Beef recall could be Harper’s Walkerton

Citizens might recall government's moral mission to protect them.

by Ish Theilheimer

The biggest meat recall in Canadian history is this week’s big story.

Last month a couple of trends collided, with disastrous results. One trend is that meat packing plants are getting bigger and bigger. Just as family farms have are disappearing, small local slaughterhouses capable of paying close attention to their products are too. They just don't make enough money for the huge agribusiness corporations that dominate the food chain today, thanks in large part to trade deals and laws that always seem to favour the big guys over small family-owned businesses.

"There's a lot of pressure from the industry to speed things up," according to food inspector and Agriculture Union President Bob Kingston, a man who has been very much in the news in the past week. "There's a lot of pressure to not be so rigid, and it takes a toll."

Agriculture Union President Bob Kingston discusses the XL beef recall crisis.

The XL plant in Brooks, Alberta, itself is a pressure cooker in many ways. It is Canada's biggest packing plant. Nearly half its workers are temporary foreign workers or recent immigrants, many of whom feel far too vulnerable to play a whistleblower role, says Kingston. In 2005 there was a bitter strike at the plant the led to the formation of a union there.

The second trend is self-regulation. That's a fancy word for putting the fox in charge of the henhouse. If slaughterhouse workers are tasked with health inspection, they're put in a conflict of interest situation. "At the end of the day, profit will determine their livelihood," Kingston told SGN. "Human nature is involved. If self-regulation was the answer," he says, "You wouldn't need policing. If they really believe that anybody with a self-interest is in a position to self-regulate, do away with traffic cops and let's see what happens on the freeways."

Self-regulation is popular with big companies because they get all those troubling inspectors out of way and can concentrate on making money. Conservatives like self-regulation, because they like anything that undermines government and public accountability. And they hate anything that stands in the way of big corporations making money.

Self-regulation is not so popular with consumers. All it takes is a crisis at a giant meat plant like XL  or Maple Leaf to remind us that we'd really really like to have some tough cops watching the assembly line in the packing house.

"When XL became a high line speed operation," Kingston said, "They didn't increase the number of inspectors accordingly. They looked for ways to relieve the pressure. So they looked for things they can get industry to do themselves. In this case the sanitation part of it is probably less technical… So they turn that over to the plants to look after themselves, and then they have an oversight role."

Like most Canadians, Kingston is fed up with the government's spin on the issue, but unlike most, he can can unspin it.

Harper and his ministers "say they've put $100 million into CFIA and they've hired 700 new inspectors, implying they're food inspectors," says Kingston.

"It's simply not true. None of that's true. The $100 million they gave to CFIA was a one-time thing… over five years" for a specific project. “The $56 million they've removed from the budget at the same time is for every year. So every year from now on they're running $56 million less than before. And there's more cuts coming."

The government's handling of the whole affair has been shoddy. For instance, CFIA and Harper's ministers claim the delay in issuing a recall was because they need a new, tougher law, currently stalled in the Senate.

"Every inspector in CFIA knows they have that authority, and they always have" said Bob Kingston, "I first became an inspector in 1979 and I learned it then. It's been taught to inspection staff ever since. There's a section in the Meat Inspection Act that gives them the authority to obtain any information they need to do their job in any fomat they wanted, and the next section of the Act explains it's a federal offence to impede [or] to not provide assistance."

Several of Stephen Harper's top Cabinet ministers did their training with former Ontario Premier Mike Harris. Haris was a big fan of self-regulation too. Tony Clement, John Baird and Jim Flaherty were all around Harris' Cabinet table when he cut public health inspection to the bone and left the work in private hands.

Those hands included the untrained and incompetent Koebel brothers of Walkerton, Ontario. Harris and the Koebels made Walkterton famous. Eight people died there when the henhouse of public water safety was left in the hands of some pretty useless foxes.

The Walkerton disaster not only killed eight people. It also killed the Harris government, becoming a symbol of all that's wrong with taking government away from its main mission — protecting citizens — just to let rich corporations get richer.

Will this month's beef recall kill off the Harper gang? We should live that long.

© Copyright 2012 Ish Theilheimer, All rights Reserved. Written For: StraightGoods.ca