In a related story, Global News turns to Canadian food safety apologist Sylvain Charlebois, a professor at the University of Guelph, who offers up this advice: “The Canadian Food Inspection Agency needs to find a way to communicate risk in real time and engage the public.”

Um, we offered up that advice in 1997. It was used when BSE was first found in Canadian cattle in 2003. And we have adapted it over time – medium and message.

More reliable food safety source, Rick Holley, a food microbiologist at the University of Manitoba, said, “The frustrating thing is in only about half of the outbreaks do we actually know what the cause was and that’s unfortunate.”

If illnesses were only in one province or jurisdiction, they wouldn’t make their way onto the federal department’s radar. Not everyone who falls ill from recalled food reports their sickness either.

Ontario data, obtained exclusively by Global News under the Freedom of Information Act, suggests that there are thousands of food-borne illnesses in the province each year but that rates are stagnant.