The committee met at 8:10 a.m.

[R. Leonard in the chair.]

R. Leonard (Chair): Good morning, everyone. My name is Ronna-Rae Leonard. I am the MLA for Courtenay-Comox and the Chair of the Select Standing Committee on Agriculture, Fish and Food. I’d like to begin with the recognition that our public hearing today is taking place on the traditional territory of the Secwepemc people, and I would also like to acknowledge the nearby Williams Lake and Soda Creek First Nations.

We’re an all-party parliamentary committee of the Legislative Assembly with the mandate to examine matters concerning agriculture, fish and food in British Columbia. The committee’s first inquiry is focused on local meat production and inspection in B.C. This consultation is based on the discussion paper that was referred to the committee earlier this year, which includes a number of questions asking about what’s working well in the local meat industry and how improvements can be made to better serve all British Columbians.

The committee is holding a number of public hearings in communities around the province, and British Columbians can participate in these public hearings either in person or by teleconference. There are other ways that British Columbians can submit their ideas to the committee, including completing an on-line survey or sending in a written audio or video submission.

More information about how to do this is available on the committee’s website, which is www.leg.bc.ca/cmt/aff. We invite all British Columbians to contribute to this important process, and for those of you in attendance, we thank you for taking the time to participate today.

All public input will be carefully considered by the committee as it prepares its final report to the Legislative Assembly, which will be presented on or before October 1, 2018. Just a reminder that the consultation will close on Friday, June 15 at five o’clock.

Today’s meeting will consist of presentations from registered witnesses. Each presenter will have ten minutes to speak, followed by five minutes for questions from the committee.

All meetings are recorded and transcribed by Hansard Services over here, and a complete transcript of the proceedings will be posted on the committee’s website. These meetings are also broadcast as live video via our website.

Now I’d like to ask the members of the committee to introduce themselves. We’ll start over at Donna this time.

D. Barnett: Good morning. I’m Donna Barnett, the MLA for Cariboo-Chilcotin. Welcome to the panel and everyone to the Cariboo-Chilcotin.

I. Paton: Good morning. Ian Paton, the MLA for Delta South. I have a farm in Delta. I was a 25-year dairy farmer. Also, in the livestock auction business, I was partners at one time in McClary Stock Yards in Abbotsford.

M. Morris: Good morning. My name is Mike Morris, the MLA for Prince George–Mackenzie.

J. Tegart (Deputy Chair): Good morning. My name is Jackie Tegart, and I’m the MLA for Fraser-Nicola.

R. Leonard (Chair): She’s also the Deputy Chair of this committee.

N. Simons: Good morning. I’m Nicholas Simons. I represent Powell River–Sunshine Coast.

R. Singh: Good morning. Rachna Singh. I’m the MLA for Surrey–Green Timbers.

D. Routley: I am Doug Routley. I live in Duncan on Vancouver Island.

R. Leonard (Chair): Assisting the committee today are Jennifer Arril and Stephanie Raymond from the Parliamentary Committees Office. Simon DeLaat and Amanda Heffelfinger from Hansard Services are also here to record the proceedings.

Now we can begin with our first presenters, who are David Zirnhelt and Cordy Cox, from the Cariboo Cattlemen’s Asso­ciation.

If you would like to come and take a seat. Again, you have ten minutes. I’ll give you a little warning. Is 30 seconds enough to be able to wrap up?

D. Zirnhelt: I’m not speaking. Cordy is making the presentation. I’m here as backup.

[8:15 a.m.]

Presentations on
Meat Production and Inspection

CARIBOO CATTLEMEN’S ASSOCIATION

C. Cox: Good morning. My name is Cordy Cox. I’m the president of the Cariboo Cattlemen’s Association, and I’m also a cow-calf operator from the West Chilcotin. I live in Kleena Kleene, B.C., and we run 1,000 mother cows there. I also sit on the executive of the B.C. livestock co-op, which is the main marketing facility for live cattle in B.C.

First of all today, when we’re talking about options for changing regulations and policy with meat inspection and how it would increase the livestock production in B.C., land stewardship is very important. Forage production and utilizing forage effectively to assist in the increase of our herd sizes are very important if we need to increase slaughter capacity.

The amendments to the livestock and trespass acts to address fences that create opportunities for producers to be productive and financially viable are also important. We need access to Crown land or access to ALR land and forage supply in order to produce food. With a lack of forage supply and a lack of ALR land or Crown land and a lack of forage, we just simply can’t bring up our capacity for raising food in B.C., especially in the meat industry.

There’s also increased research and development of a feeding sector within B.C. that is very much needed. We’re very lacking in that sector in B.C. If we want to be food-secure, we need an industry in the Cariboo. We’re very central, and the roads go north to south. I think that we’ve seen throughout the beginning of this year that when we have trade issues or other interprovincial issues, being food-secure can be very important.

We need more regional slaughter capacity and infrastructure in the Cariboo. When we’re looking at the changing regulations and policy for increasing processing in B.C. of animals that are raised in B.C., we need to be strategic in considering where various slaughter facility licences would best fit, based on economic demands.

We also need to implement and encourage more training for processors, including D and E licences, through abattoirs or university and college programs as well. It would be great to make meat inspection and slaughter a skilled certified trade. We need to offer assistance to D and E licensees who want to transition into A and B licences.

When we’re looking at slaughter capacity, especially in the rural and remote communities, we need to strategically consider the amounts and types of licences available as the urban population begins to move into areas that are, once more, rural. We also need to look at how as rural areas slowly see an increase in population, there will be more interest in licences, and therefore, future economic growth should be considered.

In addition to the increased populations in rural areas, current livestock producers need to have access to safe slaughter facilities that allow for business growth and food security for our whole province. We need to increase cut-and-wrap facilities and alleviate bottlenecks in processing. The Cariboo barely has any slaughter capacity left. We definitely need to increase the slaughter capacity in B.C., especially in the Cariboo-Chilcotin.

In regard to access to B.C. meat for consumers, retailers, restaurants and institutional buyers, we need to initiate the use of the Buy B.C. Eat Drink Local campaign to entice customers to source B.C. product. The public is increasingly showing interest in knowing where their food comes from and finding ways to support local food production. We need to assist with economic development, and we need to encourage a percentage of B.C. product in procurement practices. But, once again, we need more slaughter capacity.

In regards to accessing specialized types of slaughter to meet cultural and market-based demands, if we have local abattoirs — A, B, D and E licences — around the province, there’s also less transportation of these animals to get them to market. That means there’s less of a carbon footprint, and in today’s world, that’s something that’s very important. The closer the animals are to the forage base, the better it is for animal welfare, because that means less transport time.

[8:20 a.m.]

Animal welfare needs to be paramount, including cultural slaughter practices. Implementing training on animal welfare and human safety throughout all the licences is very important. Implementing strict regulations that minimize opportunities for black market sales is also paramount.

In regard to standards for food safety and the humane treatment of animals, stringent regulations need to be upheld by the Ministry of Agriculture. Without strict regulations, inhumane treatment of animals pre-slaughter and during the slaughter process only increases the distrust by the public.

Regulations and standards need to be designed to keep the public safe and healthy. The routine monitoring of food safety and humane slaughter practices at D and E licences is important — i.e., an annual on-farm audit.

How can access to training and development be improved in order to support the meat production sector’s need for skilled workers? Once again, it would be great if we could make meat inspection and slaughter a certified skilled trade. We could increase training and education, and that is always paramount to a cattleman.

With the public being farther removed from agricultural production now and a growing trend for urban dwellers moving rurally to help minimize the cost of living, education on how to correctly and humanely slaughter animals is extremely important to all of us, especially as producers.

Ensuring that new and existing processing facilities and licensees are properly trained and educated should be a major focus of any updated regulations, including continuing education, particularly as new research presents more humane slaughter opportunities. It should also be considered in any updated regulations.

Right now there’s a proposal for a B.C. meat centre of excellence. There’s a paper handout to go with it. It’s a proposal that’s on the table. It would promote increased slaughter capacity, advanced training and relevant research to products, meat science solutions — for example, shelf life and dark cutters.

Are the regulations with respect to provincial meat production, including those under the authority of the Ministry of Agriculture, the Ministry of Health and the regional health authorities, clear and effective? We would like to encourage that all provincial licences be regulated by one governing body: the Ministry of Agriculture. Having all licensees under one governing body would assist in effective food safety and animal welfare and, most of all, consistent quality of meat products entering the market and effective traceability programs, all of which would assist to continue in building public trust.

How can the provincial inspection program more effectively align with the federal meat inspection system in order to strengthen B.C.’s meat production, including the licensing of slaughter facilities? We would like to encourage researching whether it would be effective to align provincial inspections with federal, such as a two-tier model with an HACCP portion available to those plants that would find it beneficial. Existing protocols for provincial plants meet the livestock production sector’s requirements.

We would like to thank the standing committee for listening to improve the meat processing capacity within B.C.

We would like to stress that any changes to the licences made

(1) increase training to all processors and producers to assist in public trust and perception;

(2) increase on-farm food safety and food-handling procedures and programs to assist in public trust and perception;

(3) proactive regulations that follow sound science and assist with accountability relating to traceability of livestock from production to consumer, animal welfare and food safety;

(4) oversight and monitoring of D and E licences to ensure aspects such as animal welfare, food safety, disease management, proper disposal of SRMs, RFID tag retirement, check-off collection, etc.;

(5) overall make access to slaughter throughout the pro­vince to help reduce animal transport times;

(6) reduce the wait period due to the current lack of cut-and-wrap and slaughter facilities.

We look forward to future discussions on meat processing and production in B.C., and we’d be happy to provide more feedback, if necessary.

R. Leonard (Chair): Thank you very much. That was very timely.

Do we have any questions?

D. Routley: You said that this proposal is on the table, and it’s definitely on this table. But has it been made formally to the Agriculture Minister?

[8:25 a.m.]

D. Zirnhelt: Yes, it has, and a little bit of funding was garnered to flesh out the terms of reference and to build a steering committee. There are some applications in for funding the feasibility part of it.

Now that we have a little more clarity on the proposed federal plant in Prince George, we still fit more in the niche marketing side of things. They’re geared partly to export, but a lot more work needs to be done.

B.C. Cattlemen, which supported that federal plant in Prince George, has supported this centre of excellence because this deals particularly with the research and training, which the Prince George plant won’t be doing, as far as we know.

D. Barnett: Thank you very much for your presentation.

How will this, if this centre of excellence…? We have the ranching stability program, which we’ve had here for three years in TRU, that’s been a great success. Will this all fit together?

C. Cox: Yes, it would.

D. Barnett: How much longer would the actual program…? One-year, two-year, three-year students? What would the end of the program look like?

D. Zirnhelt: Well, what we have in mind is trying to move forward on something akin to what they have in Europe, with the three-year master butcher program. We already have the cutting for retail. Then Dave Fernie and others are working on training for other aspects. But in terms of an accredited program, it would have to be something like a three-year program. So TRU would see this just as one of the suite of agriculture-related programs. They already have the program in Kamloops, and this would build on that.

There’s also a certain amount of food research capacity within the science faculty, and that would be pulled together. Our proposal would be that it be located in the regional centre, somewhere in the Cariboo.

D. Barnett: If I could just follow up. One more question, not on the same topic. I heard you mention D and E licences. How do you feel about D and E licences in the rural and remote areas? Do you figure there should be a limited number? How do you figure they should be administered?

D. Zirnhelt: Well, if we’re going to feed B.C. or approximate that, we need more capacity. Most of the existing facilities are limited in the number of animals they can take, and that only scratches the surface of the animals being slaughtered, in reality. But the ones that could be slaughtered to meet the growing demand…. So we have to build for future demand as well.

The D and Es. If they want to follow by the rules and be inspected and give the public assurance, then they can grow to become As and Bs.

D. Barnett: So you don’t see a problem with more D and Es if they’re inspected, the same as the As are.

D. Zirnhelt: Same rules.

M. Morris: I’m just curious. You made a comment about regulations to eliminate the black market. Can you explain what the black market looks like? Who is the black market?

C. Cox: I think my perception of the black market is people and farm-gate producers without permits that are not following regulations, selling meat on the open market. That, in my opinion, would be on the black market. It’s not regulated; it’s not inspected. You don’t know where it is, where your food comes from, which is important. I think loopholes need to be closed to stop that from happening.

M. Morris: Would that include Es selling to retail outlets, or do you know?

C. Cox: No, not to my knowledge.

N. Simons: Thank you very much for your presentation, by the way.

You mentioned the D and E licences, and you mentioned annual inspection. But then you also mentioned, or Dave mentioned, a transition to an A and B. Do you think that the current system is adequate for the D and E licences? Or do you think that the inspection regime should be changed?

[8:30 a.m.]

D. Zirnhelt: Well, as an association, Cariboo cattlemen really feel that there should be more regulation, or more inspection, so we have compliance. Right now we don’t know whether there’s compliance at the D and E side. But we think that particularly if they think they can grow to serve the growing demand, they would then be competitive with the existing larger slaughterhouses and should play by the same rules.

D. Routley: You mentioned loopholes just now, Cordy. We heard about the potential for a loophole where D or E might have a butcher licence as well, so they’re able to get around some of the restrictions on an E licence by processing their own or others’ meat on their butcher’s licence, with the slaughter on the E. Do you see any of that sort of problem here? Do you see any kind of specific loophole, as you describe it, that we could address?

C. Cox: No. What David just touched on…. I think the most important thing is that we need to ensure compliance by making sure that the D and E licences are inspected. I think that is the main issue.

D. Zirnhelt: We’re all tarred by the same brush. It doesn’t matter who slips up. If there’s any kind of a number or name to them, it’s the whole industry that takes the hit.

R. Singh: Thank you so much for your presentation. I just wanted to check. You mentioned the slaughter facilities, that they’re not enough. Have they declined over the years, or has this been the situation throughout?

C. Cox: No, there’s been a decline.

R. Singh: There has been. Okay. Do you know of any particular reason for that? Why are people shutting down? Why don’t people have these facilities? Is there any reason?

C. Cox: I know that part of the reason was some of the licensing and some of the protocols and the costs with the licensing and whatnot. That’s been part of it. Also, I think, in some areas, at one point, it was an access to the beef — beef getting there. But now there’s basically no slaughter capacity in this area, and there’s not a lot of support behind getting more provincially.

I’m not meaning from the Cattlemen’s or other producers. There’s a huge need and huge support there.

David may be able to broaden on this a little bit better than I. I’m a little bit behind on some of this.

D. Zirnhelt: Well, the health regulations — I forget what year it was, 2003 or something — brought in an investment by the small people, and government participated in that. Then there was a relaxation of the health regulations, so the throughput that was planned didn’t happen, and it made viability more difficult for the people who made the investments.

The other one is…. Like a lot of resource industries, there has to be training for the higher-end jobs to support the higher wages that are demanded in resource economies, with forestry and mining jobs as competitors for people. We think that if we can make it an honourable and knowledge-based, training-based, certification-based employment stream, then we can attract people to help support the existing operators, who all have trouble finding qualified staff.

R. Leonard (Chair): One more question, quickly.

I. Paton: One of the things you said at the very beginning, I feel, is really important. To increase the herd size in B.C., more land that is in the ALR or Crown land needs to be made available for agriculture for grazing purposes, rather than forestry purposes, in that sense.

My other question to you. Based on the herd size in this general area, a lot of backgrounded calves probably go to Alberta to be finished in feedlots. Do you see the potential for some fairly big feedlots in this area to take them to finished weight, to keep this new facility busy in Prince George?

The other and final question. Manure management — is that an issue with a huge feedlot in this area of the Cariboo-Chilcotin?

[8:35 a.m.]

C. Cox: Question 1, in the Prince George area, the Prince George region — Vanderhoof and south into Quesnel and even in this area — at one time was very well known for actually growing some cereal grains and having quite a few feedlots up in that region, especially around Prince George. But in the past number of years, the access to slaughter capacity and the access to forage supply have diminished that feedlot capacity.

I do think there is a huge opportunity. If the forage supply could be increased, and the access to that supply, we could definitely promote the capacity of a plant in Prince George. But without that access…. We need more positivity surrounding growing grass and forage and agriculture, the same as there is the positivity around timber and timber dollars. I mean, we’re trying to feed the province, and that’s just as important.

Then your second question was?

I. Paton: Just manure management with a huge feedlot. Of course, that’s a huge issue environmentally in B.C. now.

C. Cox: Yes. I think that in recent times, all of us have environmental farm plans now. I don’t think that it would be, actually, a massive issue. I think that with the proper training, which most producers have, and following their environmental farm plans and working in consultation with other entities, it’s something that can be very well managed. It can go back in, towards other sectors; i.e., it could be put back onto fields.

I mean, the runoff and the managing of the water is a huge, important issue to all of us cattle producers, and it’s something that’s only going to get bigger as we move forward. I think effectively managing our operations within regulation and under a best code of practices will promote the ability to manage it properly.

D. Zirnhelt: Keeping the amount of grass longer, backgrounding, can help reduce the time period in which manure is accumulated. So there may be more restricted time on finished feed bunks, eating grain or whatever.

R. Leonard (Chair): Thank you very much. We appreciate your presentation and answering everyone’s questions.

Next up we have Frank Rohls.

FRANK ROHLS

F. Rohls: Good morning. My name is Frank Rohls. I’m not used to presentations. I’ve just made some scribbled notes, so it won’t be really fluent.

R. Leonard (Chair): We’re great with the personal touch.

F. Rohls: Introduction. First, I’m a slaughterhouse operator. I’m holding an A licence, but I’m not operating. We started out as a family operation, my wife and I, in 2003. B.C., in 2005: “You need to be inspected.” In 2007, a dilemma starts. They said only A and B licences, and then they put C licences in place — for us, the first backstab from the government.

Parallel to all the regulations we had to adhere to, the illegal slaughter flourished around us. Then there was only one person there to police this illegal stuff for the whole province. He was just a string puppet, I guess, because he worked from eight to five, and the slaughter started after work and on the weekends.

What else? We, A licence, just always had an inspector breathing down our necks. Now we had to follow the regulations, according to capacity.

We are a small plant. It’s just my wife and I. In the fall season, we work seven days a week. We kill twice a day, twice a week, and cut five days a week. So I haven’t seen town for three or four months. Just kill and cut. The rest of the year we wait for customers, now just sporadically.

[8:40 a.m.]

If you, really, would go and slaughter once a week with eight beef for 50 weeks a year, we could do 400 beef. We had a max one year of 272 beef. That’s all we had. The rest is just 100-and-something…. Whatever. It’s not really sustainable, but it worked for a ma-and-pa operation.

Capacity. The plant is still standing. I’m still holding on to the licence. If I had people who would slaughter — just for slaughter only, a theoretical number — I could do 15 beef a day. That’s my barn capacity. It works out to 3,750 beef a year. That’s the capacity from a small ma-and-pa plant.

Everybody is whining that there’s no capacity. It is the producer side. They produce those bottlenecks. At the other end, you’ve got those producers. Really, producers like her…. Those are producers. Then you have those others, those wannabe producers. They just buy a few bags of feed, apply it and think they can slaughter whenever they want. That’s not a producer. It’s a zookeeper. That’s all they are. That’s what zookeepers do: apply some feed, muck the animal. That’s it — just make a quick buck.

Over those years, I had some observations on why they shouldn’t be slaughtering, even those D and E licences. They’re nothing else but somebody who has a knife, because they’re not trained.

I made some notes. First of all, all those diseases. You have lumps or cancer eye. They come with broken pieces, broken bones. A lot can happen. But most of them are so cheap. They don’t go to the vet. They let it run, and it gives you another calf and another calf. Finally, they phone the butcher and say: “I’ve got a cow. Kill it.”

They come. The head looks like it’s, perhaps, from a horror movie — just a bloody mess moving on the neck. They want nice hamburger, because they’ve got friends who are looking for it or a school lunch program. “I can donate, so I’m the good guy. I donate my garbage.” That’s what I run into — a burger cow for school lunch programs, for friends.

Then the tagging issue is always coming in. “Oh, I need an ear tag.” It’s been years and years, and they need an ear tag. Always go: “I didn’t know.” They lie straight to your face. That’s what we’re facing all the time. So I take it with no ear tag. The inspector jumps on my neck, and I’m the bad guy.

People pick up their meat. It’s nicely wrapped for inspection. I didn’t provide boxes then. They dump it in their pickup. In the pickup, there’s a snared coyote, a chainsaw and whatever is in there. This nicely wrapped meat is dumped like a sack of potatoes. It’s normal. That’s the understanding of hygiene. I know.

The next guy or next few guys are just going to have a Mickey Mouse setup. Zookeepers, again, killing all their pigs at home — eight, nine, ten. They dump it on my doorstep. There are so many pigs I have to deal with. They’re not cold. They’re still bloating and whatever.

Little guys are not organized. They don’t have their cow separated. They come. I slaughter the cows. They’re pregnant. Sometimes eight cows, and they’re all pregnant. Calves from this size to almost full grown. It’s gross. You go and bleed the cow, and then you see the little guy is suffocating in the womb. These are all SPCA issues. You should look after those little guys more. Big farmers follow the protocol, like she said to all this.

[8:45 a.m.]

Malnourishment. Lots of cows come off the range malnourished, bony. In the wintertime, some of them come full of shit. You can’t get your knife through the hide. You dull your knife on one cow. Skin them off. You see the mistreatment. The cow wouldn’t walk, so they beat it. I see all the bruises on the meat. That’s it.

Then when they’re slaughtered with farm kills or those Ds and Es and stuff, they use front-end-loaders. There are flies around, improper sanitation, no running water — never mind hot water with 82 degrees Celsius.

They do the work with farm clothes. They’re handling the meat just without washing hands. They shoot it, muck around on the hide and, with the same hands, go in the meat. Meat is hanging in the cooler. You’ve got all your mouldy fingerprints, after a few days, on it. Lack of understanding the sanitation, no experience with the proper killing. It’s just murdering the stuff.

The bleeding. I’ve seen them. You can bleed an animal…. It’s like fencing. It’s an art — knife in and out. Sometimes there’s not even blood on the knife. Those guys look like they’ve got a wild boar after they cut one throat — no knowledge, no nothing.

They don’t know about disease inside, don’t know what to do with an abscess on the liver. If there’s an abscess on the liver, it bursts. All the pus goes over the carcass. But they’re still on the lucky side. They’ve got the school lunch program. They can dispose of it.

R. Leonard (Chair): You have another half a minute to finish up. Time goes fast, I know.

F. Rohls: What else? We are providing a service. Now, I found this from the CRD. The Quesnel Airport is on life support, so they implement a tax, a referendum. We butchers are suffering to have work year-round, so why not put something like a tax or a fee or a levy of some sort so we can have a money pit to get money out to keep a butcher on year-round, even if the zookeepers can’t supply us with work year-round, like a wage subsidy?

R. Leonard (Chair): All right. You’ve had a lot of life experiences and some pretty telling remarks. Thank you very much for making that presentation.

We already have a question from Mike.

M. Morris: Sir, you paint a pretty grim picture of what goes on out there, but I think that there’s an onus on the licensees, such as yourself, to refuse to take animals in the condition that you’re describing, as well, and also to provide some instruction to the producers on what they should be doing and what they shouldn’t be doing, and maybe reporting them to whoever the inspector is for the area.

I want to go back to a comment, because I’ve heard it from other presenters yesterday as well. How do you regulate finished cattle to coincide with year-round production? How do you get that animal to the finished state at the right age, at the right weight, to provide you with that year-round service that you’re describing?

That’s one of the problems we have. Up here we’ve got weather to contend with, so that regulates when the calving season is. Perhaps we can change things a little bit in the warmer climates in the south, but up here we’re pretty much confined to calving in the spring, and of course, that stipulates or determines when the slaughter takes place.

Did you have any thoughts on how that can be regulated a little bit more to provide that year-round service?

[8:50 a.m.]

F. Rohls: I’m not a producer, but cows go in heat several times a year. So if you’ve got your herd, and you rotate the bull at certain times…. When the calves come out in the cold season, just provide barns, and keep them clean.

M. Morris: Okay.

R. Leonard (Chair): I have a question. You say that you have a licence. What class of licence?

F. Rohls: A.

R. Leonard (Chair): A, okay. Thanks.

Any other questions?

D. Barnett: What is your capacity for hanging beef once you’ve slaughtered them? How many can you take at a time?

F. Rohls: It depends on the size. I can hang between 30 and 35 for aging when I cut them myself.

D. Barnett: So 30 to 35. And you do the butchering also.

F. Rohls: Yes.

R. Leonard (Chair): You say, also, you’re not practising right now.

F. Rohls: No. I had a couple of accidents. The last one did it so I can’t work anymore.

R. Leonard (Chair): Well, thank you very much for sharing your experiences with us.

I’d like to call Felix Schellenberg.

FELIX SCHELLENBERG

F. Schellenberg: Thank you. My apologies for being late. I’ll just give a quick introduction of who I am and what we’re doing. We are a fully vertically integrated operation. That means livestock production, with the centrepiece being beef, hogs and sheep. We do about 5,000 poultry seasonally during the summer, and we have a laying operation with a grading station.

Fully integrated goes on, including a provincially licensed and inspected abattoir. We are a certified organic operation; the abattoir is also certified organic by PACS. Incidentally, the PACS inspector spent a full day with us yesterday. That is a yearly occurrence — a very stringent inspection, including animal welfare and practices that are certified organic versus conventional.

Our market is 100 percent Vancouver. We have our own butcher shop on Commercial Drive. We have a restaurant and meat outlet downtown on Denman Street. And as I speak here, we are negotiating a location in North Vancouver. Why that? Because we’ve been a cattle ranch for 40 years, and we just need more market. We don’t really want to bring our certified organic animals onto the commodity market — which, part of it, we have to do at the moment.

We have our own transport business. We go down with a refrigerated truck to Vancouver to deliver our meat and meat products — highly value-added, some of them — at Chilcotin Harvest in Redstone in the Chilcotin. We bring back, with the refrigerated truck, goats we need up here.

We also have our own restaurant and meat outlet in Redstone and supply quite a bit of frozen and fresh meat to the local people in the vicinity of Redstone — Alexis Creek, up to Anahim Lake, to some lodges. We have the local meat sales and outlets locally, but the bulk of the meat we are processing goes to Vancouver.

[8:55 a.m.]

Being certified organic, also…. Obviously, the refrigerated five-tonne truck is also certified organic, so it is being inspected. We use it with our logo, which is on my vest here, so it’s good advertising going down there. People have a lot of trust in the business because they know we advertise ourselves. They know regulators, authorities, are looking, as third parties, into it, and they trust…. I don’t know why, because when it comes to taxes, they don’t trust government at all. But somehow, with food safety, they do trust a third-party opinion and a third-party check. It would be im­possible to sell meat in Vancouver that wasn’t inspected.

Why do I say that? Because there is quite a bit going on in this province with people selling, off the pickup truck, meats that have been produced up here in the Cariboo. They stand on the street corner in Vancouver somewhere or Surrey or Langley, and they sell it right out of the truck like that. This is true. It’s competition for us. It’s not big competition, but the competition is there, and it is definitely a lesser product in quality than what we provide. That’s just fact.

I look at it this way. I, Felix Schellenberg, need a driver’s licence to drive a vehicle. The gentleman over there drives the same vehicle, but he doesn’t need a driver’s licence. There is a discrepancy there that we need to fix.

I didn’t pick on you. I’m sure you have a driver’s licence. But it was just an example.

As you see, and you probably hear, I’m not very well prepared for this meeting, but I had about five minutes to make some notes. However, when you are that involved with a business like that, it’s on your mind all the time, so it doesn’t take much to actually explain the situation for us.

The customer expectation down there…. They don’t even know, but they fully expect that what we deliver is clean, was produced under excellent sanitary conditions. Animal welfare is very, very important nowadays to people. We have an open, standing invitation to anybody that wants to look at our operations. Be it at the ranch, abattoir, restaurant and the locations in Vancouver, they can come.

We have, probably, visitors every ten days that go to Bella Coola or wherever. They come from the coast. They know our business. “Wow. Hey, can we look at the ranch?” Yes. They are being sent up. They drive 11 or 12 kilometers. I mean, the abattoir is still on ranch land, but they have to go back on the highway and go up to the ranch, and they’re welcome to go anywhere. We have nothing to hide, and we operate in a fashion that we will never have something to hide. We could claim that as a business, but we can also say, “The certified organic inspectors are okay,” and people trust that.

We have, weekly, new customers. In Vancouver on Commercial Drive, we are now open, I think for the eighth year. It was a rough three years at first, but now we have a beautiful customer base. There’s not a week going by…. I would say probably two, three times a week people are coming in saying: “We heard about you. We checked you out on the Internet. We talked to people. I haven’t eaten meat in 15 years” — or 30 years or whatever — “and I’ll start eating meat again.”

This is a compliment, because you’ve actually now created a customer that is loyal to you. They don’t even know how loyal they are, but they will not buy meat somewhere else. Not that other meats aren’t good too; it’s just that they like the vertical integration where we are in control all the way.

That brings me to what are our biggest hurdles. I can tell you. That’s why I actually drove two hours to be here, late….

R. Leonard (Chair): No, you’re plenty on time.

F. Schellenberg: But not too late. Thank you for letting me speak, by the way.

It’s skilled labour, people that actually are good at what they’re doing. And we advertise worldwide.

[9:00 a.m.]

We advertise first in Canada, obviously, then in South Africa, Switzerland, Germany, Austria and Mexico for those skilled labourers we need. That’s fine. We have beautiful appli­cations from German-trained master butchers that want to come here. They want a change in life. They have a lot of social problems over there, and in many European countries, because of migrating people from other places into these countries. They love what we’re doing.

As a matter of fact, we have a Swiss butcher, now 12 years in Colombia, and we have applied to get him in. He’s a master butcher. He’s very good. He’s a consultant and a teacher as well, and it’s going to work. But it is a process that is just tough.

In the United States, they have foreign workers. They have programs where it’s very easy to get labour in from Mexico. These guys come for eight months. Then they’re gone. They want to work. They want to work hours. They have a minimum wage they have to pay in the U.S.A., but we have…. Wow. Our ordered wages we pay to these people, and that’s low skill, but they actually want to work. It is very high.

R. Leonard (Chair): Excuse me. Just 30 seconds more, please.

F. Schellenberg: Oh my god. Okay.

All right. We do produce our own meats, and then, seasonally, we do a lot of customer work for local ranchers or whoever. We do that a little bit all year, but in the fall time, from September to December, it is really busy. We have up to 14 people in there.

R. Leonard (Chair): Okay. Well, thank you very much. We appreciate you….

F. Schellenberg: Thank you for letting me speak.

R. Leonard (Chair): Stay. There may be some questions. We’ve got Mike and Ian. Mike first.

M. Morris: I’m familiar with the area. I went to school in Puntzi, when the air force station was still running up there.

I’m curious, though. What drove you to establish the business down in Vancouver? Was it a lack of market up here, or was it just the economies of scale that you were operating under? And you’ve got a class A?

F. Schellenberg: Yes.

M. Morris: And quite a diversified lineup of product here, with beef and hog — and poultry as well?

F. Schellenberg: Yes.

M. Morris: I’m just curious as to what pushed you down in the direction of Vancouver. I’m very entrepreneurial.

F. Schellenberg: When we decided to go fully vertically integrated, the next market for us would have been Williams Lake, where there is a concentration of people. But people in Williams Lake at that time still had the grandfather who had a little beef herd and would take out the steer from the neighbour.

There is sufficient money in Williams Lake. There’s no problem there, but the education, the demands on the animal background are vastly bigger in Vancouver. Like, as you know, they are all green. They believe, all of them, in social justice.

Then we decided: “Look, if you really want to start a business, we can’t just two-bit away in the local markets.” Price is still a big issue locally. Whereas in Vancouver, they buy the idea, and they pay for the idea. That is why the Vancouver market is tremendous for us. It’s beautiful.

I. Paton: Interesting story. Thank you for coming. I didn’t catch exactly where your operation or your ranch is.

F. Schellenberg: It is exactly 150 kilometres west on Highway 20 in Redstone, unincorporated. It’s not Redstone reservation.

I. Paton: Bella Coola area. Okay.

F. Schellenberg: Well, between Bella Coola and Williams Lake.

I. Paton: What is the actual name of your company that is the brand on your meat on Commercial Drive and whatnot?

F. Schellenberg: Well, the comprehensive company name is Pasture to Plate Inc., as in grass to dinner plate. We run three different companies. There’s Pasture to Plate Inc. Then we have Chilcotin Abattoir, also doing business as Chilcotin Harvest. We have the ranch, officially at arm’s length as well, which is Altherr and Schellenberg Cattle Co. Ltd. That has been for the last 35 years — that name.

[9:05 a.m.]

I. Paton: One more quick question. We’re all here, really, to explore different licences. I don’t think you made any real comments on D and E licences, inspectors. How many days a week do you have an inspector come to your facility? Every day that you’re killing?

F. Schellenberg: Yes.

I. Paton: Okay. That is how many days a week, roughly?

F. Schellenberg: That depends. That’s seasonal. It can be three to four days.

I. Paton: Do you feel inspectors are very important to be at all facilities, whether they’re A, B, D and E?

F. Schellenberg: I believe in, usually, one measuring stick and not two. We all pay a certain amount of taxes, depending on our income. It’s not: “Oh, the gentleman over there pays less tax with the same income as I have.” That’s what I believe in.

I think hygiene and quality and sanitation and being…. You know, some of us have millions of dollars invested in these buildings. That’s just not the same as if you work out of your garage. It’s just not. It cannot be.

D. Barnett: Thank you, Felix.

I’d like to say that Felix has a very first-class operation out in the Chilcotin. I’ve toured it many, many times. I’ve had Agriculture Ministers out there many, many times.

I’m going to ask you a question, Felix. How do you feel that the bureaucracy time frame…? When you need a new piece of paperwork or there’s a new regulation, how do you feel that people like yourself, way out in the Chilcotin, are basically treated? Do people respond to you right away? Are you put on the back burner? Do you feel that there are more regulations for you than there are for people in the city?

F. Schellenberg: It is very tough, regulations for us, because we sell in the city. We also label everything in French, because we are further than 100 kilometres from the city. The labelling is very, very strict. Basically, they apply federal laws to our product. That’s just the way it is.

We are in Canada. We are in British Columbia. I think when I produce meat and sell it, I have to face that. Like Joe Blow down the road, if I had a neighbour that was doing that and he sells out of his garage…. I don’t think it should be like that.

D. Barnett: What does this add in cost to your product? Do you know?

F. Schellenberg: Well, the 35 inspections for our administrator…. She spends two weeks straight, just with these people. Two weeks. I can tell you that she works on a very nice salary.

When we do the provincial meat inspection, it’s pretty straightforward. There are not too many changes. If there is a change, we discuss it. I also have a bit of a rapport with the provincial veterinarian. They are very open to say: “Okay. Well, no, we can certainly discuss that.” It’s quite good, I think.

J. Tegart (Deputy Chair): Thank you very much for your presentation.

I think yesterday we had some comments in regards to the amount of red tape, and you’ve just made some comments. Donna asked, to a number of people, about how many forms need to be filled out. Are there redundancies in the system? That would be helpful for us to know.

It’s interesting to hear from many different producers the impact of one incident on everybody, whether you’re inspected or not inspected. If there’s one incident in the cattle industry, it affects everybody, no matter how you produce your product.

For us on the panel, we’re looking for information and recommendations that would perhaps protect the industry from those kinds of things. If there are regulations that we need to look at, it’s helpful to hear from producers if you have some ideas around that.

Red tape in particular — are there redundancies there? Do you believe that there should be some changes in regards to the different licensing?

[9:10 a.m.]

F. Schellenberg: I’ve been a rancher for 40 years. I grew up with horses. I made my own rules for most of my life. Then we got into the regulated industry, and by god did I wake up.

Yeah. It was very frustrating for me in the beginning, but once you realize that you are not taking on the Canadian Army, you just do your stuff. Once you’re used to it, so what? You have tax. You deal with cattlemen, with inspections, with certification, with transport regulation, with drivers that can only drive eight hours. So you accept the fact. It’s the law, it’s the regulation, so don’t whine about it.

We make it easier than: “Why don’t you just throw it all out the window?” That happens in countries in this world. You know that. What have you got then? You have anarchy.

I’m very much a free thinker, believe me, and authority does not go well with me, but I learned.

R. Leonard (Chair): Yes, I heard that, with your desire to see the equity of standards applied across the board and the trust that grows with a good system.

R. Singh: Thank you so much. We have been hearing — yesterday, too, and also from you — that there are not enough trained people to work at facilities. You talked about bringing people from outside. Do you think there’s a big need for a training facility to train such people?

F. Schellenberg: You know, we live amidst First Nations reservations. We hire First Nations people on the ranch. The ranch is not so bad, because if it’s seasonal — or if it’s their season, I should say…. You come or you don’t. It doesn’t matter on a ranch. When you work with perishable goods, I have to depend on people showing up. We still are very lenient towards this attitude, but we need a core staff we can count on. Either we bring these people in from other countries, or we train them here.

Absolutely, I’d love to train them. If we had a facility, we could easily accommodate. We have accommodation. We’re planning to build a motel in the next two years. That is much in line with what we think could be done — that students come out for a few days, learn, have a proper apprenticeship program.

That’s a difference from here to Europe. Europe is full of apprenticeships. Here? “Well, yeah, I worked for a butcher for the last ten years.” Well, what did the butcher know? What did he know? You should have a licence to train somebody, because otherwise, you train stupid things to people, you know? This is just a fact.

Yes, a training facility would be great, absolutely. We have enough people in Canada. Do you remember when China came in with the one child policy? China, at the moment, is importing workers because they haven’t got enough, right? We have people here, but they all want to work only seven hours a day and three days a week, preferably. But there are people that would love to be trained, so let’s do something.

R. Leonard (Chair): Well, thank you very much for your presentation and answering everyone’s questions. Thank you for taking the time to travel all this way.

Next up we have Wilma Watkin, from Walk’In Acres.

W. Watkin: I’m wondering if I’m restricted to my 15 minutes or if I can have a little bit of extra time.

R. Leonard (Chair): I think in terms of fairness, after we just heard from Felix, we have to give the same amount of time to everybody. We have a little bit of leniency with time. We can always make it up in the question period, perhaps.

WALK’IN ACRES

W. Watkin: The paper that you’re getting is actually timed for ten minutes, if I talk reasonably fast.

I’d like to say good morning and welcome you to a beautiful day in Williams Lake. It’s probably the nicest day we’ve had in a couple of weeks. You’re willing to travel on what I look at as quite a gruelling schedule, to be able to be here and listen to people like myself.

As you know, my name is Wilma Watkin. My husband and I raised and sold farm-gate poultry as well as ran a poultry abattoir from 2001 until 2016. This is in Quesnel, so I guess I travelled down to come for this as well.

In 2004, when the Meat Inspection Act was brought in, the push-back from the farming community was massive, so much so that in the spring of 2011, the government formed something called the operators reference group. The purpose of this group was to work with government representatives to help move forward on trying to get some regulations and stuff in place.

[9:15 a.m.]

This group consisted of representatives from a cross-section of all abattoirs in B.C., with the goal of giving guidance and formulating the framework for the current system.

I have to tell you at this point I was vehemently opposed to having an inspected system. I had several reasons for it, but we can talk about that later, if you want. However, as a member of this group, I learnt a lot about all kinds of things with meat that I really didn’t know. Quite frankly, it was the introduction of zoonotic diseases that was a real game changer for me.

Do you know what that word means? It means that those are diseases that can be transferred from people to animals and vice versa. There are many of them that can affect meat. But the two that really caught my eye, actually, were trichinosis and tuberculosis, because these are significant health risks to people and, in some cases, can actually cause death.

TB is spread through the ingestion or inhalation, and the M. bovis strain of TB in deer, elk and bison is actually a source of infection for pastured animals. There’s a nasal discharge, and that, with other particles, can actually contaminate water and pastureland. Then domestic stock can become infected by grazing and drinking in the same pasture. We see deer in there all the time. It’s not a thing.

TB gets passed to humans through the ingestion of undercooked meat. Beef would be a prime in this one, and I personally like my beef rare to medium rare. You would think that the TB would be killed by heat by cooking it because the outside gets hot. But all it takes is a quick look on Google to find there are all kinds of hand-held tenderizers, which are all the little needles. You can immediately, just by tenderizing your meat, push that TB into the centre of your meat, where it would not hit a proper temperature to actually kill it.

You would think that in many ways, kids are being trained at school to learn about all the problems with diseases and making sure that they cook their meat properly. But many home ec classes, in fact, have been cancelled throughout the province, and you don’t see a lot of it. So unless parents know and make a point of telling their kids that this could be a hazard if they don’t do things properly, in fact, they may just be totally ignorant and become sick regardless.

The other one is trichinosis, and it’s a roundworm that can affect pork. This parasite can be found in all mammals and has actually been confirmed in 150 species, ranging all the way from grizzly bears to rodents. Infection is spread, again, by eating undercooked meat and ingesting the larva. Since pigs are also carnivores, it’s not difficult to see the possibility of transmission here. All they have to do is eat an infected mouse, and they have it, okay?

If a person becomes infected, the clinical presentation range is actually from asymptomatic, with no symptoms, and it can also be fatal. It depends on the number of larva that were ingested.

Commercial pigs, I believe, are raised basically in barns so that they control a lot of this stuff. But when you get your mixed farms, those pigs are out in the pasture along with everything else, so it’s easy for them. Really, my concern is that if you don’t have an inspector on site, are they actually going to be able to recognize the little -osis that, in fact, represent this disease?

There are only been two documented cases of trichinosis in humans. It’s very difficult to, apparently, diagnose in people. One of them was in ’97. One was in 2005. They both had to do with bear meat. One was just eating bear meat undercooked, and the other was where they had bear meat as part of the mix in sausages and in jerky. Jerky is just dried meat, so it’s very easy to see where it wouldn’t be up to temperature. However, that doesn’t mean that the risk is not there, right?

Since I have a few more minutes, I will talk a little bit about poultry, because that is my expertise. The big risk with poultry is not so much the diseases that they have but, in fact, the bacteria that comes with it. Seventeen percent of chickens have salmonella. It just comes with the chicks, and there’s no stopping it.

[9:20 a.m.]

One of my jobs in the plant, in fact, besides having an inspector tell me whether there was something wrong with the birds, was that I had to chill those birds absolutely as quickly as possible because bacteria actually duplicates at a phenomenal rate even at room temperature. So you can take something and very quickly move it to where it’s very dangerous.

In terms of having an inspector next to me, you have to remember when you’re dealing with custom poultry, as I did…. We had quite the weight ranges. They went all the way from 4½ to 13 pounds. Those are not my birds that I’m slaughtering. I had my own birds. So even though I may have had a moral obligation to take a bird and condemn it, I don’t know if, before inspection, I actually had the right to do that. A person raises 25 birds, they bring them to me for slaughter, and they sort of expect to get 25 birds back. Unless you actually have the power, which an inspector has, to toss that bird because of this, they’re going to question you on it.

The other thing is that I don’t have the knowledge that an inspector has to be able to actually identify. There are several, probably more…. There are quite a few different forms of hepatitis. I could never tell the difference even though she explained it to me. Some forms of hepatitis she would throw away, and others were allowed to carry on into the system.

As a worker, as an owner, as somebody who worked very hard, actually, to make sure that the meat I passed on was safe for human consumption, I really didn’t have the knowledge base, even after ten years, to be able to adequately say: “Okay, this animal will make you sick.”

At one point in B.C., we actually had on-farm animal testing for health. I really don’t know when that disappeared. But since it is now gone, in fact, abattoirs are the next logical place where you’re going to catch disease because it’s not being caught on the farms. And it will stop the meat, then, from going into the marketplace. The fact that you seldom, if ever, hear of the consumer becoming ill from a zoonotic disease by eating meat really attests to the strong preventative measures we have in place before the meat actually enters the food chain.

Class A and B abattoirs have met a rigorous standard for both the facilities and the operating procedures. They’ve relaxed them on the facilities, I gather. We’ve also got rigorous standards on our operating procedures while we’re processing. They also have an arm’s-length trained specialist, which is the government meat inspector, on site at all times during slaughter. The inspector’s responsibility includes a pre-slaughter check on the animals and the facility itself, as well as inspecting each carcass and the entrails. So every bird in my place got checked. That’s true throughout.

The same cannot be said of class D and E licences. Slaughter often happens outside in an uncontrolled environment, and there’s no direct oversight or carcass inspection for disease by a government inspector. Quite frankly, I’m appalled to learn that there are a total of 52 D and E licences in B.C., 52 locations where animals are frequently slaugh­tered outside where temperatures and pests cannot be controlled. That’s 52 locations where there isn’t an inspector present to declare the carcass fit for human consumption and 52 locations where up to 820,000 pounds of meat can enter the food supply chain. To me, that’s 52 locations where I really believe the risks to safe meat are well above an acceptable level.

Easily accessible slaughter has been extremely difficult to obtain in rural and remote B.C., but I believe that the issuing of many D and E licences to help mitigate the problem has been a really shortsighted solution. Relaxing the standards merely erodes the safeguards and unnecessarily increases the risk of unsafe meat being placed on the tables of families. Rather, the solution lies in finding ways to increase class A and B abattoirs throughout the province.

R. Leonard (Chair): Just to let you know, 30 seconds, please.

W. Watkin: I thought I was going to get some extra time.

R. Leonard (Chair): No, I said that everyone gets ten minutes. We’ll have an opportunity to ask questions to fill it out. So if you could just….

W. Watkin: That wasn’t made clear to me. I haven’t even talked about the financial aspects.

R. Leonard (Chair): I’m sorry. But just to be fair to everybody, we give each of the presenters ten minutes, and then we have some extra time and will be able to ask some questions. So if you can just sort of walk through the last few points, that’ll open up things.

W. Watkin: Okay. If that’s the point, then I will go to my recommendations.

R. Leonard (Chair): Yes, that would be great. We’ll be sure to make sure we ask all the questions that’ll help round out your presentation.

[9:25 a.m.]

W. Watkin: We want to establish…. I’m suggesting a group similar to the operators reference group, which would consist of abattoir owners, operators, government regulatory personnel and health specialists. This strategy was successful in developing the current meat regulation system and may actually be helpful in moving forward here.

I think you should stop issuing D and E licences and pull them whenever services become available. I think you need to provide financial assistance to establish more class A abattoirs with no- or low-cost loans — or a forgivable portion that would be similar to student loans, based on continued service — except that it’s going to take time to grow capacity and to give financial aid for the transition period.

Negotiate lower hydro rates and insurance cover. Negotiate with regional districts to remove the light industrial classifications where they exist — this cost us a lot of money when we rezoned it; my taxes went up by 50 percent — and possibly to help offset the high cost of transportation for farmers, to level the playing field throughout the province.

R. Leonard (Chair): Thank you very much. For questions, we’ll start with Doug and then Mike.

D. Routley: I’d just like you to explain the financial aspects. You said you….

W. Watkin: I have a point form on page 4. This is for the last year, because we did retire.

We were a very busy business, actually. We slaughtered 300 to 325 chickens, or 100 to 125 turkeys a day, up to 11,000 birds a season. We slaughtered Tuesday and Thursday, with packaging on Wednesdays and Fridays, so customers had to make two trips, one for delivery and one for pickup. We serviced customers all the way from Prince George down to 100 Mile House. So this was a significant time and cost commitment for the farmers.

We charged the basic rate of $5 per chicken up to seven pounds and 75 cents for turkeys. I had five direct employees at a pay rate of $14 an hour, which becomes $16 when you factor in all the other stuff. On that, our net income was just over $55,000, and we made $2,800 as a net profit, which is only 5.4 percent. Labour is huge with custom birds. Mechanisation does not work. So it was $36,000. My insurance — $800 of it is building, but $2,000 was commercial policy. All that was, was trip-and-fall. There was no coverage if anybody got sick from my meat.

My taxes had gone up. Hydro, I think, was around $2,100. At the end of this, there’s a copy of my income statement. I wanted to be transparent. You guys can look at it afterwards.

The important thing to note is that there was no debt load here. All of the capital costs, which included the $60,000 for the upgrade, in fact came either out of our chicken revenue or of off-farm revenue. That’s not enough money to support a family. I worked on the line, and if I’d been paid, I would have made $14 an hour for half a year. That’s not going to sustain a family.

M. Morris: I’m just interested in your comments on eliminating class Ds and Es. Is that for all animal abattoirs, or is that just for poultry?

W. Watkin: No, that’s for everybody. To me, you have to have an inspector there. You cannot have flies contaminating. I had to have a reverse air system to keep flies out of my facility. I was told I needed to slaughter inside — again, because of the contamination from the environment.

I don’t know how many of these other licensees actually slaughter outdoors, but even now, there are licensed ones with A and B that, I gather, slaughter out of doors, and I can’t understand how they’ve allowed that to happen. I think it’s a true safety issue for me. It’s not a case of if something is going to happen; it is going to happen. Something’s going to go sideways, and we’re all going to pay for it.

N. Simons: We’ve seen it go sideways, with Maple Leaf Foods. We’ve seen recalls. We’ve seen listeria. We’ve seen a lot of issues with the big….

I’m just going to say…. What do you say to the little guy who lives in an isolated community accessible only by boat, who wants to be able to feed their family or their neighbour down the road? What would you suggest to them?

W. Watkin: I know that money is always an issue, because you’re always dealing with budgets. But somehow or other, you have to get an A or B licence in there. If nothing else, you have to get an inspector there to look at that meat.

N. Simons: What about a veterinarian?

W. Watkin: Yeah. Anybody who knows about disease could do the thing. I just would think that that might be more expensive than an inspector.

N. Simons: When you talk about economy of scale…. Some people in my constituency had to put their animals on a trailer and go the night before, take a ferry, two hours, then be the first in line in the morning and then bring everything back. That’s significant.

[9:30 a.m.]

When we’re legislators thinking about a regime that works for the province, sometimes exceptions are made. That’s where, I think, the previous government brought in the Ds and Es. We’re trying to figure out a way of ensuring that we can continue to protect the public.

I’ll ask you. Do you know how many deaths have occurred from people eating tainted meat in Canada?

W. Watkin: There haven’t, as far as I can tell…. I mean, I read your Hansard notes. From what I can tell, there hasn’t been an incident to date, but that doesn’t mean we won’t have one.

N. Simons: No, I recognize that.

D. Barnett: Nicholas may have asked my question in a different route. Would you be in favour of class D and E licences if the rules were the same as…?

N. Simons: Then they’d be As.

W. Watkin: Yeah. Then they’d be As, right?

D. Barnett: No, they wouldn’t be As.

W. Watkin: Well, they’re not cutting.

D. Barnett: I’m talking about the inspection rules.

W. Watkin: Yeah, but there also have to be other things in place to stop contamination from the environment. So I would think it also needs to be in a building, for sure.

J. Tegart (Deputy Chair): I found it most interesting to listen to your comments about the concerns when the legislation came in — not wanting inspection and wanting to do it the way you’d always done it — and then your comments today about where you’re at today. In your sense of people in your industry, are many people at the same place you are, or are they still resistant?

W. Watkin: No. Well, anybody, obviously, that has an A and B abattoir would have had to have some conversion, or else they wouldn’t have opened up. I honestly think that even for people who were asking for E licences…. If they knew the risks involved, if they got sued because somebody got sick from their meat, I’m not too sure that they would actually want to have an E licence.

R. Leonard (Chair): I’ll just wrap up with one last question, then. On the issue of insurance, you said that you had trip-and-fall insurance. Is there such insurance available to you for accidental contamination?

W. Watkin: I think there is. To be honest, I never checked it out, partly because my insurance bill for the whole farm was already just shy of $6,000. So it becomes a big issue.

R. Leonard (Chair): Well, thank you very much for your presentation. I hope you appreciated the questions, as they rounded out your presentation.

N. Simons: Yeah, thank you very much. By the way, there are 66 B and E, not 52.

W. Watkin: Okay. The 52 was what I read off Hansard. So it’s increased, has it?

N. Simons: Well, we’re wrong sometimes. That’s the problem with Hansard. They keep track of what we say.

W. Watkin: Not of what’s real there?

R. Leonard (Chair): The next presenter is Robson Valley Custom Meats — Matt Rempel.

ROBSON VALLEY CUSTOM MEATS

M. Rempel: Good morning. My name is Matt Rempel. I represent Robson Valley Custom Meats, located in McBride, B.C. We are a class A abattoir.

I’ve been involved in the meat industry for four years. It started for me in McBride at IGA as a meat cutter, leading to becoming meat manager. Later an opportunity arose for me to partner with another fellow and take over a class A abattoir that had been trying to get off the ground. The people of McBride and Valemount have been waiting for a class A facility for years, as the next closest are located in Prince George and Darfield, meaning a travel time of over two hours.

While working at IGA, safe food practices and sanitation were my top priority, and I wanted to present the best product possible for shelf life and, more importantly, to keep people healthy. People could trust the products that I put out because I knew I had a high standard for food handling. When IGA closed their store, I moved on to manage the meat department of the other grocery store in town. When I left there, I know of several people that stopped buying meat from town and now purchase their meat in Prince George, because they do not trust the food safety practices of the people behind the counter now.

[9:35 a.m.]

This is one of the reasons I joined up to start up Robson Valley Custom Meats in McBride. People asked me to. They trusted my standard of meat-handling and knew that I would put out a quality product for them.

When we were beginning the process of opening the abattoir, we had six people looking for E licences, along with several E licences already located in the area. Because we were opening, the government put a halt on their application, as they would rather have animals run through an A- or B-licensed abattoir.

Some of these applicants were happy with us opening, while others were upset, as they wanted to process their own animals. Several of the E licence holders brought their animals to us even though they already had an E licence.

So here we are today, talking about the current state of the meat industry, how to address problems with capacity, issues with the complexity of starting an abattoir, why we need the system that we have now, as well as a host of many other issues.

I don’t have all the answers, but I can tell you my experience in the meat industry in a rural and remote location and what I have seen there.

Firstly, E licence compliance. I know of several E licence holders who are using their E licence as a cover and selling their meat retail and/or outside of their designated area. Why not? No one will check on them or look at their records. Hit your allowable animal units for the year? Well, let’s not mark the next one down.

For the whole province of B.C., we only have one enforcement officer. How does that make sense? It didn’t take me long to realize that it wasn’t worth trying to deal with the illegal slaughtering and selling of meat in my area. Even if our enforcement officer was to look into an issue, what he is able to do is extremely restricted.

E licence food safety. There were two main cutting places you could use for meat-cutting in McBride. One of them is now an E licence holder. I had used both for wild game, before opening up Robson Valley Custom Meats. The first I never wanted to cut in again, and the second wasn’t much better. The first had mouse droppings everywhere through­out the cutting room. The bigger problem was that there was no access to hot water to clean it before you started. If you were to clean, they only wanted you to clean with vinegar. No degreaser to get that fat or those meat chunks out of the big gouge in the table. Nope. Vinegar will apparently take care of that. Yes, this is an E licence holder, but it is okay because the Ministry of Health is overseeing them.

Animal slaughtering. I have had several discussions with farmers on how long it takes them to kill, skin and gut their own animal on their farm. Most E and D licence holders do their animals outside. What is the weather like? How hot is it? If it takes them a couple of hours to do a beef outside in warm weather, what is happening to the bacteria on that carcass? What about the flies and the bugs having all that spare time to hang out? What about not having access to hot water or having to sterilize their knives every time they get hair or feces on it? What about when they are done and need to move it to the cooler? How do they keep it clean?

Under these conditions, how can anyone honestly say that this is providing a safe product for the public? The meat inspectors go through a rigorous amount of training to recognize issues and diseases in animals and their carcasses. Every time I have a kill day, I am glad to have them there to ensure that everything we cut is healthy and safe for public consumption.

What if a farmer runs into an animal that has issues? Will they recognize it, or will they catch it? Will they decide to just use that carcass anyways because they already spent the money investing in it to sell? Who is there to ensure that every carcass is safe to eat? Can we and should we really trust a four-hour course to give them the knowledge and experience, when it takes our meat inspectors over a year?

Anytime I have talked with people about the standards of animal slaughtering and meat-handling between As and Bs compared to Es and Ds, everyone has said that they would never buy from an E or a D. The reason for this is because the public does not know about the reality of the oversight of the meat they are buying. The public believes that the Es and Ds have the same standard of food safety and inspection as and Bs and are blown away that the government would let that happen when they realize the truth.

The public has put its trust in the government to have oversight over the food industry in Canada so that they can trust the foods that they are eating to be safe.

From working in the grocery store, would I ever sell a farm-killed animal? No, because I could never 100 percent trust it. It needs to be inspected and ensured to be safe to eat for me and the public and in order to sell it. If it makes sense and is needed for the big federal guide for food safety, then it’s just plain logical that it’s needed for the small guys, for food safety.

[9:40 a.m.]

Am I here to say that everything about A- and B-licensed abattoirs is perfect? No. I would actually like to see more done to ensure that healthy products come out our doors — for the government to give the meat inspectors the ability to check the whole plant to ensure a clean and sanitary working condition and to ensure that everything that’s being produced in B.C. is of the highest quality.

It makes more sense to have someone who is at the plant every other week to check the whole plant over, instead of a health officer doing it once a year. There was legislation in the works to make this happen before the last election. That has now been put on the back burner, most likely to be forgotten.

I am currently in the final stages of closing down Robson Valley Custom Meats. After all the clamour and excuses about farmers killing their own animals because Prince George and Darfield were too far away, I would still hear of these same farmers illegally killing and selling their animals.

In our time of operation, I have not had a single animal from Valemount — which is 45 minutes away, or 75 kilometres — brought to our plant to be slaughtered. So do I believe it when farmers are complaining about not enough abattoirs or none in their area? No. Because I dealt firsthand with them lying to my face about needing one and then continuing to illegally kill and sell their animals when they had one. I had farmers complain and get angry when I’d tell them I can’t slaughter their animal this week and they’d have to wait until next week. Not a month, a week.

Farmers complain about not being able to get their animals done when they want them, and I understand that. Abattoirs are usually open year-round and have lots of capacity throughout the rest of the year. Use up these times. It is really hard to hire workers when you can only promise them work for the fall.

If farmers would slaughter their animals throughout the year instead of just in the fall, abattoirs could have a higher capacity — not because they are doing more during the whole year but because they can have a better workforce working for them because they have the animals to keep their employees working all year and aren’t scrambling to find workers when the fall comes around.

My final thoughts are these. Why do we hear about Alberta beef and absolutely nothing about B.C. beef, for quality? Why are our standards for high-quality provincial meat products so low that nobody even looks to see what we’ve got? Instead of loosening the regulations to keep some people happy, the government should be strengthening our standards and taking this opportunity to help B.C. move forward and become a leader in meat industry practices and food safety.

R. Leonard (Chair): Thank you very much, Matt. Thank you for making the time to travel all that way to come and speak to us today.

M. Rempel: Actually, I’m now working down here at Rodear Meats.

R. Leonard (Chair): I’m sure we have lots of questions for you. We’ll start with Nick.

N. Simons: Thanks a lot, Matt. I could tell there is frustration and a little disappointment that your venture is not as you would have hoped it would have been. We haven’t heard a lot of stories like the one you say. We hear from the farmers who need another abattoir. We don’t hear the other side of that.

M. Rempel: I’m probably one of the few people…. I’ve been in exactly the spot where they’re complaining that I need….

N. Simons: Yeah, you are. Do you believe that those who are slaughtering on the farm illegally are…? Did you say that they were doing it under the cover of a D and E, do you think? Or are they doing it anyway?

M. Rempel: Some of them are. They have an E licence. Some of those E licences are selling to retail. Then I know of several of them that are taking that outside of their designated areas to the Okanagan — and Vancouver, which is definitely not even in their regional district.

D. Barnett: You’re from McBride, right?

M. Rempel: Yes.

D. Barnett: These people that you’re talking about that have these licences — are they from the McBride-Valemount area also?

M. Rempel: Yes.

D. Barnett: Has anybody reported these people to the inspectors?

M. Rempel: I have contacted the inspector, enforcement. I have tried to get him out. The logistics and responses I have had…. I have not been able to get him out, to come up to the Robson Valley to do checks. I have heard that he has come up once to do…. But there was no communication between me and him. About him coming up to look at people, I don’t know who he checked out. I don’t know what he did. That’s one of the issues of having one enforcement officer for all of B.C. How can he look at the whole place?

D. Barnett: Is this practice still going on, to the best of your knowledge?

M. Rempel: Oh yeah.

D. Barnett: Thank you. We shall make note of that. Of course, I think it’s something that really needs to be looked into.

[9:45 a.m.]

If there is meat that is uninspected going out there to the marketplace, we have no idea what’s out there. That concerns each and every one of us. So we will make special note of this.

M. Rempel: We sell half-beefs, and I have had people on the phone tell me: “Well, it’s okay, because in Valemount, there’s a local butcher who sells half a beef.” I’m like: “Well, he didn’t get it from me.”

D. Barnett: It’s not just that. It’s the health of the animal all around that needs to be taken into consideration.

M. Rempel: Oh, yeah. I know several people have talked about that. I know exactly that it’s happening. Actually, two weeks ago when I was at the dentist, I had a receptionist say they got meat from a certain person. I’m like: “Don’t tell me this.”

J. Tegart (Deputy Chair): I guess it’s a follow-up to Donna’s comments and questions. If people are selling to retail from a D and E licence, and it’s not inspected food — I’m going to show my ignorance — doesn’t the retailer need to prove that it’s inspected?

M. Rempel: To who?

J. Tegart (Deputy Chair): Yeah. If the grocery store is buying….

A Voice: Consumers don’t know.

J. Tegart (Deputy Chair): I guess I see the gap.

D. Routley: I used to sell bicycles, and sometimes I sold in the United States. There were some really stupid rules. If I had a bike in Canada that was not something I’d sell — it was for bike shows — and I took it into the States and then brought it back, I had to pay duty both ways. It was ridiculous. Even the director of Canada Customs personally told me: “Well, just say that’s a warranty bike. Throw it in the garbage and bring the other one back.” He’s counselling me on how to, essentially, evade a stupid rule.

There’s a lot of ideological discussion around rules and regulations and red tape. That was one that I would agree was ridiculous. But with this situation, if we don’t have the regulations that we have, we can’t sell internationally. There are all these repercussions from the BSE thing. In this case, what I’m hearing from some people….

I was an entrepreneur, and you are. We believe in a private sector, free-market economy. In this case, what I’m hearing from you and others is that a strict adherence to the rules is the only hope for legitimate businesses, right? Because if you don’t, you’ll have all the consequences internationally as well as locally — and on your conscience as well.

In this case, it seems we’ve got private sector people here saying, “Please, government, regulate and enforce,” and that we need a level playing field. It’s really what I’m hearing: we need a level playing field. Right now the regulations are in fact encouraging a slope on the field against you. That’s what I’m hearing.

Could you confirm for me that I’m right, or am I wrong?

M. Rempel: My issue isn’t so much a level playing field. My issue is sanitation and healthy product. I feel the government role is to ensure public safety. I don’t think anybody can tell me that farm slaughter is 100 percent safe. I can’t say necessarily that even abattoir is 100 percent, but you’re going to have a greater degree of safety in an abattoir versus farm killing.

That alone is my big priority. With the regulation and such like that, I spent almost a month and a half working through paperwork and dealing with stuff like that before we opened up.

Was it hard? Was it tedious? I didn’t want to look at a computer after the first month. But was it worth it? Yes. Would I do it again? Yes. This is someone that is opening up a brand-new business doing it.

I fully agree that someone who’s in my generation…. I’m one of the youngest abattoir owners right now in B.C. The issue is that a lot of older people are now retiring and moving out. There’s no one my age coming into it. We talked about training. The issue is: why would someone my age or the younger generation coming up go into the meat industry to work four months a year? If not, why? It wouldn’t work.

The issue is that if you want to build workers to come into the meat industry to carry on abattoirs, you need to have it that the abattoirs have year-round work for them to work at. It’s not so much about regulation for me. It’s about public safety.

M. Morris: Just a quick question. You say there’s one inspector, or one enforcement officer, in the province. Where is that individual located?

M. Rempel: I believe it’s in the Lower Mainland.

[9:50 a.m.]

N. Simons: Matt, you mentioned that you understood there was legislation that was pending, prior to the last election.

M. Rempel: Yep.

N. Simons: What was that legislation? How do you know that?

M. Rempel: We had discussions with people in the Ministry of Agriculture. The inspectors, even our inspector, were waiting to take over, for it to go through, to be passed, and then they would take over training for the Ministry of Health — of their role. Right now in an abattoir, you have your slaughter side, which is overseen by the Ministry of Agriculture, and your butcher side, which is now overseen by the Ministry of Health. That way, it was….

You could bring it all under one table, under this. Our meat inspector is then going to be able to walk through the whole building and give recommendations. It would make sense, because she’s there every week. You might as well have that rather than a Ministry of Health officer calling up once a year and going: “Hey, I’m going to come.” “Okay. Well, let’s do a big clean, make it look pretty.” Whereas the meat inspector could see day to day, every week, our activities and make recommendations and changes.

N. Simons: That’s something we’ll follow up with. Thank you.

M. Rempel: I don’t know the title, what it was or anything like that. I just know from the Ministry of Agriculture and our meat inspector that they were expecting it to come down the line.

R. Leonard (Chair): Okay. Thanks very much. I’ve just one quick question. You obviously were trained. Where?

M. Rempel: All my training has come through working at the grocery store, and my partner was working at the abattoir that I opened up with. I’m now continuing to further any skills I have with wherever I am, such as at Rodear Meats.

R. Leonard (Chair): All right. Thank you very much. Appreciate your time.

We have the next person as Rodear Cattle Co. Ltd. — David Fernie.

RODEAR CATTLE CO.

D. Fernie: You’ve just met my latest trainee. He’s taking me over. I’d like to retire one day. I’m 61 this year, and my hands are shot. He came to me. It was a great deal — a young man who wants to step into this industry, which is good.

I’d like to thank you for giving me the opportunity to speak here today. I’ve written this five times, five different ways, and each one…. I could actually sit in front of you and talk for half a day or maybe a full day about each subject. I’ve got a lot of experience and a lot of time at a provincial slaughter plant.

I’d like to start. My name is David Fernie. I represent Rodear Cattle Co. and our subsidiary, Rodear Meats. We’ve held a class A licence, BC04, since January 1, 1990, so we were in the beginning. There were nine of us back then.

We’re a multi-red-meat facility. We do everything that’s red. We do custom slaughter, custom processing, custom value-added products. We also have our own value chain which we sell to weekly in Vancouver, and monthly, we have one grocery store with 11 chains that we sell to on a regular basis. We sell to Whistler, Kelowna. We go all over the place with product that we either work with a producer or we’ve produced it ourselves. As well, we have a lot of beef jerky sales, particularly in this area. Everybody knows. Everybody travelling through stops and buys our jerky. We have a lot of experience in this.

I also do a lot of volunteering and contracting my skills. I’m currently the president of the B.C. Association of Abattoirs. I sit nationally on the Food Processing Human Resources Council advisory board for industrial butcher competency. Right now we’ve made phase 1. It’s been a three-year project. We are now working on a national butcher certification project, and we should have that done within a year.

I sit with Cargill, JBS, Olymel — all the big guys. I’m the only small guy there. I represent small processors. We’re working towards a certification system and training within the plants, nationally, with a certification.

[9:55 a.m.]

Also, I was recruited by Canadian Executive Service Organization, CESO. Maybe you might recognize the name. I’ve been recruited for two assignments in Ecuador to help them with their meat industry. I’m also the trainer-instructor with our B.C. Association of Abattoirs introductory meat-processing training program. We’re on our fourth program right now. We’re going to do it this summer in the Cariboo. It’s the last one we’re doing, because the new funding between the province and Ottawa has not yet been assigned. They’re still working on the negotiation of how that money is going to be spent. The money is funded by the Ministry of Advanced Education, Skills and Training.

I’ve had a heck of a time trying to figure out what I’m going to write here and what I’m going to say. Actually, what I wrote, I’m not really going to say. There are so many different things that I’ve got to poke in there, but I’m going to use the framework on this.

My business. The original navigation, through all the complicated bureaucracy to get the permits, public hearings and all that, is not much different in 1990 than it is today, only there are probably about 70 percent more requirements that you have to do to get a licence. It’s getting larger all the time. Our business is in good standing. Our licence and permits are all up to date. We comply to a rather large amount of daily regulatory oversight — which is all in place, I must say, for the good of the public.

Someone — I think it was Cordy — talked about alignment with the federal system. Well, we are in alignment with the federal system when it comes to CFIA requirements on the Animal Health Act. We’ve got SRM CCIA tags for traceability, PigTrace and the Sheep Federation. We’ve got humane slaughter handling and transportation. All these things are monitored by our inspection system. If we’re out of line, we get a warning, or we get, maybe, a noncompliance. But if it’s on the animal welfare side, it goes to the SPCA. We don’t want the SPCA around. It’s a pretty big club to have over your head.

Our B.C. meat inspection system also mirrors the Canadian food inspection system Manual of Procedures, the MOP. Also, we’re in alignment with the B.C. abattoir code.

The only thing that’s missing to be more in alignment with the federal system is having a full FSEP, HACCP program, which you can’t have unless you have a federal registration number. We have food safety plants, and we don’t have any E. coli testing like the federal does.

I can tell you, because I’ve operated a federal plant before, that it is a very, very…. You think this is a burden? You know, we have a stack of regulations, provincially, like this. The federal is like this. Samples for E. coli, per lot, are $360 each. So small-scale federal doesn’t work. You need large numbers of animals to run through.

With all these requirements that we have in the provincial system mirroring the federal system, we have what you would call a system that the world envies. Since I’ve been travelling a bit, I know this. We have exceptional animal health across Canada. We have safe, quality, disease-free meat available to all Canadians and to export. That’s critical, because what we do is that we produce products that are disease-free, particularly of zoonotics.

The last 25 years our provincial and federal systems have been the mop-up of foreign animal diseases, zoonotic diseases. The federal government spent probably 40 years going through their herd health program, where they went through and blood-tested everything, cleaned it all up. In about ’95, they dropped the program and turned it…. Basically, all the main disease detection was done through ante- and postmortem inspection, which is the key to the quality of all our meat and the safety of our meat.

[10:00 a.m.]

I’m not going to get into the issues about Ds and Es, because I think you know how I think about that. Certainly, all the ministers I’ve met recently know exactly. We don’t even discuss it because we’ve had that hash-out on there. I think Wilma talked about the C licence. That was used to get people transitioned, over time, to become A’s and B’s. Maybe it might be time to enact that again and get D’s and E’s to move towards that.

As you met Jacques Campbell yesterday, on her presentation…. She is very, very small. She is looking at about a maximum of 35 units, and a D licence is 25. Yet she is able to manage and operate a small, inspected plant. It’s not pristine; it’s not perfect. But it’s sanitary and functional, and an inspector in the meat inspection system was willing to work with them to make that work.

As your Hansard says, Gavin Last said that there’s no problem. If you need inspection, we can provide it. They’ve been exceptionally flexible about getting people into the business and wanting to see everything inspected. I’d just like to add that.

Also, we talk a lot about capacity. As you can see, I gave a little bit of a handout there of what we have to do. I’ve also given a sort of lineal spreadsheet there of all the different things, the regulatory requirements, we need on a daily basis. As Felix said, none of us like regulations. But if you want to do this business, you just get in the mode, and you just do them. Every food safety thing that we do…. It’s a manufacturing process. It’s just what we do. We set it up, and we just work it through. If you need to grease your truck every day, you grease your truck every day. It’s a cost, but in the end, the outcome is a longer-lasting truck.

On the issue of capacity, the main thing is that with all these things — you can see the regulatory requirements and the investment involved — you need year-round work. You need to have trained employees. When we talk about a training program, we can train people all we want, but to get these people up to speed and become masters at what they do…. We’re looking at five years to get them up to speed. We can train them in nine months, but the skill level doesn’t get to where they’re productive people. It takes time. Much the same as a plumber or a welder, it takes time to take on those skills and learn those skills. Those things need to be understood.

It’s complicated, but we’re a long ways away. Even if we had a place started today to do a masters program, the industry is not ready for a masters program. You can teach him all you want and send him off to the field. What’s he going to learn? He’s going to learn what the guy did, what most guys are doing. But we’re not into the skill level that we’re talking about in a masters program. We need to upgrade all the plants at the same time, too, so they can teach the skills that are being taught at school. Those are all important things to consider.

Again, back to the capacity. On the capacity issue, we work hard for four months. We have eight months of slack time. You can’t keep good people. They go back to the logging industry, or they take another job or move out of the country. It’s really important to understand that there’s plenty of capacity. As we speak today, there’s a conference call with Gavin Last. We’ve got funding to do a provincewide capacity issue so that we can find out what the capacity is and so that you guys can know how much capacity is out there and how we use it.

Furthermore, I’d like to offer…. The B.C. association would like to present to you a compressed brief on how all these parts of the whole inspection system — what’s required — integrate into the system and how important ante- and postmortem inspection is.

R. Leonard (Chair): Thank you very much. I appreciate your presentation. This is pretty dizzying.

D. Fernie: I know. That’s why we didn’t put another one in there.

R. Leonard (Chair): Do we have any questions for David?

M. Morris: Talking about the capacity issues, I look at the Cargill plants in Alberta, in Brooks and High River and whatnot. They seem to be running all the time.

D. Fernie: They have highs and lows.

M. Morris: They have the same issues that we have in B.C. with capacity?

D. Fernie: They never lay anybody off. They may be working more overtime. As you know, being in the Interior, how the system works…. You wean your cows in the fall, and you ship your cows.

[10:05 a.m.]

There are capacity issues where the cow price is really good in October, and then, as we get into December, it declines. Then it rises again. We have this overload of cattle in the system. Those cows need to go to the feed. They have to sit on feed, so they pay less for them. Because the cow value is only…. They can only get so much for the cow meat, so they get killed later on.

We do have capacity issues federally but not in the sense that the plants shut down or slow down and lay people off.

I. Paton: Two questions. One is…. I guess, hypothetically, when we talk about inspectors, if we had enough money to say, “Okay, let’s hire 25 new inspectors in B.C.,” and they’re each making 75,000 bucks a year, would that solve some of the problems with all the D and E licences? If we had way more inspectors roaming the province checking on these Ds and Es every time they do a slaughter and a cut, would that benefit the system, or do you feel that Ds and Es should just disappear altogether?

D. Fernie: I don’t think that they should disappear. I think they should be converted. Upscale to a B or…. Most likely, the E would be a B.

I. Paton: With proper inspections, yeah.

D. Fernie: Yeah. Like it’s been said before, if you don’t have the ability to sanitize your knife, you contaminate every time you put your knife back into skin. You contaminate the product again. You need to sanitize your knife.

I. Paton: What I’m getting from…. This is our second day of meetings. You know, the Ds and Es that are 2½ or three hours away from an A and B licence facility are saying: “Well, send me an inspector. I’ll play by the rules.” But the inspectors are going: “Well, it’s too far for me to drive 2½ hours to get to a small facility to do an inspection.”

D. Fernie: Well, I mean, at Matt’s plant, I think it was a two-hour drive, and I’m not too sure what Felix’s drive is.

F. Schellenberg: Depends how fast you drive.

D. Fernie: On the west Chilcotin road, you can drive very fast.

My personal view is, as an association and in my view, we’ve accepted Ds and Es in remote areas, okay? We understand that they’re not viable. I’m just saying that if they become viable, they need to upscale. I mean, you’ve got 22 or 27 Es in the Kootenays down there.

I’m sure that there’s probably viability for an A or B plant down there. Those kinds of things need to be looked at. I mean, when you get enough plants that are Es and maybe some Ds in the area, you really need to say, “Okay, time to get together and build something,” and not continually add more Ds and Es to that.

D. Barnett: Thank you for your presentation. As you know, one of the issues we’ve had here for a long time is distance. For people to basically put their animals in a trailer and travel two, three, four hours is not feasible. It’s hard on the animal, and of course, people get frustrated and they sell out and there’s no more…. Your capacity for slaughtering and cutting and processing disappears.

We now have nothing in the South Cariboo again, as you know. Of course, many ranchers down there — I’ve met with many people with not just cattle but sheep, pigs, you name it — are basically selling out. So when I listen to the abattoir association say, “We don’t really think that Ds and Es should be out there….” How do you think that we can fix the issue of not having any ability to keep these small-time ranchers, or whatever you call them, in business if they cannot get their slaughtering done?

D. Fernie: Well, essentially, if we go to a D and E, the ranchers become butchers, right? If we went that way, they would have to become processors as well, because we don’t have the capacity to go with a cut-and-wrap beyond that. So really, if there’s enough of them, they should combine their effort and build a small A or B facility to take care of all their processing needs in the South Cariboo.

[10:10 a.m.]

For example, just recently a new plant, a B plant in Sumas, was being constructed. They used to use Johnston Packers, and they shipped their meat to a cut-and-wrap retail place. Then, all of a sudden, when they get the B built, and they’re starting to operate…. No sooner does that happen, when the cut-and-wrap says: “Oh, we don’t want to do it anymore.” So now they have to make themselves an A.

Long-term thinking to create opportunity in your community is that instead of having nine or ten Ds or Es down there, put it all together and build a proper facility, to where they can actually build some capacity down there.

D. Barnett: If I could just add to that. We tried that as a co-op, and of course, because of the design and the rules and regulations, millions of dollars for local people to put into a co-op just didn’t work. If they just used slaughtering but not processing in these Ds and Es, do you feel that with a good inspection, to the association, they would feel comfortable with that?

D. Fernie: No, I think that you’ve got to stick with the policy of a couple of hours away from an A and B. I think that if you have that many people down there, the cost of building nine E licences down there is more than it would cost to build a B licence to do all the work and have it inspected. It would be fully inspected. You wouldn’t have any complications with killing outside and weather and flies. It would all be enclosed and chilled, and they could be sent to Rob down there to be processed.

R. Leonard (Chair): Are there any more questions?

Thank you very much for your presentation. We look forward to your — what did you call it? — compressed submission.

D. Fernie: Yeah. If you’re interested, we will do it. We’ll travel to Victoria to do it for you — or wherever you want to meet.

R. Leonard (Chair): Sure. Absolutely.

We have one more presenter on the list: Roma Tingle, from Glenbirnam Farm.

Thank you for coming today.

GLENBIRNAM FARM

R. Tingle: You’re welcome.

Ladies and gentlemen of the committee, good morning. My name is Roma Tingle, and I operate a farm in partnership with my husband, Jim, in Prince George. I would like to comment on the challenges faced by smaller farm and ranch operations with the processing of their livestock. We have a small, purebred beef operation and a commercial flock of sheep, and we direct-market most of our lamb locally.

I will speak mostly with regard to our market lamb production. We are very fortunate to have an excellent class A abattoir a very short haul from our farm, but even this has challenges for processing our animals. One of the most frustrating things is getting space at the abattoir at the most optimal time to market our lamb. Also, we are forced to accept times for processing when lambs may not be at their optimum weight, which increases processing fees.

Recently I participated in our provincial sheep association seminars, where we had a speaker from the University of Guelph give a talk on raising market lambs. He described optimal weeks of feeding and feed nutrition to achieve market weight at the most timely and cost-effective way. Once the lamb has reached that benchmark, not only does it lose quality, but it costs more to maintain, and the meat quality deteriorates. Not having the ability to have the lambs processed at their optimal weight significantly restricts the ability to expand the flock.

In addition, lack of abattoir capacity forces us to consider alternate marketing strategies, including hauling the lambs to auction in Alberta. This reduces the benefit to the B.C. economy and the support to local feed and equipment suppliers, in addition to the support to B.C. abattoirs.

The demand for lamb in B.C. and, for that matter, in Canada exceeds current production. Lamb is being imported when we have the ability to significantly meet the market if the infrastructure is there to support and sustain the sheep industry. It is ironic that there are so many rules and restrictions on the industry at a time when there is such a demand for locally grown and produced product.

[10:15 a.m.]

The proposed CFIA regulation changes on traceability will hamstring small ruminant producers. For example, having to report deaths within seven days is not feasible. Losses by predators may not be found until animals are brought in at fall gathering. Also, the cost of all the recording is prohibitive. Many sheep have multiple births, so the cost of tagging offspring of a ewe is actually more expensive than that of a cow, not to mention the hours needed to record all the births.

Use of technology to expedite this is not as easy as it sounds. Even with assistance to purchase appropriate equipment, often there is incompatibility with hardware and software programs. Also, as technology changes, there is a need to upgrade and change the equipment, incurring additional expense, which may not be supported. In addition to this, despite the attempts to provide small phone apps and recording equipment, there are still a number of producers who do not have good Internet service, cell phone service or are reasonably competent in computer use.

There are also other issues around language and producers living totally off the grid. I recently had to assist a new producer in the area who spoke very limited English and had no knowledge of regulations around processing of their animals should they wish to sell their meat.

The proposed changes in reporting movement of animals will further impede the industry. Lambs being raised for meat will be processed within a few months, and the requirements for receivers reporting animals will be onerous for those buying short-term feeder lambs, since they will have to have a PID, a premises identification number, to report lambs coming onto their premises.

Few sheep producers have PIDs, since they have been voluntary in B.C. PIDs for sheep have not been considered to be necessary, since there are limited approved indicators and places to purchase them, so the locations of the tag purchasers are easily accessed in an emergency. Fines for any non-compliance of the regulations will drive smaller operations out of business.

Some of the general concerns around local meat production and inspection include

(1) access to an inspected facility within approved limits of transport times;

(2) access to a processing facility at optimal waits;

(3) lack of regular inspection of licensed facilities, particularly on-farm operations;

(4) lack of surveillance of animals slaughtered and meat sold without inspection;

(5) the need for more protection for producers being harassed to allow on-farm slaughter by persons willing to circumvent the legal requirements;

(6) assistance for abattoirs to find and be able to retain skilled help;

(7) lack of federal facilities in B.C. to allow sales to other provinces or internationally;

(8) lack of assistance to communicate to sheep owners who are not aware of tagging requirements and are not members of sheep associations;

(9) lack of assistance for producers who have to haul livestock large distances to processing facilities and then have to return to pick up their meat;

(10) uninspected meat being sold at farmers markets and other outlets in areas where there is an inspected facility, undercutting local producers.

We are in support of being able to sell our meat products processed in an inspected, licensed facility, with the confidence that we are presenting a quality product to our customers. But unless all meat produced is treated the same way, any slippage in the system reflects badly on all producers and is a severe detriment to the expansion of the sheep industry in B.C.

R. Leonard (Chair): Thank you very much, Roma.

Do we have any questions for our sheep farmer and rancher?

M. Morris: What’s our capacity in B.C. for lambs? Do you know how many head we produce every year and slaughter? Just roughly?

R. Tingle: You know, I get that question all the time. It’s impossible to be able to answer it accurately. I can tell you roughly, by Stats Canada’s figures, how many sheep producers there are in B.C., that kind of thing, but to come to nail it down, we can’t really know, because there are so many different ways that they are being handled and processed. We don’t get a lot of feedlots, for example, raising lambs. There are small ones. A few people do a little bit. But really, there is no way to accurately answer that, because there’s such a huge underground economy with small ruminants.

[10:20 a.m.]

J. Tegart (Deputy Chair): Thank you for your presentation. I find it interesting, as we hear more, particularly from someone like me who is not a farmer…. I certainly live in an area where there’s lots of beef and cattle. But to hear the….

The public’s perception is that whatever is being sold is safe. If I buy at a farmers market, that makes it extra safe, because I know you’re the farmer, and you would never sell me anything that wasn’t safe. So it’s about perception out there.

What we’re trying to do is make sure that everything is safe, right? But when we sell our food…. If I can buy it within 100 miles, I feel much more confident that I know the culture in which it’s grown and whatever. As we move forward, I’m learning more and more about: my perception is a little off.

How do we keep the confidence in the industry in a way that doesn’t make it impossible to be in the industry?

R. Tingle: That’s exactly why I’m here, because we do go to a very small farmers market. The people do get to know you, and there is that trust. It’s a value chain based on trust, really, and that’s a good thing. But unfortunately, if we are abiding by all the rules…. We have our meat processed in a licensed facility. We know it’s a safe, quality product, and most of the people that we sell it to know that too. But there are people who are coming in with uninspected meat that can undercut us and sell at those same types of markets. We have no control over that. We have no protection over that, as well, which puts us….

It costs us more to process, obviously, because we’re sending it to a facility. We have to take it there — all the added costs to being able to use a process-licensed facility. But we have absolutely no protection.

We had one fairly large sheep producer come in from an outlying area and sell his lamb $3 a pound below what we were selling it for.

R. Leonard (Chair): I have a question for you. The Ds and Es that are uninspected — they have to be labelled as such, I believe. Okay. Respond to that, please. I don’t even have to ask the question, obviously.

R. Tingle: It’s pretty aggravating, because yes, sure, they’ll have an uninspected stamp or whatever it is on their package of meat. Ours is inspected, and it’s got the stamp of the abattoir on it. But they can charge less because they don’t have the amount of money and time into producing the inspected product.

R. Leonard (Chair): Do you think, in terms of protections, it would be helpful if there was more education and awareness-raising to the general public about the difference between inspected and non-inspected meats?

R. Tingle: It might help. There is a huge underground economy with small ruminants, and we know it goes on. We know that there are people that will buy lambs up at auction and take them and slaughter them and sell the meat with nothing. They’re not even Ds and Es or anything else. They’re just totally flying under the radar.

Those are some of the things that as producers, especially smaller-based ones…. Your margins aren’t that big. You want to keep producing a good product. But to be in competition with that kind of thing…. That, healthwise, is a really dangerous thing going on.

I. Paton: Madam Chair, could I ask a question through to Dave, from Rodear, if we’re at the end here?

R. Leonard (Chair): If we can bring him up to the microphone, then. Is it relating to Roma’s presentation as well?

I. Paton: No. We can finish up with Roma, then.

[10:25 a.m.]

D. Barnett: I have a question for Roma.

Thank you very much for your presentation. Where I live, I know there’s a lot of uninspected lamb that is out there. How negative of an impact do you think it really has on your industry?

R. Tingle: It’s big. It has a huge negative impact. I didn’t say too much about what other hats I wear. Past president of the B.C. sheep association — currently the treasurer, a director on their board. I’m also a member of the national Canadian wool growers, on their executive. I hear about a lot of things and have a lot of experiences over what’s going on in the industry — not just in B.C. but also across Canada.

Yeah, it does impact. There’s no question.

R. Leonard (Chair): Well, thank you very much. I appreciate your presentation and answering all of our questions.

Now Ian has a question for David Fernie, so we’ve brought him back up to the mike.

RODEAR CATTLE CO.

I. Paton: Thank you. Dave, earlier you mentioned E. coli. Do the provincial inspectors randomly draw blood before an animal is killed to test for brucellosis or E. coli or anything like that? And, if not provincially, do they do it at the federally inspected facilities?

D. Fernie: Okay. We’ve got to step back to probably ’95-96. For all bovine, blood was drawn over a two-year-old animal at slaughter and also all through all the auction markets.

You probably remember that, where the CFIA — or at that time, Ag Canada vets — were running to the chute, taking brucellosis and tuberculosis blood samples. We stopped doing that right around ’95-96. It might’ve run a little bit longer.

When we had some tuberculosis in 2000, they started testing again regionally. But, for E. coli, E. coli is fecal contamination, usually from….

I. Paton: Yeah, sorry. It’s not blood-borne.

D. Fernie: Yeah, it’s not blood-borne. No, we don’t do that, but those of us that are doing larger volume are doing carcass intervention and usually using lactic acid, and maybe twice — maybe citric acid in another process, as well, for carcass intervention.

Just to add, it’s called N60 testing federally. It’s based on a skid or a tote of meat, and they do 60 random samples, usually on a rod that goes through. It’s a sample of 226 grams, and there are 60 of them per sample.

I. Paton: One more quick question. Knock wood, there’s a rare, rare case of mad cow. If you saw a trembling animal come into your plant, what would be your first move? Who would you call?

D. Fernie: This is part of what I would present to you. That’s when we talked about ante- and postmortem inspection. Ante is what the inspector is trained to do. Antemortem inspection is strictly for the visual inspection of all live animals. You’re looking for fever, ears dropped, nasal discharge, stumbling walk for BSE. All of those things are done by the inspector.

Also, our corral staff often will pick up these things and make note and suggest to the inspector: “You better take a look at that one in pen number, what’s-his-face. Down the road, he’s brought in something that is a little suspect.”

All that is done in the ante part. It picks up a lot of things, not just BSE. But yeah, that’s what we would do.

R. Leonard (Chair): Thank you both for coming and answering further questions.

Now we have an opportunity, if anybody hasn’t spoken yet, where we open the floor to people who want to come and maybe speak for five minutes, if they have something they’d like to add. Please come up to the mikes, and let us know your name so we can get it right for the record.

JIM PETER

J. Peter: My name is Jim Peter, and I’m basically a small farmer. We belong to 4-H too.

[10:30 a.m.]

Our problem is that society has forced us farmers to alternate our farming. Normally, when a baby is born, there’s green grass for it, and it gets prime milk. Now we’re forced, in the pork industry, to calve out in January, to have them ready to be sold by April.

That all ends up…. They have to book a year and a half to get their beef slaughtered. People are buying beef…. Or have to order to be slaughtered before they’re buying it. You understand what I mean?

Now, there are not enough butcher houses around. Like they’re saying, there’s a big demand at a certain time. Everybody is forcing…. These abattoirs can’t handle it.

Then people are forced to butcher their own. Now, the pork industry is going downhill, because a lot of people just can’t have the time to book their animals in. You’ve got to phone in a year in advance. You don’t even have the animal yet. If your weight is not correct that you want, you have to butcher your animal prematurely, so you’re only getting half of the produce that you spent all summer trying to build up.

The only way that we can do this is for animals to be born and raised at different times. You end up butchering twice a year. You’re butchering in the spring, and you’re butchering in the fall. A lot of people buy their animals from us, and they raise them and butcher them in the fall. Nobody butchers in the spring, really. The majority is always in the fall.

That is a problem. That is why a lot of people are butchering their own and selling their own meat, because they raised this animal. What are you going to do with it? Chuck it away, because you can’t bring it to the abattoir?

Now, the pork industry right now is going downhill. I could have sold 200, 300 piglets this year. I don’t have them. Demand is there. Why can’t we eat our own produce instead of buying American stuff? We can raise just as good animals here, if not better, than America or Alberta beef or pork or chicken or whatever.

We’re teaching our young kids in 4-H how to raise all these animals, but there’s no market for it. Like horses, for instance. We can’t get any horses butchered around here. It’s not even worth trailering them. So what do the people do? Turn them loose. If we had more abattoirs, then we can round up some of these animals and get them processed.

Now, if more and more horses and animals get turned loose, the forestry and the government is just going to run out and shoot them all — boom, boom, boom. They’ve done it in the past in Brittany Triangle.

What a lot of us will do, too, is round up these horses and then bring them to market, so at least we salvage them and we keep the population down so they’re not causing problems for the ranchers. They’re not causing problems for the ground and stuff. Right now there’s probably about 25 to 30 percent of animals turned loose — horses, for example.

If you have a young foal, you won’t get 50 bucks for it. You can’t even bring it to an auction. We don’t even have a horse auction in town anymore. We don’t have a small animals auction in town, so you can’t sell your animal. The next thing is to butcher it.

I’m even thinking about butchering my own horses. It’s meat. It’s raised proper. It’s raised by me. I know it doesn’t have diseases. I keep my herd small, and if you keep your herd small, you minimize the chances of diseases and stuff. The bigger you get, the more diseases you get.

We need more abattoirs in B.C. That’s the bottom line. Greenpeace keeps burning them in Alberta. That ain’t helping us either, because the majority of the stuff goes to Alberta. All these big buyers and stuff. They all buy cattle and ship them all to Alberta to be butchered. The cattle sold in an auction in Williams Lake, the majority of them…. How many head get butchered in B.C.? The majority go to Alberta.

We need more abattoirs, and we have to work with the abattoirs so they can keep going year-round, because they can’t operate on a half-a-year’s business either.

We need more trained people in here and more abattoirs. Otherwise, I might as well pack up farming too. I have the customers to buy them, but my customers have no place to get them butchered. A lot of my customers don’t want to butcher. They don’t want to kill the cute little bunny. They don’t want to kill Porky the pig. It takes a certain kind of people in order to process the animals. You have to be in the right state of mind. It takes certain trained people to kill these animals for food. And food we need.

We go to the grocery store. How many American products are in the grocery store? How many B.C. products are in the grocery store? Same with our fruit. How much American fruit is bought right now — cucumbers, all that kind of stuff?

[10:35 a.m.]

If we farmers can’t sell our products and have our customers buy our young stuff, then we might as well just pack it in too and just buy all from America or Alberta. We need more abattoirs, and we need more trained staff. It’s simple.

R. Leonard (Chair): Okay. Thank you very much.

Does anybody have any questions for Mr. Peter?

All right. Thank you very much. We appreciate you coming up and giving us your thoughts.

Are there any other folks who’d like to step up and say a few words? No.

Okay, then I will say thank you to everyone for coming out today. For those of you who’ve travelled long distances, we really appreciate you taking the time and effort to come and help inform us in our work. It’ll be the fall when we have our report out. Keep in touch with us on line to see how we’re faring.

Thank you very much. I’ll now adjourn the meeting.

The committee adjourned at 10:36 a.m.