“The legislation is good. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with it, but our concern is that they won’t have the capacity to deliver,” Agriculture Union president Bob Kingston told The Hill Times last week. “Whenever we’ve seen situations where they don’t have the capacity to deliver, they turn more responsibility over to the regulated parties. They keep saying that’s not going to happen, but mathematics would tell you otherwise.”
Mr. Kingston, whose union is a member of the Public Service Alliance of Canada, approved of the “ambitious” legislation but said it would be difficult to implement if the government continues to eliminate inspection and administration jobs within the agency.
The government introduced Bill S-11, the Safe Food for Canadians Act, in the Senate on June 7. It is currently before the Senate Committee on Agriculture and Forestry.
The legislation consolidates the Canada Agricultural Products Act, the Fish Inspection Act, the Meat Inspection Act, and food-related aspects of the Consumer Packaging and Labelling Act in an effort to streamline the federal food inspection system.
In a June 21 appearance before the committee, Agriculture Minister Gerry Ritz (Battlefords-Lloydminster, Sask.) stressed the need for legislation that would bring consistency to food inspection in Canada and enable food inspectors to respond quickly to outbreaks of food-borne illness.
“The Safe Food for Canadians Act is the linchpin of our efforts to ensure the safety of all food products sold in Canada or exported by Canada, no matter what the source,” Mr. Ritz told the committee. “This new act will simplify legislation, strengthen enforcement powers on imports and exports and will deliver stiff fines to anyone who purposely endangers the safety of our food.”
The act establishes a licensing and registration regime for food importers and exporters, creates a CFIA complaints and appeals office, and standardizes the authority of food inspectors so that all CFIA inspectors have the same powers to conduct inspections.
The act also sets out previously non-existent penalties for food tampering and the sale of recalled food items. Penalties range from $250,000 to $5-million and up to five years in prison, depending on the severity of the offence.
Mr. Ritz said that the legislation would “align” Canadian food safety laws with the 2011 U.S. Food Safety Modernization Act by simplifying the rules around food licensing, inspection, and enforcement. The legislation also simplifies Canada’s food safety framework, which was a key recommendation of the Weatherill report on the 2008 listeriosis outbreak.
Liberal Saskatchewan Senator Robert Peterson, a member of the Agriculture and Forestry Committee, pressed Mr. Ritz on CFIA’s capacity to implement the transformative legislation given the wide-ranging cuts to government services in the 2012 budget.
The Canadian Food Inspection Agency’s budget will be reduced by $56.1-million over the next three years as part of the 2012 budget, while the previous year’s budget invested $100-million over five years in the agency. The 2012 budget also invested $51.2-million in food safety, but that funding will be spread across CFIA, Health Canada, and the Public Health Agency of Canada.
Mr. Ritz said that changes to CFIA’s budget were part of the “ebb and flow” of finding efficiencies at the agency, and downplayed the latest budget’s plan to achieve more than $56-million in savings by 2015.
“These are not cuts. They are efficiencies ongoing. We found efficiencies in the administration side,” Mr. Ritz said. “A lot is captured by aligning some services with Agriculture Canada and other departments so we do not overlap.”
Sen. Peterson asked Mr. Ritz during the committee meeting if he would support amending Bill S-11 to mandate an annual third-party audit of CFIA resources to ensure that necessary resources were available to enforce the legislation. Although Mr. Ritz said he had no problem with such an amendment being put forward, he called additional measures “redundant” in light of the audits the CFIA conducts internally and by international organizations.
The government maintains that it has added 700 meat inspection jobs since taking office in 2006, but PSAC estimates that 100 inspectors and 300 administrators will be eliminated with the latest budget. As of March, 2012, CFIA employed 3,534 field inspection staff, and overall staff at the agency totalled nearly 7,300.
Mr. Kingston also took issue with the suggestion that the administrative positions that are being eliminated do not contribute to frontline food inspection. He said that administrative workers at CFIA are responsible for monitoring and designating imports for re-inspection, and keeping tabs on companies with poor compliance records.
“[The government] is talking about licensing 10,000 new importers’—who’s going to look after these? The very people with expertise in doing this kind of thing are the ones they’re in the process of laying off,” he said.
Mr. Ritz has downplayed the $56-million as administrative “savings” and denied that there would be any changes to frontline food inspection, but Mr. Kingston has warned that the cuts would roll back improvements made to food safety following the 2008 listeriosis outbreak. The food safety crisis resulted in 23 deaths from tainted meat products, and led to calls for Mr. Ritz’s resignation.
CFIA staff has grown significantly since the 2008 outbreak.
Ken Whitehurst, executive director of the Consumer Council of Canada, said that the legislation had the potential to improve food safety, but whether the government’s initiative is successful will depend on how well they are able to implement the program.
“The new act doesn’t decide what level of resources will be needed to make it effective,” Mr. Whitehurst said. “The act creates a framework, but the CFIA still has to make its recommendations about what it needs to live up to its obligations, and governments trade off all the time how well they can meet their obligations.”
Mr. Whitehurst added that policy consultations are typically dominated by well-resourced industry lobbies, while consumer interests are too often excluded from the process.
“I don’t think that anyone has the knowledge or information today to say what the impact will be of those [CFIA] cuts,” he said. “If we were properly resourced to be more meaningfully involved, including being able to contribute our own thinking and research, the implications of some of these changes and resource decisions would be much clearer.”
Original Article
Source: hill times
Author: CHRIS PLECASH
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