget constraints the CFIA has taken a variety of cost cutting measures such as banning overtime before last summer’s tragedy. As a result, CFIA inspectors were unable to verify that pre-operation and sanitation inspections at Ready-to-Eat meat processing plants in Ontario and Quebec were properly conducted by plant employees, including at the Maple Leaf plant that was the source of the contaminated product.
• Prior to the introduction of HACCP in November 2005, pre-operation and sanitation inspections were conducted by CFIA inspectors and often resulted in orders to disassemble slicing equipment for cleaning.

These are some of the symptoms of the critical budget shortfall at the CFIA which undermines the safety of the food Canadians eat.

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For more information, please contact:

Jim Thompson
613-567-9592