Oct. 10, 2012 - Issue #886: Typhoon Judy
Big picture look at XL
Government's bent on reducing red tape puts consumers at risk
A big-picture look at the events of the last month reveals that the case with the tainted meat crisis emanating from XL Foods in Brooks, Alberta is much bigger than flawed processes or failure to follow procedure. A big part of the problem is rooted in political ideologies.
At least 11 cases of E. coli have been directly linked to meat processed at XL Foods (at time of publication) with many more suspected and over 1700 beef products have been recalled from hundreds of stores across Canada and the United States. The company has now publicly admitted that they failed to follow or update safety protocols and last week federal officials suspended the plant's operating license and ordered it shut down until the Canadian Food Inspection Agency is satisfied that it is safe to reopen.
The question is what will come out of this in the long-run. There will surely be a large inquiry which looks at the specifics of the case, what the safety failings were at the plant, how the tainted meat escaped notice by Canadian officials (the initial alert came from officials in the US), whether or not the CFIA followed proper protocols in issuing recalls and ultimately closing the plant and numerous other questions that definitely need to be looked at in-depth. This process will be similar to what came out of the Walkerton tainted water crisis and, most recently, the 2008 outbreak of listeriosis at a Toronto meat-packing plant that killed 23 people.
What is not likely to be looked at by a future inquiry into the crisis is the political ideology and flawed priorities behind the crisis—an ideology and a set of priorities that will also make future crises of this nature inevitable.
It begins with the neoliberal bent of the Harper Conservatives and their underlying belief that any form of government regulation is an unnecessary burden to the free and efficient operation of markets. Closely connected to that is the illogical premise that the best way to protect the public interest is by always ensuring that the corporate interest takes priority.
How does that manifest in the current circumstance? It begins with the federal government cutting back oversight over the operations of meat packers and relying more and more on self-regulation by the industry itself. In other words, acting on the belief that these companies will always prioritize public well-being over profit and safety protocols over volume. This move has helped this government achieve its dual goals of cutting spending (by cutting inspectors and CFIA staff) while at the same time reducing some of that burdensome regulation from industry so they can focus on the business of making money rather than filling out paperwork.
It's interesting that at the same time that this tainted meat crisis was exploding in the government's face, the government was releasing the report of something called the "Red Tape Reduction Commission"—a committee made up of government MPs and some of their friends in the business community set up to find ways to further reduce those pesky anti-business regulations and oversight protocols.
At the same time as they've been working to reduce regulations on business, they've also been working to fundamentally change the priorities under which those regulations are enforced. In the case of XL Foods, this meant that even though the CFIA had been alerted by the US that E. coli had been found in meat from the plant on September 3, the first public warning of XL products was not issued until September 16, by which time at least four people in Alberta had already been affected. Even then, the XL Foods plant was allowed to keep operating, and processing meat products until the CFIA finally shut them down on September 27—almost a full month after E. coli was first found in meat from the plant.
The CFIA has said they could not take any action earlier because they had to wait for the results of their investigation, suggesting that it would be wrong to take action against the plant until they had all the information in hand. In criminal law this concept of innocent until proven guilty is tempered by removing suspects who could pose a danger to the public interest from the general population while they await a trial.
When it comes to corporations, however, the default has become that the business' right to continue making a profit clearly trumps any danger that might be caused to the public interest. A government that truly prioritized public health and public interest would have ordered the plant shut down the moment they learned of a potential problem. Not this government. This government felt it was more important to let the company keep operating as long as possible, despite adding dozens of products to the recall list daily and a growing threat to public health.
Yes, we need to look at, understand, and fix the collapses in procedures and safety protocols that caused this specific crisis, but we also need to step back and understand the political and ideological imperatives at the root of the problem and fix those as well. And those larger issues don't just impact meat packing, they also affect dangerous goods transportation, pipelines, chemical plants and many other industries. If we don't get the bigger picture, it will only be a matter of time before we find ourselves dealing with another crisis, and the next one may be that much more tragic. V
Ricardo Acuña is the executive director of the Parkland Institute, a non-partisan, public policy research institute housed at the University of Alberta.
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