The committee met at 10:05 a.m.

[R. Leonard in the chair.]

R. Leonard (Chair): Thank you, all, for making the time to come here for this meeting. I would like to welcome our presenters today from the Interior Health Authority and the Vancouver Coastal Health Authority — Kevin Touchet and Darren Molder.

Let’s get at it. I’ll turn it over to you to make your presentations. Hopefully, you’ll be able to…. We’ll save questions for after, I think, probably.

K. Touchet: Sure, that’s fine. I don’t have too much concern. If there’s some urgent issue that needs to be clarified, that’s fine.

R. Leonard (Chair): Okay.

Briefing by Regional Health Authorities

K. Touchet: Thank you for the opportunity to present on our health authority staff roles and some thoughts on the meat….

R. Leonard (Chair): Hang on a sec. It’s Kevin who’s speaking.

K. Touchet: That’s right, yes. Thank you. We will be going back and forth, so we’ll try and pause in between.

Again, thank you for allowing us to present our positions on health authority roles and some opinions from the staff in the meat inspection discussion paper. As mentioned, my name is Kevin Touchet. I’m the manager of environmental health with Interior Health. I’m based in Kamloops. I’ve been in the field for about 30 years but more directly in the meat inspection program for the last several years. So I’ve had a bit of experience with the meat program directly.

D. Molder: I’m Darren Molder. I’m a senior environmental health officer for Vancouver Coastal Health, and I’m based out of the Sechelt health unit. I supervise areas of the coastal and rural parts of VCH. I’ve been involved with the meat inspection program, class D and Es, for ten years, right from where it started — involved in teaching the course, inspecting, reviewing the food safety plans, the licensing process, etc. I’ve seen the program unfold right from the ground floor.

I’ve been with Coastal Health for about 14 years now, so I can offer what the perspective is from the field, from the health authority side of things.

K. Touchet: We’ll provide some details from the perspective of both health authorities as we go through our material today. There are some differences in the approaches and some differences of opinions in terms of how we should proceed or how some things are done currently.

I’ll start off by briefly discussing the licensing process, focusing on the D and E licensing. Much of our roles are front loaded, so we put a lot of effort up front to get things set up.

We often receive inquiries about the approval process and provide information about the process and contact information for Ministry of Agriculture as needed. Right up front, we’ve got both agencies involved. For the class Es, we work with the Ministry of Agriculture staff and wait for their recommendations from the feasibility study reviews that they do before we proceed with any of the next steps.

For eligible clients for the Ds and Es, it’s necessary for these clients to complete the SlaughterSafe training, complete the food safety plan and an application for the licence for the EHO to review. Now, the EHO does set up the logistics with the client to get the SlaughterSafe course set up and the on-site visits, so there’s a bit of upfront work in that area as well.

From there, the EHO would perform on-site farm assessment, looking at the facility amenities, the water supply and general site conditions, to assess that location. Once they’ve gone through this process, and upon successful completion of all the paperwork and the information’s provided, the licence is issued with applicable conditions.

The conditions are quite standard for most of the licences that are issues, but there are also some very specific conditions that are applied for that specific operation. It might be limited to a specific species or a certain time frame, for example, that they may be restricted to.

[10:10 a.m.]

D. Molder: I guess the bigger difference in the rural areas of Vancouver Coastal Health is that we have no class A or B slaughter facilities. We are what they call one of the designated areas. That means there are no class D restrictions — no restriction on the class D licences, no feasibility studies involved, minimal involvement with the Ministry of Agriculture. So it’s a fair bit easier to initiate a licence application in the rural areas of Coastal Health.

K. Touchet: I’ll move on to routine inspection for the slaughter establishments now. In Interior Health, the inspection frequencies are set on the basis of a risk assessment that’s completed by the environmental health officer or EHO, as we often call them. This is done after the licensing process is underway. The inspection frequencies will be determined by that risk assessment.

Just for curiosity, if you are interested, we’ve got about 80 percent that are assessed at low risk and about 20 percent that are at moderate. There are none that are high risk. And we just have those three risk categories.

The inspection frequencies are set currently at once per five years for the lower risk, once per three years for moderate risk and once a year for the highest risk. Of course, we don’t have any at this point right now. It’s less often than you might expect for, say, a restaurant or other food facilities, a food processor. It’s based on that risk that we’ve perceived.

Those types of facilities — restaurants, for example — are generally ranging from once a year for the low risk up to about three times a year for the higher risk facilities. It’s the same risk assessment that’s used for all of those food facilities to determine that.

D. Molder: Yes. And very similar in Vancouver Coastal Health. We try for consistency across the food safety programs from health authority to health authority. So yes, we follow a very similar risk-based inspection frequency for Coastal Health. At present, all of our class D and Es are set at low risk, so that’s one inspection every five years.

I. Paton: Can we do questions while we’re doing this?

R. Leonard (Chair): Yes. They said they’re open for it. So go ahead, Ian.

I. Paton: Thank you. You’re saying no D and Es in Vancouver Coastal Health area. But what about…?

D. Molder: Just to clarify, no class A and Bs.

I. Paton: Sorry. That’s what you meant — class A and B. So where does Meadow Valley Meats come in, in Pitt Meadows and AGM meats in Cloverdale and then the ones in Chilliwack? That would be Fraser Health?

D. Molder: That sounds like Fraser Health, yes.

I. Paton: Okay. But they’re not represented here today.

D. Molder: Correct.

I. Paton: Okay. Fine.

N. Simons: Can I just ask a question about the risk levels? Is the risk level based on previous experience? Or is there something physical about the location that would make it higher or lower risk? Or is it just operator commitment or something?

K. Touchet: I can speak to Interior Health specifically. The risk assessment is based on the nature of the food itself — is it a high-risk food; is it a lower-risk food? — the type of processing that is done, how many steps are included in the process. Again, this is not very significant in terms of a class D or E. You’ve got the carcass there, and there’s no further processing on site. Whereas in a restaurant, there’s a lot more handling, a lot more stages or steps where hazards can be introduced or where hazards cannot be eliminated, based on their handling processes. That’s an important part.

We also do include a little bit on the operator’s attitude and previous compliance history and those types of thing. The risk assessment is based on a number of models that are out there, used by other agencies.

D. Molder: So it’s a real combination of all those factors — operators, equipment, type of food and steps involved.

R. Leonard (Chair): Before we continue, I believe that’s Donna on the line.

Hi, Donna.

D. Barnett: Morning.

K. Touchet: Good morning, Donna. Kevin Touchet from Interior Health.

D. Molder: Good morning. It’s Darren Molder from Vancouver Coastal Health.

K. Touchet: Any further questions before I jump back in?

R. Leonard (Chair): No. Go ahead.

K. Touchet: I’ll touch on the scope of the EHO role in the general program. Both in Interior Health and in rural parts of Vancouver Coastal Health, the EHOs are considered generalists, meaning that they have inspection duties over a wide variety of programs. In the Interior, we have tried to specialize the work to some extent but found that having EHOs focus their activities on meat inspection some of the time but…. There’s still lots of other work around, so they don’t always get to be just exclusively meat inspection. There are other responsibilities that they take care of.

Just to expand on the other programs that are included for the generalist EHOs, it’s all types of food premises. We’ve got food service, food service establishments — restaurants, delis, those types of things — food stores and food processors.

[10:15 a.m.]

Included in the food processors we’ve got 13 class A meat processing facilities. They’re looking at the facility from the first drip cooler onwards. There are 120 other meat-processing operations. These are cut-and-wrap shops, butcher shops and other processes that are included.

Other work that they do also includes inspection of independent water systems and monitoring of those; recreational water — pools and hot tubs and, in some areas, beaches in places like the Okanagan, so that might be a significant part; personal service establishments — tattoo parlours, piercing places and those types of things; industrial camps.

There are also other program activities that they would work on: support for communicable disease programs — so enteric and zoonotic diseases that may require follow-up work. Investigations of various types of complaints, all sorts of different types of complaints that they receive: sewage system failures, for example, housing issues and many complaints that come in related to those regulated facilities that they deal with.

Also, administrative work related to many facilities. Business licence referrals, for example, they’re going to be reviewing and responding. So there’s a fair bit of work there.

In Interior Health, we have 33 generalist EHOs tasked overall with inspection of over 6,500 food facilities. This doesn’t include the temporary food permits or temporary markets that they also have a role in. And 385 independent water systems. These are not the community water systems; we have other staff for that. They’re going to be inspecting water systems that may be related to those stand-alone restaurants or stand-alone food facilities. And 1,200 recreational water facilities, 275 higher-risk personal service establishments and a smaller number of industrial camps.

The typical caseload is about 250 to 300 facilities per environmental health officer, excluding complaint follow-ups and some of the demand work that they do — things like disease investigations, temporary market permits and those types of things. The variability for the assigned work is based mainly on the travel, but it will also vary depending on if they’re in a larger centre versus a much more rural centre. So there’s some variability between inspector to inspector.

D. Molder: In Vancouver Coastal Health, just the rural areas I’ll speak to, because that’s where classes D and E are based out of. Yes, we are generalists as well. It’s essential to have the EHO to be able to cover all the programs that Kevin just listed off there. It’s a lot of variety. They handle everything, even including big and small water systems and compliance of the Drinking Water Protection Act.

In Vancouver Coastal Health, in rural and coastal areas, there are ten EHOs in total. Five of those are specialists in the meat-licensing program. That’s really one of the only specialties that you take on. Other than that, you are a generalist EHO and drinking water officer, and able to handle a wide variety of issues that come up.

We have that model because of coverage. Through the summer, when one person is on vacation, it’s important to have highly competent EHOs to fill in and cover for that person when they are away.

All the programs that Kevin just went through…. We have all those same programs as well, and that keys off of provincial legislation that requires us to inspect those types of regulated facilities.

R. Leonard (Chair): Can I just clarify that you said you had five specialists around meat? Is that what you said?

D. Molder: Of the ten EHOs that we have in the rural areas of Coastal Health, five of those have the additional meat program on their duty list.

R. Leonard (Chair): So five don’t?

D. Molder: Five don’t. Yeah.

R. Leonard (Chair): Okay. But they’re also generalists.

D. Molder: They’re very much generalists. Yeah, every one. All ten are generalists.

R. Leonard (Chair): Gotcha. Thank you.

K. Touchet: I want to touch on the nature of the slaughter facility inspections from our perspective. It’s a little bit different. It’s worth noting that it’s kind of a different inspection than the Ministry of Agriculture inspectors may perform.

Our inspection does focus somewhat on infrastructure, temperature maintenance, recordkeeping and the like, but there’s little activity or inspection on the animal itself. There’s no antemortem or postmortem inspection. There’s no observation of the slaughter itself. They’re not on site during the slaughter, so there’s no observing of the gutting process or evisceration, hide removal, SRM handling or any of that kind of stuff.

Again, the EHOs are not typically on site when the slaughter is occurring. It’s more about the physical facility, the records, temperature maintenance and those types of things.

D. Molder: It’s worth noting that the inspection criteria and even the inspection checklist are taken right out of the provincial SlaughterSafe manual. In terms of the items that are looked at, the criteria that will be looked at, that is, essentially, an established inspection checklist that’s right in the SlaughterSafe manual.

[10:20 a.m.]

Every applicant or every licensee knows the requirements and knows the types of things that will be looked at during a routine inspection or even the initial licensing inspection.

K. Touchet: I’ll move on to some of the resources that the EHOs have available. They do rely on many of the resources developed. Darren mentioned the SlaughterSafe course materials. A facilitator’s guide, for example, is included as well. Some other documents that have been developed or are used, including the code of practice, would be part of that process to use as a resource. The Ministry of Agriculture website and the health authorities websites will have some information there as well.

Again, we talked about that up front — trying to help the operators or potential operators with some information. Those are certainly some of the resources that are used to guide those prospective licensees in their early stages.

When they’re considering the business as they proceed through those steps, we’re hoping that information will help them with their decision-making process. In some cases, I think we do get a lot of inquiries where people choose not to proceed with the process. Not all of the calls we get are going to turn into somebody who’s applying for a licence.

There are also some specific resources that have been developed to assist with operations. We found that there may be some technical guidance that’s required in some areas, so we developed a meat transport guideline for taking meat products from the slaughter facilities to, say, a cut-and-wrap shop — some tips on how to protect the product during those times.

The intent is to allow the licensees a good understanding of the requirements right up front, before they start their operations.

D. Molder: At Vancouver Coastal Health, just like Interior Health, we have extensive use of the resources provided by the ministry. Some of the gaps in resources that we’ve become aware of are being able to learn about safe slaughter technique as well as animal health assessments. Those are two gaps that we’ve become aware of just in seeing the licensing program roll out over the last ten years.

K. Touchet: One of the roles, of course, for the environmental health officer is helping the operator facility to gain compliance or to move them into compliance. Of course, EHOs have a statutory authority granted to them and base their decisions on good judgment, assessment of available evidence and their understanding of administrative fairness.

There are a number of different tools available for EHOs. Any decisions to proceed with enforcement actions are done only after voluntary compliance processes are failing, with the exception of if it’s a significant, immediate health threat. Then a more robust response is going to be required. But generally, it’s a progressive nature through steps to gain the compliance of the operator.

D. Molder: In VCH, we call the process progressive compliance. That really embodies all the principles of administrative fairness. Education is used first and efforts to encourage compliance initially. Then there are enforcement tools at the end of the day, if that’s required after other avenues have been exhausted.

K. Touchet: To summarize, in some case…. We’ve got an effort to strike a balance, really. That’s what we’re looking at. And historically, while food safety has been a strong focus for our programs, we recognize that the issue of food security is also important. It’s an important determinant of health, so it’s always in the back of our minds. Improving food security, though, should not be done at the expense of food safety.

Anything to add on that, Darren?

D. Molder: Yeah. It’s a balance. At the end of our background, we provided some pros and cons to the different potential policy directions that could be chosen. That just gives you a sense of the factors to consider in proceeding with one of those directions. We’ll elaborate on that soon.

N. Simons: Can I ask a question?

R. Leonard (Chair): Yes, Nicholas.

N. Simons: The animal health issue — the gaps. I think that you identified some resource gaps. That was something that we’ve heard in other places as well. You know, the As and Bs have people there checking. Are there potential solutions to that, if it’s a gap that needs bridging?

D. Molder: A potential solution to that? Well, a big challenge to that is that we are not at the slaughter process for the class Ds and Es when it’s occurring. EHOs are not there. EHOs are not veterinarians. There’s that.

[10:25 a.m.]

Really, the licensee has to fill out some criteria for how they assess the animal health before and after. They write up that criteria in the food safety plan, and if there’s a question, they are encouraged to call the 1-800 vet line in Abbotsford and do a consult with a vet on the phone. Apparently, it’s quite a responsive 1-800 phone number. They’ll even receive a photograph taken of whatever the abnormality is of the animal, and they will provide veterinary advice over the telephone.

N. Simons: Would it be possible to get some statistics on the usage of that 1-800 line, just to see? It would be interesting for us to know if it encourages farmers or if it’s something that they avoid. Just curious.

J. Tegart (Deputy Chair): Just a couple of comments. Thank you very much for your presentation today. One of the things that we are hearing is coordination between the two ministries. And you’ve identified a gap.

A couple of questions. If I’m applying for a D or E and I phone Interior Health and I get an EHO and they say that the material is on line, is there a one-stop shop for applicants, or do I have to go to Interior Health, to the Ministry of Health, to the Ministry of Agriculture?

The next part of that question is: based on how many people inquire versus how many people actually go through the process, what are the barriers that they’re facing or feel that they’re facing? Do you do stats around how many inquiries you have versus how many follow through?

The last question I have is: have we had any serious health outbreaks?

K. Touchet: Well, to answer the first question — is there one-stop shopping for all applicants? — probably not. It does vary depending on the nature of the location that they’re at.

In the class E situation, there’s the feasibility study that is led by the Ministry of Agriculture staff. We work closely with them, and we do hear from them when there’s an application being considered, and a recommendation letter is sent out as a result of that. Sometimes there are some back-and-forth questions that occur, but from the clients’ perspective, no, it’s not a one-stop shop for the class Es.

For class Ds, I would say it’s probably a little more streamlined. It sounds like there’s very little involvement with the Ministry of Agriculture, but I’ll let Darren sort that out.

D. Molder: Yeah, the class-E-potential interested applicants would simply phone one of our offices, and we’d proceed to schedule, as soon as we could, a SlaughterSafe course to get them introduced to the licensing process. That would involve giving them the manual. Essentially, the SlaughterSafe course walks them through the licensing process.

Our health authority does not collect stats on inquiries — to what you were specifically asking about — but we do sometimes start a waiting list or a list of names and telephone numbers that we collect until we get about four to six applicants. Then we proceed to offer the SlaughterSafe course.

K. Touchet: The second question was with regards to the number of inquiries versus people that proceed with the licensing process. No, in Interior, we don’t keep those stats either. I suspect that there are a lot of people that will search for information through the websites, for example, or phone other agencies, which we never hear about anyway. There’s no idea of the proportion that actually follow through.

My apologies. Your third question?

J. Tegart (Deputy Chair): It was in regard to health outbreaks.

K. Touchet: Ah, right. Health outbreaks that have been traced back to on-farm slaughter processes? None that I’m aware of, but that may or may not be part of the investigation that occurs. I would expect that it probably would be, if meat was implicated as the source. There would probably be some trace back involved with that. So to answer that, no, I don’t know of any that are related to on-farm slaughter specifically.

D. Molder: I’m not aware of any either. And we should clarify. There’s a last part of our presentation to offer here before we have too many further questions.

[10:30 a.m.]

K. Touchet: That’s fine. It’s nice to answer the questions while they come up.

R. Leonard (Chair): Please proceed.

K. Touchet: Just a few points for consideration, some pros and cons. In the development of our speaking notes and information, we found that we did have some differences of opinion as to how to proceed or some recommendations from staff. We did survey our staff and got their opinions, so we wanted to get the field perspective on this as well.

I’ll just go through some points for consideration, some pros and cons. You’ll probably note that there are some differences as we move through here.

D. Molder: Before you go on, yeah, you can look through the backgrounder document here. There are quite a few pages of opinions, and some of those are quite frank and candid opinions from EHOs in the field. We made no effort to edit those out or to pretty them up or anything. That’s just added opinions from EHOs that have been involved in the program from the field.

K. Touchet: What we did try to do is at least clean it up a little bit in terms of the categories that they’re in, so it’s a little easier to follow as you go through it. I’ve just further boiled these down a little bit more to some topic areas.

The first one I’ve got is EHOs and health authority involvement. The points here are: the EHOs are located in all areas of the province, have good food safety inspection experience, but increased demand for EHO services takes away from the other service delivery. As we’ve noted, there’s a number of different types of facilities that they do get into for service-delivery inspection work, and if they are drawn away from that, certainly there’s a reduction in service there. The other option there, of course, is increased funding for support to expand the inspection service.

The last bullet under this title is EHOs focus, which is mainly on facility-based, not on animal health as we mentioned before.

Did you want to come in here?

D. Molder: Yeah. I mean, understanding that from the year 2010, health authorities and EHOs have launched and provided inspection support for this meat program with zero extra financial resources right from the start. We did it on the side to the best that we could.

Interesting that when Kevin and I were putting together the backgrounder document, we did discover some differences of opinions and how we feel about further EHO and health authority involvement in the program.

Really, Interior Health is further along in the development of their licences — to the point, I would say, that there is a bit of a stretch on resources that you’ve experienced in Interior Health.

K. Touchet: Yeah. Thanks, Darren. I think part of it is geography as well. We cover a pretty large area, so trying to get the bodies out to the facilities and stuff….

I’ll move on to the training….

D. Molder: Just one last thing. Coastal Health has not seen that stretch of resources quite yet. So more of the points on the pro side of things in terms of EHO involvement…. That’s a little bit more from the Coastal Health perspective, because our resources have not yet been stretched to the point where it would begin to potentially impact inspection frequencies in other programs.

We tried to encapsulate that difference and just having the pros and cons listed for further EHO involvement.

K. Touchet: Moving on to training for potential licensees and for the EHOs, we’d like to see additional training options available, perhaps on-line courses, video-based courses or a correspondence course, and see centralized training options made available, I think, just for ease of access but also for consistency in the material that’s being presented.

Animal health and slaughter technique training would also be helpful for both the EHOs and the licensees. Certainly, that’s been recognized as a bit of a gap previously.

D. Molder: Yeah, those were two of the main gaps that were identified in resourcing for knowledge of both EHOs and the licensees, the operators doing the actual slaughter in the field. Those would be potential training areas for further resource development.

K. Touchet: Code of practice is another topic. Mandatory compliance with the code will improve the facility standards and make it easier for the licensee to eventually proceed to a class B licence. The downside, of course, is with code-of-practice compliance. Then there would be increased start-up costs for the on-farm slaughter operations.

D. Molder: And just be aware that existing class D and E licences…. Speaking to my area in rural Coastal Health, they would find compliance with the code of practice to be challenging if the code of practice became a code of requirements — for many of the existing class D and Es in Vancouver Coastal Health.

[10:35 a.m.]

It is an excellent document to serve as a set of requirements if there’s a licensee that wants to start moving and graduating towards a class A or B designation. It outlines the construction criteria that would be sought after if they were to entertain graduating their business, growing their business into a class A or B facility. It serves as a good outlining of those requirements.

K. Touchet: Finally, just reducing the restrictions on the D and E facilities, the expansion of areas eligible for a licence and decreasing restrictions such as travel-time ranges have potential to improve the product availability in the marketplace. However, expansion of the D and E licensing without going with ongoing inspection, as with the A and B licences, further exacerbates the inconsistencies and the negative impacts on those A and B licensees. Lesser inspection standards also may mean increased potential food safety risks.

D. Molder: If a class A or B facility does decide to go into one of these designated areas, certainly existing class D and Es would be potentially impacted, and time and resources spent by health authorities in bringing along and in licensing the class D and E licences would potentially be time wasted from the past. That’s just a resource impact. So there are pros and cons to the expansion of class D and Es that should be carefully considered.

K. Touchet: That’s all we have. Thanks for the opportunity to share the details about the meat inspection program from our perspective. We’d be happy to take any questions now.

I. Paton: We got back from a trip that we all took about two weeks ago. We hit six or seven different places, and we heard from several people in the business — abattoirs as well as farmers and ranchers. The issue that we could see, I thought quite clearly, is that the As and Bs have provincial inspection. Most of them said that they welcomed it. To have the inspector there each day was very gratifying for them — to make sure they’re doing the right thing, doing the right job and handling the cattle properly, etc.

Then we got kind of a mixed reaction from Ds and Es. The first thing I noticed was that Ds and Es said, “Well, we’re supposed to be inspected by the environmental health officer,” but your guys are busy doing all sorts of things. You listed off all the different tasks they have in the course of a week. Some of the Ds and Es said: “I haven’t seen an environmental health officer in two years, three years.” Some say: “I’ve never seen one.” At best, if they do come around, they take a look: “Okay, are your stainless steel tables clean? Is your water source good? Is your refrigerated room at the right temperature?” It’s these sorts of things. But it has absolutely nothing to do with the inspection of the meat that’s being slaughtered.

Then the guy with the E licence starts selling some of that to his neighbours down the road, and it really doesn’t help that he had clean stainless steel tables. If this is poor-quality meat or something, we’ve got a huge problem in this province. That, to me, was the whole crux of the issue that we saw: you guys have got a job to do, but you’re busy doing all sorts of other things, and at best, you’re simply inspecting the facilities. It’s nothing to do with the quality of the meat, the handling of the animals, all those different things. That’s where I think we’ve got a huge problem.

K. Touchet: Yeah, I think you’ve provided some good points, some interesting points here. I think that’s pretty close to what I see as reality as well. We’re not dealing with the animal-health side of it, and most of the contamination is going to be on the animal itself.

The physical facility will lead to some potential increased contamination of the carcass. For example, cross-contamination, poor handling, poor use of knife sanitation and those kinds of things can impact the carcass, in contamination of the carcass, but we’re not there to see it, necessarily. That’s why that upfront training is really important: to have an understanding, for the operator, of what the right things to do are. The onus is really on them to do the right things, because we’re not there to watch it.

I. Paton: Madam Chair, we could drag this out all summer and all fall till we come to a decision, but I’m thinking that either we need more Ministry of Agriculture inspectors to be looking after all the licences, or we need more of your guys that are totally trained to go out way more often and be there when some of the animals arrive, get slaughtered and whatnot. It’s kind of one of these chicken-and-egg things.

[10:40 a.m.]

K. Touchet: That’s an excellent point. Clearly, the program wasn’t resourced to the full extent that we would hope it would be for a thorough inspection process — meeting the same kind of inspection frequency that we’d see with a restaurant, for example.

D. Barnett: Thank you for your presentation. I was lucky enough to catch most of it.

I’ve been very engaged with the slaughterhouse issue up here in the Cariboo region. A few years ago, when we were going through some times to try and get a slaughterhouse here, one of the suggestions and recommendations that was made by local people and committees, etc., was that in order to protect the integrity of the animal when there was a slaughter done — whether it was D, E or whatever it was — and there was no federal inspector available, a veterinarian be on site at a cost to the person with the animal.

I still think that people would probably feel a lot better with these D and E licences if something like that was a regulation.

R. Leonard (Chair): Is that a question or just a comment?

D. Barnett: It’s just a comment for staff. I mean, I’d like to hear it from them.

K. Touchet: Thank you, Donna. I agree with that.

I think that it’s been noted here that the lack of oversight during the slaughter process itself is a concern when it comes to the food safety side of it. I think having somebody with adequate knowledge and a third-party inspector such as a veterinarian that is maybe hired on contract for that, I would say, would be a nice opportunity to have some increased oversight over that kill process — doing the antemortem, postmortem inspection; looking at the slaughter as it occurred; and the handling of the carcass immediately afterwards. I agree that that’s a nice option.

D. Molder: You cannot argue with the food safety benefit of having a veterinarian do the antemortem and pre-mortem assessment. There’s no argument there.

Just the trade-off that is sitting there is that type of requirement would make it difficult for many of the existing Es and Ds to continue business, with a requirement for a veterinarian to be present every time that they choose to slaughter. Not all class Ds and Es, but you will find that some of the remotely based class Ds and Es will have challenges in pulling that resource together for the slaughter day.

R. Leonard (Chair): Does anyone have any other questions? I have a few myself.

You talk about increasing training for the licensees as well as for the environmental health officers. What we heard was that lack of and maybe a misperception that the environmental health officers could do those animal health, food safety inspections that you don’t have jurisdiction over. If you got more training around that, then would that not just confuse those producers more to expect from you things that aren’t in your role?

K. Touchet: Thank you for raising that, because it is a different role, and there are different responsibilities.

I think, the way I see it, from the animal health aspect…. We’d get questions from operators at times. Even though we’re not necessarily the agency that has jurisdiction, we try and answer the questions as best we can. If we don’t have that information, we would refer them on to another agency that would have more detailed information. It’s more for helping the operator to understand what the requirements might be once they get into doing the slaughter process itself — not that we’ll be there to oversee it necessarily but to assist in providing that information.

D. Molder: The main referral direction for any animal health question is to the 1-800 help line, the vet help line based out of Abbotsford. That’s the main resource that is currently used to direct any inquiries from a class D or E.

R. Leonard (Chair): You mentioned that before. Who’s responsible for that 1-800 line?

D. Molder: I’m going to guess that it might be the Ministry of Agriculture, but that phone number is in the SlaughterSafe manual.

R. Leonard (Chair): All right. Thank you.

I was going to ask you, too, about the travel times that you typically experience. It’ll give us a better understanding of how remote “remote” is, in terms of being out to visit and do your inspections.

K. Touchet: Are you referring to the environmental health officers’ travel time?

[10:45 a.m.]

R. Leonard (Chair): Yes.

K. Touchet: Okay. That’s really going to vary by the location that they’re based in. We’ve got environmental health officers that will focus on meat in Kamloops, Kelowna, Nelson and Cranbrook. We’ve got facilities that are…. I think probably the worst-case scenario, the toughest to cover, would be the fellow in Kamloops. We just got an application from Tatla Lake.

Donna may be able to elaborate on how far Tatla Lake is from Kamloops. You’ve got a road trip ahead of you. You’re talking overnight stays and that type of thing to be able to accommodate that. There’s some significant travel distance there.

Kamloops to Williams Lake — probably three and a half hours. Then you’re in a couple of hours off the main highway.

Jackie, you probably know that area just as well.

R. Leonard (Chair): That really helps, because one of the restrictions is that two hours or 100 kilometres, to see how much further we’re talking about.

K. Touchet: The difference…. The reason I asked the question for clarification was: are we talking the environmental health officer, to travel to a site, to do a site assessment, or are we talking about the travel time for an operator that has an animal that they want to take to a facility somewhere that goes beyond that two hour travel range?

There are a couple of different travel factors that we play with. But in terms of the feasibility study, that two-hour travel time…. There’s some tough territory, some mountains to climb over, some winding roads to get to the destination, for sure.

R. Leonard (Chair): One of the other things that was raised is that somebody could be in one health authority and be fairly close to something in another health authority, but they’re many, many kilometres away within their own health authority.

K. Touchet: True. Yes, I think in the western area…. I know that in the North Thompson, there’s some activity in that area in terms of facility operators that have a long road ahead of them to get down to areas around Kamloops where there might be a class A facility, for example, or even just further down the road a couple of hours to something in the North Thompson if they have the capacity to do the slaughter there.

There’s some travel time, but crossing the regional district boundaries…. I suppose that does occur as well. I think in the Lillooet area, we share the coverage area for the Squamish-Lillooet regional district with Vancouver Coastal. There will be some restrictions on sales on the basis of product coming from the plant in Lillooet to go to Kamloops, but it can go down to Whistler within that same regional district.

D. Molder: To speak to some travel time challenges in Coastal Health. We have B.C. Ferries involved to travel to Texada Island. We have a water taxi involved to go to Keats Island. We have a lot of logging road travel and a number of licensees up in the Bella Coola area as well. An EHO flies up there to inspect other facilities as well — drinking water systems, etc. — but is also checking on the rural slaughter establishments.

Yes, lots of coastal travel in our neck of the woods.

R. Leonard (Chair): Thank you. That really puts some colour to it.

J. Tegart (Deputy Chair): We’ve heard lots of conflicting information and opinions on what we might be considering. You talked about how, since 2010, we’ve been working through this process. We’ve heard from people who run class As, saying they were resistant right from the start but can’t imagine having a slaughter day without an inspector being on site.

If you were sitting in our seats…. I’m thinking about animal welfare. I’m thinking about safety of our food pro­ducts. I’m thinking about producers who are challenged to get to places to have slaughter. How do we make the system work for everyone?

K. Touchet: The million-dollar question. Having pon­dered this, and introducing my personal biases, the vision that I see would be to have a number of small, localized class B operations spread throughout the areas where the production occurs. You get the benefit of having inspection. Of course, there’s a cost to provide the inspector, and there are some higher upfront costs for construction, but if you take away the limitations on market share or shipping distances — for example, being able to ship to another regional district — then you’ve got the benefits to offset those extra costs by constricting the class B.

[10:50 a.m.]

That’s my personal bias. I expect Darren may have a different perspective on this.

D. Molder: That’s a tough one. That’s a million-dollar ques­tion. If the class Ds and Es are phased out or asked to be phased out with the introduction of a class A or B facility that may or not have the financial resources to do that…. Maybe on the Powell River coast, there simply isn’t the volume of animals available to support a class B facility. That just might be an economic reality. That economic reality was some of the background that created this licensing scheme back in 2010, through some lobbying from local citizens in remote areas.

In remote areas, the licensing scheme was received very positively. It was seen to attempt to put checks and balances into the food safety plan as best as possible to cover the areas of food safety concern.

I would suspect from those rural areas…. If there is a firm direction to phase out the class Ds and Es, there would potentially be some political questions and some repercussions from those rural areas, which might have felt that they were led along some sort of path but now the landscape and rules have changed for them. To their viewpoint, they would raise the point that there has never been a documented food-borne illness outbreak from the class D and E licences as they’ve been run for the last eight years.

The devil’s in the details for how this could be continued to be offered in the context of class D and E, particularly in the remote areas. We’ll try to touch on some of those gaps in areas, for resources.

N. Simons: Originally, in 2010 or when the exemptions were made, I believe it was for two regional districts only. There was the Powell River regional district and Bella Bella. I think that since then, nine other regional districts were added. That was sort of my question. Do you know how it was that those other areas were added?

D. Molder: They were added with travel time. I think it was tied into a feasibility study of: is there a class A and B facility that could be reasonably used as a resource for local farmers to take their livestock to? Is that your understanding, Kevin?

K. Touchet: It’s a bit fuzzy, but yeah, I think that’s probably accurate.

N. Simons: I think that those original exemptions, the two, were due to the fact that animals were being transported on a ferry, and they had to be there the night before and first in line in Nanaimo, or something like that.

My other question was: do you have the numbers — I don’t know if it would be possible to get — of how many people stopped raising animals for food? Anecdotally, on the Sunshine Coast, I’ve heard of people who…. When the rules first came in, they said no. They can’t do that. They won’t be able to bring their animals to the slaughterhouse. Some people suggest that our food security side of it suffered because of that, the original no exemptions.

D. Molder: Are you talking about prior to 2010, prior to the licensing scheme?

N. Simons: Yeah. Prior to the licensing scheme, completely. How many people said: “Here comes a licensing scheme. There are no exceptions, no exemptions. We’re not going to be able to do this. We’re selling the farm”?

D. Molder: We don’t have those numbers, but you — probably complaints to MLAs — might have those numbers.

N. Simons: I’ll look through my files.

R. Leonard (Chair): I have one other question from your backgrounder. You said: “With the addition of the Ministry of Agriculture enforcement officer position, much of our focus has been on the sale of uninspected meat.” I was hoping you could elaborate a little bit on this inspection of uninspected meat.

K. Touchet: Yeah. Early in the stage of the licensing, we were involved in a lot more enforcement activity with regards to complaints of illegal slaughter — people slaughtering without a licence. So we would follow up with these clients — try and get them on track with a licensing process or ask them to stop doing the slaughtering, unless it was just for personal use.

The Ministry of Agriculture did hire on an enforcement officer, and the roles shifted a little bit so that the Ministry of Environment enforcement officer was taking on complaints of illegal slaughter. We would maintain the complaints regarding sales of meat from an uninspected facility.

[10:55 a.m.]

We’re still doing the retail side of it, where people are selling without having gone through an approved slaughter facility through the food premises regulations instead of under the meat inspection regulations. So we still have a role for a product that hasn’t gone through an approval process going into marketplace, but the responsibilities have shifted a little bit since the initial stages.

R. Leonard (Chair): Is that complaint-driven, or do you just go out and do random audits?

K. Touchet: Yeah, typically that’s complaint-driven. We’ll get a complaint. Somebody hears about somebody that’s been selling our volume of product out to area stores or friends or whoever else. We would investigate to find out a little bit more information. If the investigation showed that there was room to proceed or a reason to proceed, then we would pursue it further.

R. Singh: Just one question that we were hearing and I also see in your inspection thing. A lot of people have concerns that there is no inspection. Where are these concerns coming from? And I see in the opinions, also, like they want videos, and they want constant inspection of the food, although we haven’t heard of any outbreaks or any unsafe food going out. Where are there concerns coming from?

K. Touchet: I would just be guessing at this, as much as anything, but there is a difference in the different systems. In a class A or B, you’ve got somebody there all the time monitoring the situation, whereas in the Ds and Es, you’ve got somebody that’s looked at the facility, has provided the information to the operator about how to do things right, but nobody is actually checking the carcass before it goes out the door. So that’s where that difference is and the inconsistency. I would assume that that is the case in terms of the concerns that were raised.

I. Paton: Getting back to Jackie’s comments about what your opinion is of how we can make this work…. I think we all heard on our recent travels that, you know, in a perfect world, as you said, you’d have A or B inspected facilities all over the province, even in the most remote parts of the Kootenays or whatever, so that everybody would have the assurance that any meat going out has got an inspection stamp on it, rather than just…. You know, you go to the farmers market and say: “Hey, no problem. I’m licensed.” Well, that doesn’t really help. You might be licensed, but the meat you’re selling at the farmers market isn’t inspected.

We also heard from owners of As and Bs that said: “Wow. It’s so difficult to stay in business.” Because finding skilled labour and keeping them busy year-round…. I mean, a lot of these livestock are being slaughtered in only three or four months out of the year. The rest of the year, what do we do to keep our doors open, to keep the employment going and keep these people around?

It’s being put on this committee to come up with some answers, and there are no simple answers. Do we throw into the budget another $5 million or $10 million to hire more EHOs to be way more active in learning a bit about the slaughter industry and doing checks on some of these Ds and Es way out in the backwoods? Or do we hire more provincial Ministry of Agriculture inspectors to go out and be doing spot checks on these Ds and Es?

With some of the Ds and Es, we thought: “Wow. This guy sounds really good. It sounds like he’s got a great facility. It’s him and his wife, and everything’s clean as a whistle.” Then we heard guys going: “Well, I just shoot the cow out behind the barn, and I lift it up on the front-end-loader of the tractor, and I start skinning it out. It’s terrible on hot days because there are flies everywhere.” We’re just like: “Whoa. There’s something wrong with this picture.” So yeah, any further comments would be valuable as to what you think — your side of things in the Health Ministry, versus the Agriculture Ministry.

K. Touchet: I appreciate your points. I think that you have a difficult job to do, to decide how to recommend this move forward. One of the things I think about is money. Who’s paying for it, and how does this money come to support this industry, to support increased food production and not eliminate those smaller operators that have higher costs and have difficulty in getting things done? Do I have an easy answer? No, we work on the operational side. We don’t set the policy. We can make recommendations or suggestions.

[11:00 a.m.]

It’s a tough one, and I don’t really have a magical solution. I do see some inconsistency, and I see that there’s been a lack of funding to support that over time.

I’m going to pass it over to Darren and see if he’s….

D. Molder: It’s an excellent question. Of course, that’s the crux of the issue. We’ve brought the file forward from the year 2010. EHOs and health authorities have brought it to the present day as best we can with zero extra financial resources. We’re at the decision point today, here. What direction are we going to go to?

The financial resources could be put towards Ministry of Agriculture or health authorities. The benefit of the health authorities is that we have boots on the ground all over B.C. right now. We have extensive experience in food safety inspections. The benefits of the Ministry of Agriculture inspector side of things is that they are much more focused on the animal health and being present during the slaughter.

There are different inspection schemes that could be considered for both models that would potentially address the risks that have been presented. Down to the detail on how that occurs…. It would involve more inspectors and more training for either of those groups. I don’t know if there’s one favourite group out there that I could really promote right now, but knowing that Interior Health has been stretched to the point of starting to see significant impact on resources…. With our smaller remote areas that we have in Coastal Health, we haven’t quite seen that yet, but it could grow to that point.

K. Touchet: Similar thoughts. It may not necessarily be those two agencies that can be involved in inspection. As Donna had suggested previously, maybe you need a third-party person in there to do the inspection — a retired vet that might be able to give up a bit of time for a small amount of money and be willing to go in and oversee the slaughter process when it’s done infrequently so that it wouldn’t add too much of a huge cost to the operation of that D or E licence.

There are other options available. Some people have talked about video inspection. So you’ve got a camera hooked up to the computer that’s focused on the slaughter area. Not a perfect situation — there are lots of hiding spots in a facility — but it would give a better impression of what’s going on during that slaughter if there’s no one else around. So there are other options available.

N. Simons: You basically answered the question with respect to the potential…. I heard in 2010: “Well, why not just get a vet to come in and watch while I do my two animals or whatever?” That was one possibility.

Is there also something that can be done in terms of the traceability? That’s often identified as the key to accountability. What are the possibilities of improving traceability in D and E?

K. Touchet: That’s a tough one. We can promote recordkeeping, monitoring sales logs and those types of things. I don’t know exactly how Ministry of Agriculture inspectors will do that in an A or B plant if nobody is there to monitor the records for a year or two or three at a time. Somebody could be sitting in their kitchen just writing out logs. Not to say that that’s occurring or that people would be willing to do that, but it is a possibility when there’s no oversight.

D. Molder: As it stands right now, the class D and E licensees are asked to describe what a recall process would be like in their food safety plan and put their name to that. That’s part of the approval process in that they would identify how the complaints are logged and tracked on the required complaint forms, how health authorities would be contacted if there was a report of a complaint and what other further follow-up steps they would take.

There is a recordkeeping component to the class D and E facilities that’s currently asked for right now. Now, that’s a paper exercise that doesn’t have an inspector in the plant watching over it every day.

J. Tegart (Deputy Chair): I guess, as we have the conversation and, certainly, as we listen to input, not being a farmer or a rancher myself, I really question increased monitoring. Our expectation is to have safe food. Certainly, we heard from small producers that we are very accountable to our neighbours and to the people who buy our product. They know who we are. If our product isn’t good, they will never buy from us again.

[11:05 a.m.]

We all know, in small rural communities, the one person. There is an accountability that isn’t government-related. It’s about trust. It’s about an industry that has a caring for animals and a caring for providing food for their community.

For me, on this committee, it’s: how do we support those farmers and ranchers in a way that keeps them viable but also keeps people’s food safe? I would suggest that rather than talking about more monitoring, if we haven’t seen an outbreak…. I mean, the big outbreaks come from the Maple Leafs — right? — the big guys. What are we trying to fix?

K. Touchet: I appreciate your comments here, and I think you’ve raised some good points. Outbreaks associated with large facilities are more likely going to make the news, for sure, because they’re dealing with large, large numbers of animals that are going through a plant.

D. Molder: And there’s more data to prove the outbreak.

K. Touchet: Absolutely. So you’ve got the epidemiological investigation work that links it back to a specific plant. That traceability is important, certainly, to tie those together. With a smaller operation, it doesn’t mean that the product isn’t necessarily contaminated, even if the operator is doing the best thing they can. But in terms of an outbreak, you may only have two or three people involved in the outbreak. It may never get that traceability that you’re looking for. You may never be able to tie it back.

In both cases, there’s an onus on the person buying the product to handle the food safely as well. They still have to cook the meat before they eat it. That may be a big part of why we don’t see larger outbreaks or more frequent outbreaks related to meat products, because the consumer is actually doing their part of their due diligence, in many cases, to help reduce that risk.

While there are food-safety steps that occur at the production stage, and we want to see, from farm to fork, food safety integrated all the way through, not all of that responsibility is placed on the operator of a slaughter facility. Your points are well-taken.

We haven’t seen large outbreaks — or outbreaks, period — with Ds or Es. But they’re not the only ones responsible for that food safety. There are other people further down the chain.

R. Leonard (Chair): Thank you very much. Well, it’s after 11, and you’ve given us a lot of time and answered all of our questions. We appreciate your backgrounder. It was very thorough.

One more question, and then I’ll wrap it up.

I. Paton: Do you deal with your counterparts in provinces — say, Alberta? I’d be very curious to know what they’re doing, because obviously, they have some huge slaughter plants in Alberta. But they also have small producers way in the northern part of Alberta and whatnot. Do you know what their inspection process is dealing with? Is it a bit the same as ours?

K. Touchet: Honestly, no. We don’t communicate interprovincially, necessarily. That would occur more at the ministry level, where a new process is being introduced. There’s a consultation phase, for example. They would collect information from other jurisdictions as to what their processes are and maybe pick the best out of what’s going on there or what would be most applicable for a situation in B.C.

I. Paton: Madam Chair, I might suggest that as a committee, we maybe look into what some of the other provinces are doing with remote….

R. Leonard (Chair): We’ll be talking about where we can go with all of this.

D. Molder: I would suggest they have fewer geographic challenges with mountains and oceans and water and sheer distance in Alberta, compared to B.C. Those geographic challenges have shaped policy in B.C.

R. Leonard (Chair): Once again, thank you very much. I appreciate you taking the time to answer our questions. Specifically, I want to say thank you very much for some of the unique things that you brought up in your backgrounder paper that I hadn’t heard about, like the impact of social media to marketing and things like that. Thank you very much, and have a good day.

We will now take a five-minute recess.

J. Tegart (Deputy Chair): Thanks to your staff, too, for the input.

The committee recessed from 11:09 a.m. to 11:23 a.m.

[R. Leonard in the chair.]

Deliberations

R. Leonard (Chair): Can I have a motion to go in camera?

Moved by Nicholas and seconded by Rachna.

Motion approved.

The committee continued in camera from 11:23 a.m. to 2:40 p.m.

[R. Leonard in the chair.]

R. Leonard (Chair): Somebody move adjournment, please.

R. Singh: I move adjournment.

R. Leonard (Chair): Thank you, Rachna.

Thank you, everyone, for joining today.

The committee adjourned at 2:40 p.m.