Officials spent most of their time on paperwork at Maple Leaf plant leading up to listeria crisis

By: Robert Cribb, Toronto Star

Federal inspectors monitoring the Maple Leaf plant at the centre of Canada’s largest listeria outbreak spent less than two hours a day at the facility – often dropping in for as little as 15 minutes – in the year and a half leading up to the tragedy, a Toronto Star/CBC investigation has found.

And as much as two-thirds of the time each week was devoted to administration and recordkeeping rather than inspection, according to time sheets obtained under access to information legislation.

Proper oversight would require an inspection presence of at least 7 1/2 hours a day in a facility as large and complex as the Bartor Rd. plant that produced enough listeria-tainted meat to kill 22 Canadians, says the union representing meat inspectors.

The daily worksheets, which detail when inspectors began and ended their shifts and the nature of their duties, reveal for the first time the extent of daily oversight and inspection activity.

The records – hundreds of documents covering 19 months – include more than 80 instances when inspectors visited the plant for between 15 and 30 minutes.

Canadian Food Inspection Agency officials and the agriculture minister have repeatedly said inspectors spend half their time doing hands-on inspection work and complete all of their required tasks.

But the documents paint a picture of an under-resourced system in which inspectors spent little of their time on production floors as they moved between the several plants each oversaw. At Maple Leaf’s Bartor Rd. facility, near Hwy. 401 and Sheppard Ave., one inspector covered off an eight-hour production day and another visited occasionally during the eight-hour sanitization shift at night.

The daytime inspector had six other facilities to monitor and the evening inspector had more than a dozen other plants, though some were cold-storage facilities.

Bob Kingston, president of the inspectors’ union, said the Star/CBC data confirms what inspectors across the country have been saying. “You’ve got a system that’s valid on paper or looks good on paper,” says Kingston. “But that’s all it is, a paper system because you don’t have the horses to make it work. And until they fix that problem, they’re gambling. And I think gambling in a reckless way.”

In an interview this week, CFIA national inspection manager Tom Graham defended the agency’s resources, saying all inspection tasks at the Bartor Rd. plant were completed as required in the lead-up to the outbreak. “I do believe that (less than two hours a day on average) is enough time if the oversight is properly completed,” he said. “They met all the requirements at the time (at the Bartor Rd. plant).”

He acknowledged, however, those requirements ultimately proved insufficient.

Following the listeria-triggered deaths, the CFIA introduced new mandatory testing protocols that added new inspection duties and oversight, including taking swabs.

“There’s no excuse for what happened here,” Graham said of the outbreak. “We committed to make changes and we’ve already made changes in our system.”

Those changes and added duties have not come with added resources, critics say. In fact, 58 new “front-line” inspectors promised by Agriculture Minister Gerry Ritz during the height of the outbreak last summer have not been dedicated to meat inspection, the Star reported yesterday.

Overall, CFIA inspectors spent an average of about 100 minutes a day at the Bartor Rd. plant in the 19 months leading up to the outbreak. That figure dropped from about 120 minutes in 2007 to less than 80 minutes in the first seven months of 2008. Then, in August 2008, after the outbreak began claiming lives, inspection time at the plant skyrocketed to 309 minutes a day.

After reviewing the Star/CBC data, Wayne Easter, Liberal agriculture critic and member of a parliamentary subcommittee investigating the country’s meat inspection system, said the CFIA and the agriculture minister will be formally asked to explain these numbers.

“What can you do in 15 minutes in terms of doing your job as a federally paid inspector in a plant?” he said. The CFIA’s Graham, asked if any inspection task could be completed in 15 minutes, said: “Probably not, no.”

© Toronto Star