Canadian Minister of Agriculture and wannabe listeria comedian Gerry-isn’t-my-moustache-awesome Ritz announced today the government will spend $75 million Canadian taxpayer dollars to make sure Maple Leaf Foods products don’t make people barf or kill them.

"The Government of Canada’s highest priority is the safety of Canadians. We are making significant investments to hire more inspectors; update technologies and protocols; and, improve communication so that Canadians have the information they need to protect their families."

The government will:

• hire 166 new food safety staff with 70 focusing on ready-to-eat-meat facilities;

more inspectors with listeria-vision goggles won’t make a difference

• provide 24/7 availability of health risk assessment teams to improve support to food safety investigations;

the half-dozen people in my lab used to do that

• improve coordination among federal and provincial departments and agencies;

more meetings

• improve communications to vulnerable populations before and during a foodborne illness outbreak;

could do that now, have produced nothing

• improve tracking of potential foodborne illness outbreaks through a national surveillance system;

yawn, been saying that for years

• improve detection methods for Listeria monocytogenes and other hazards in food to reduce testing time and enable more rapid response during food safety investigations, as well as expanding the Government’s ability to do additional Listeria testing; and

a few researchers get money for their testing protocols

• initiate a third-party audit to make sure Canada’s food inspection system has the right resources dedicated to the right priorities.

Maybe they could hire the American Institute of Baking, from Manhattan (Kansas) the same third-party auditor geniuses who said Peanut Corporation of America was doing a bang-up job, that is until over 4,000 products were recalled.