Maple Leaf president Michael McCain told the media today that,
“I once again wish to express my deepest personal sympathies to those Canadians who have been affected by this tragedy. While this is the most unfortunate of events possible, I absolutely do not believe that this is a failure of the Canadian food safety system or the regulators.
“Certainly knowing that there is a desire to assign blame, I want to reiterate that the buck stops right here.
“As I’ve said before, Maple Leaf Foods is 23,000 people who live in a culture of food safety. We have an unwavering commitment to keep our food safe, and we have excellent systems and processes in place. But this week it’s our best efforts that failed, not the regulators or the Canadian food safety system.”
Good for McCain. He runs a company with world-class aspirations, so he’s not weaseling away from the spotlight.
And he unshackled the company of any political or bureaucratic commentary – which has been fairly hopeless all along.
But if McCain is going to step up, he’s also going to get some questions,
McCain says, “a comprehensive study done at the University of Regina gave Canada one of five superior ratings out of 17 top-tier OECD countries in a world review of food safety. This highlights that Listeria is a particularly challenging bacteria for the entire food industry to manage, including the United States and Europe, simply because it is pervasive."
That study was fairly challenged and has not been published in a peer-reviewed journal. Don’t cite shit.
And you didn’t address any of the tough issues.
Will you release the results of the 3,000 listeria swabs your company takes every year to provide some data, some meaning, to your claims that public health is your top priority?
Will you back some kind of point-of-sale initiative – warning labels or otherwise – to explicitly warn pregnant women and immunocomprimized Canadians that, as you say, listeria is so widespread in the environment, that vulnerable people should not eat your products.
Michael McCain, you’ve taken some great first steps and gone way beyond what government has done. The sooner you lose them the better; they’re deadweight and not very good hockey players. They don’t lose their jobs, and they don’t lose sleep about falling stock prices.
Me, Ben, Amy and the rest of our team are here to help you actually implement that culture of food safety you and your folks are so fond of citing. We’ve noticed you liked the pictures of recalled products idea. We’re not just armchair quarterbacks, and we’re just an e-mail away.