'I reiterate, the buck stops right here'
Published Thursday August 28th, 2008
Accountability The meat recall and the responsibility for fixing it are for Maple Leaf Foods to bear alone, says Michael McCain
TORONTO - Canada's food inspection system, under scrutiny amid a massive meat recall and a listeriosis outbreak that's killed at least five people, was absolved of blame Wednesday by the president of embattled meat giant Maple Leaf Foods and defended by the minister of agriculture.
Michael McCain - the Maple Leaf chief executive whose abject apology has been playing in television commercials across Canada for nearly a week - said both the recall and the responsibility for fixing it are for his company to bear alone.
"I reiterate, the buck stops right here," McCain told a news conference at company headquarters in Toronto.
Just two hours later, Agriculture and Agri-Foods Minister Gerry Ritz dismissed a media report suggesting federal inspectors at a Toronto processing plant where the Listeria-tainted meat originated were mired in paperwork and not on the production floor.
"We are saying that's not true," Ritz said of the report. "About 50 per cent of an inspector's time is spent on the floor of the plant; the other 50 per cent is overseeing paperwork, most of it scientific in nature - test results and the like."
With the drumbeats of a looming election campaign growing ever louder, Ritz insisted the federal Conservatives have done nothing to impair the government's ability to ensure Canadians need not fear from what's on their dinner tables.
"We're concerned with the safety of the food supply and Canadian consumers," he said. "There is no valid argument whatsoever that there's been cuts to the Canadian Food Inspection Agency."
Canada has "one of the most stringent food safety systems in the world, but we can always make it better," Ritz said.
"That's why we're investing $113 million in Canada's Food and Consumer Action Plan and have already hired 200 more inspectors with more to come."
Prime Minister Stephen Harper said his government plans to change the system to put "greater responsibility" on the producers.
"There has to be a shared responsibility. There is no system in the world where every product is inspected all the time. That's just not feasible," Harper said in Tuktoyaktuk, N.W.T.
The ranks of Canadians joining class-action lawsuits against the 100-year-old meat packer continued to swell Wednesday even as the number of deaths being blamed conclusively on the outbreak dwindled slightly, down to five from six the day before.
Tony Merchant, a lawyer heading a class action for Merchant Law Group based in Regina, said more than 1,450 individuals had joined the suit as of Wednesday afternoon.
The rapid growth of the class action is "shocking" and "unprecedented," said Merchant.
However, a public relations veteran gave McCain Credit this week for taking responsibility for the crisis, and predicted that Maple Leaf will recover share value and consumer confidence.
"They've done a very good job making sure they're on top of it," said Terry Flynn in Hamilton, Ont., assistant professor of crisis management in the business school at McMaster University, in an interview.
"They're demonstrating transparency," said Flynn, who provided advice to officials in Walkerton, Ont., after seven people died of E. coli in the municipal water supply in May 2000.
McCain seems sincere acknowledging that "this happened on his watch," Flynn said, referring to the crisis at Maple Leaf.
Were Michael McCain one of his students, he would tentatively gim him an A minus for his actuions to date in the crisis - but reserve final judgement after seeing how it plays out over the next six months or one year, "because this is still a living case and we're still into it."
Ten deaths, all of them linked to the outbreak, remain under investigation to determine if they were caused by a bacterial infection that up until two weeks ago, the average Canadian had never even heard of.
Some 29 confirmed cases exist across Canada - 22 in Ontario, four in B.C., one in Saskatchewan and two in Quebec - while an additional 30 cases remain classified as "suspect."
McCain said the company's recall extended well beyond those products that had tested positive for the Listeria bacterium, and that the company contacted all of its direct customers and warehouses and some 87 per cent of warehouses in the Canadian food chain.
"This week, it's our best efforts that failed, not the regulators or the Canadian food safety system," McCain said.
"I emphasize: this is our accountability and it's ours to fix, which we are taking on fully. We have and we continue to improve on our action plans."
Media reports Wednesday quoted Bob Kingston, a union official and former inspector with the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, as saying inspectors at the plant had been relegated to auditing paperwork and dealing with several other facilities.
Reports last month, linked to a leaked cabinet memo, suggested the federal Conservatives were planning to put more responsibility for food inspection in the hands of the companies themselves.
Later Wednesday, Kingston made it clear the changes that came into effect March 31 affected processing plants like Maple Leaf, while the leaked cabinet memo seemed to be directed at procedures at slaughterhouses - which have not changed for the time being.
Still, Kingston said the new procedures at processing plants mean inspectors, who often have half a dozen plants to inspect, are being swamped with paperwork.
"You're racing from place to place doing the paperwork, and how much time does that realistically leave you to do inspection activities?" Kingston said.
"Even if your manager has the sense to tell you to use your discretion and judgment, if you think you want to take a quick stroll through the plant, you're often not going to have the time to do it anyway."
It was the Liberals in the late 1990s who slashed funding, cut hundreds of staff and merged food promotion and food protection into a single agency, said New Democrat MP Judy Wasylycia-Leis.
"They've moved to a paper system whereby industry basically regulates itself. So the big loss in terms of front-line inspection happened long before the Conservatives came onboard," she said.
"The Conservatives are simply doing another round in the same direction."
It remained unclear Wednesday when the Toronto plant at the heart of the outbreak, which was scheduled to resume production Thursday, would reopen, McCain said.
"We will not restart the plant until this investigation is complete, and I've signed off on it personally."
Meanwhile, a funeral was to be held Thursday for a woman from Madoc, Ont., whose family says she died of listeriosis.
Frances Clark, 89, fell ill last week and died Monday, just three days after she was admitted to hospital. It remained unclear Wednesday whether Clark was indeed killed by listeriosis, or whether she was infected by the same strain as the outbreak.
A statement from the local health unit described a recent listeriosis death in the area as a "probable" outbreak case, but didn't confirm Clark was the victim.
- with files from Derwin Gowan
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