Monday, October 06, 2008

But ... but ... but ...


What an entertaining new development:

Listeria reporting rule dropped before crisis
Meat plants not required to tell food inspectors when bacteria found

Four months before the Maple Leaf outbreak started claiming lives, Canada's food safety agency quietly dropped its rule requiring meat-processing companies to alert the agency about listeria-tainted meat, a Toronto Star/CBC investigation has found.

Twenty people died as a result of the outbreak this past summer, and federal meat inspectors and their union say this rule change likely made the country's listeria outbreak far worse than it had to be.

I blame the Liberals.

4 comments:

The Seer said...

Specifically, I blame the liberals at the CBC. They changed the rules in the middle of this campaign. The rules used to be IOKIYAC. What is Canada coming to?

LuLu said...

Ahem ... ADSCAM!

Ti-Guy said...

Reminds me of that SNL skit featuring prepared foods being marketed as new and improved with anti-bacterial agents: "Chicken Helper. Now with Chlorine Bleach!"

...for some reason. Only because I can't understand where (and why) in this process changes in regulations aren't made public. Why does it take a joint CBC/Toronto Star investigation to find out that this reporting requirement was dropped?

Beijing York said...

In the past, most changes to regulations usually occurred after stakeholder consultations and public announcement. We saw that that definitely didn't happen with the censorship clause in Bill C-10 and seemingly not in this case either. Harper's style of governing is secretive and authoritarian.

I would love to see the family of victims of this horrific scandal mount a law suit against Harper. Preferably before October 14.