Tag Archives: XL

Canadian ag minister Ritz out to lunch – again

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This guy should have been booted from Canadian cabinet in 2008, with his bungling over the Maple leaf Listeria outbreak that killed at least 23 people. But, he’s still there, just another reflection of the rise of mediocrity in Canada. But why listen to this grumpy old man. Jim Romahn, who’s grumpier and older writes:

Agriculture Minister Gerry Ritz is once again out to lunch while a meat packer undergoes a huge recall of tainted products.

When it was Maple Leaf Foods Inc. recalling processed meats, many of them cold cuts, because of Listeria monocytogenes, Ritz said it was death by a thousand cold cuts.

That went over really well with the families of the 21 people who died and others who were sickened.

Now in the midst of a massive and growing recall of ground beef and steaks from XL Foods Inc. of Edmonton, he is quoted in Hansard saying “The people at CFIA have done an exemplary job.”

Yeah, right!

So wonderful that they missed all of those deficiencies and failures to conduct adequate testing and to keep adequate food-safety records.

That only surfaced after the massive recall began, when, in farmer language, the horse had escaped from the barn.

And why, pray tell, has the CFIA failed to require the company to keep good enough records that there could, and should, have been only one recall. We’re now up to eight and still counting.

Ritz said the CFIA is working hard to regain the confidence of the United States meat packers and Food Safety and Inspection Service and “to get back into that lucrative American market.”

I guess the Canadian market doesn’t count.

Ritz is once again out to lunch, apparently oblivious to the hit that beef consumption is taking because Canadians are afraid to buy hamburger from any of the major supermarket chains. I have encountered a number of people who say they’ve stopped buying hamburger at supermarkets. Maybe also the fast-food restaurant chains, although I haven’t personally heard any comments about them.

Ritz said “I reiterate that none of the product made it to store shelves and no illnesses have been linked back to this particular strain of E. coli.

“We have actually done a tremendous job.”

I guess the Calgary famlly whose little girl is in hospital with, the parents say,  E. coli food poisoning, are really impressed with this “tremendous job.”

The food inspection service at the Canadian Food Inspection Agency is in dire need of a shakeup, or shakedown.

And it’s not only meats that require a total overhaul.

Eggs are another product where the CFIA track record is abysmal, as revealed in court documents related to the lawsuits against Ontario’s two dominant egg graders and the general manager of the Egg Farmers of Ontario marketing board.

Eggs that passed CFIA inspection at the two dominant egg-grading company plants, and that were requested by the general manager of the egg board, arrived at another egg-grading station dirty, so cracked and broken that they were leaking all over. These were supposedly Grade A eggs.

And if you believe the claims of the dominant egg grading companies that the eggs were Grade A when they left their premises and must have become dirty, cracked and broken in transit, then I’d like to interest you in investing in some swamp land in Florida.

And if they did get dirty, cracked and broken in transit, what does that say about those companies’ trucking performance?

But the obvious need for major changes to food inspection at the CFIA are not going to happen under Ritz who says they are doing “a tremendous job” or “an exemplary job.”

He’s out to lunch. Maybe of a thousand cold cuts.

Meanwhile beef farmers and the entire meat-packing industry suffers a loss of consumer confidence.

Food safety officials waited weeks to issue tainted beef alert

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Canadian food safety bureaucrats waited nearly two weeks to issue a public health alert after learning that beef from an Alberta plant was contaminated with a potentially deadly bacteria.

Post Media is reporting this morning that officials with the Canadian Food Inspection Agency revealed Monday they only launched an in-depth review of the sanitation and controls at the XL Foods facility in Brooks after their counterparts south of the border found two more contaminated samples of animal trimmings destined for ground beef, infected with E. coli 0157.

A senior executive with the Public Service Alliance of Canada and veteran meat inspector said the affected product should have been recalled within days of the initial positive tests.

“We’ve allowed potentially contaminated product to get to the tables and into stomachs of people across this country,” said Bob Jackson, the PSAC’s executive vicepresident in B.C.

“They should have taken action immediately when they had that positive result. Under the CFIA’s new regulations and procedures, those decisions are left to the company, but there was a time when a federally-appointed, independent inspector would have tagged that product and insisted it wasn’t going anywhere.”

“XL Foods executives did not agree to be interviewed for this story, but an executive with a large American food distributor confirmed on condition of anonymity that the company had told him the contaminated product did not test positive at the plant’s in-house laboratory after it was slaughtered and processed Aug. 27.

“But a shipment that later crossed the border was sampled by inspectors from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety Inspection Service on Sept. 3 and was found to be contaminated with the bacteria.

“The test results were passed on to CFIA the next day, the same day the Canadian agency said its own routine sampling found a positive result in product from the XL plant. While agency officials said they immediately began an investigation, no recall was issued based on Health Canada’s assessment that normal cooking would eliminate any risk to consumers.

“On Sept. 12, the Food Safety Inspection Service notified Canadian officials of two more contaminated samples in product that had been intercepted at the border and tested.

“This is not the first time that American authorities have singled out the Brooks facility or wrapped the CFIA on the knuckles for its oversight of meat slaughter and processing facilities that export product to the United States.

“A 2008 audit of what was then Lakeside Packers found knives used to check carcasses had blood and residue from use the previous day, and scrap metal near the building was a potential harbour for pests.

“The 2010 audit noted there had been two instances when contaminated ground beef from unidentified plants in Canada had ended up being caught during FSIS’s border inspections.

“The agency concluded it has systemic concerns with the Canadian inspection system, including the fact CFIA was not consistently assigning federal inspectors to each shift at plants where product was produced. A re-view of Canadian inspector logs found a low number of documented non-compliance instances, which didn’t reflect what their counterparts found when American officials visited the plants.

“In the week since the first health warning was announced on Sept. 16, CFIA has had to reissue alerts and expand the voluntary recall six more times to include 250 different products. It has been trying to track down and isolate potentially contaminated product that has moved along the supply chain toward restaurant kitchens and consumer barbecues throughout Canada and parts of the United States.

U.S. agency alerted Canada to E. coli danger

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As the Canadian Food Inspection Agency expands the XL Foods E. coli O157:H7 recall for the sixth time tonight, it was revealed CFIA first became aware of problems with the beef when tests conducted in the U.S. came back positive.

According to the Canadian Press, agency spokesman Garfield Balsom confirmed that word of the positive findings came from the Food Safety Inspection Service of the U.S. on Sept. 3, nearly two weeks before CFIA began issuing advisories about ground beef products produced at Edmonton-based XL Foods.

(For sticklers, the story identified FSIS as an agency of the U.S. Drug Authority; it’s part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture.)

Balsom said XL initiated the recall on its own, insisting it was not ordered as a result of the U.S. test results.

“There were some positives identified by the FSIS, but the positives were not the trigger for the recall,” Balsom said in a telephone interview. “The recall was a voluntary recall by the company.”

So, what does trigger public notification in Canada?

If the product is imported, Canada goes public quickly; if it’s homegrown, they take their time.