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Bill 32 - Meat Inspection Amendment Act, 2008

October 23, 2008 - Second Reading

Ms Blakeman: Thanks very much, Mr. Speaker. I’m pleased to have the opportunity to be able to speak in second reading to Bill 32, the Meat Inspection Amendment Act, 2008. Having consulted with my caucus members, they are indicating to me that they have a willingness to support this bill. But, clearly, based on the number of them that have raised issues prior to me, there are some questions to be answered, so I’m hoping that in Committee of the Whole the sponsor of the bill, who is…

Mr. MacDonald: Battle River-Wainwright.

Ms Blakeman: …that nice young fellow from Battle River Wainwright – thank you – will be coming forward with some clarifications and answers.

My understanding is that the major issue on this is the transfer of inspection authority and what that shakes out to really mean. Here’s one of the areas that’s occurring to me because I can’t get a lot of specifics when I start to track this back. One of the sections is replacing the words “police officer” wherever they appear in the act with “peace officer.” I hope my diction is good. I wonder what the meaning is behind that because I’m guessing that that would allow for some of the new categories of enforcement personnel. I don’t know what to call them because they’re not police. At one point there was some sort of proposal for a deputy police or something, and that didn’t happen. We have ended up with a couple of new levels of people that have powers, and some of them carry guns and some of them don’t, but they seem – some of them, most of them, all of them are able to hand out tickets.

I can’t get a really clear definition. What’s the criteria for hiring some of these guys that are sheriffs, for example? I would like to be able to get a hold of some of that information because, clearly, what’s happening here is that we’re moving from having police officers responsible for enforcement and infractions to having a peace officer. I don’t know who a peace officer is. I’m assuming here – and I’m happy to be corrected, as usual – that that would include the new definition of sheriffs and other categories that I’m not even aware of yet. There always seem to be new categories. That may well be happening because we wish police officers to be out on our streets fighting serious crime. Therefore, if we need someone to go in and deal with an infraction in a meat facility, it doesn’t need to be a police officer with two years of training and a gun on his belt. Fair enough. But I am wondering about the hiring criteria and the training standards of some of these new areas. I don’t want to see any of those individuals placed in a position where they’re being asked to do something that they haven’t been trained to do because that’s a pretty scary position to be placed in by somebody, and that’s not clear for me from what’s in here.

That replacement clause appears several places. It’s in section 8, which is amending section 8(a). It’s also appearing earlier in the bill in the original section 2(k): “‘peace officer’ means a peace officer appointed under the Peace Officer Act.” Okay. Again, that is indicating that there’s a change in who was expected to perform certain duties under this act.

The section that we’re mostly interested in, I think, is section 3, which is repealing the authority of Alberta Health and Wellness to inspect these premises, leaving it to the Department of Agriculture and Rural Development, which may well be very reasonable. But, clearly, the answers that I’m looking for are: do we end up with the same number of inspections that are available? If the problem is that we didn’t have enough staff in Alberta Health and Wellness to do these inspections, in shifting it to the Department of Agriculture and Rural Development, are there sufficient staff there to respond to the demand for them? I would like some information on that.

Transition is always interesting in this province because we end up with the government changing things so often that I find many of the departments are left very quietly shaking their heads saying: I don’t know who I’m supposed to report to now, and I don’t know what form I’m supposed to fill out because everything changed. So part of what my colleagues were asking for – and I will echo that – is: what are the transition plans in place to move from the Health and Wellness inspectors to the Agriculture and Rural Development inspectors?

The final concern – and I’m pretty sure that the government would have dealt with this, but, you know, give me the information – that consumer protection and a level of consumer information are really important. People are essentially pretty careful if they’re given the information to be careful about. If they’ve been misled or if information is not provided, then we can’t fault them if they make mistakes.

For example, if there is a recall, as we witnessed a massive recall that happened with the cold cuts around the listeria outbreak, you would really have to be severely impaired in some way, in a coma or out of the country, to not have heard the number of recall notices that came out in the newspaper, on the radio, and on the television. They did a massive attempt to tell people: please, please, please be careful with this. You know, I would expect at that point that most people would go to their fridge and try and get rid of it. The people that became ill became ill before the warning was out there. That’s always the concern: what is that level of contingency plan that’s available to help consumers find out about it and, more importantly, to protect the consumers before they have the ability to protect themselves? Those are always the issues that only government can do. The private sector is very good at many things, but there are some things that others will not do and that, therefore, it falls to government to do. Consumer protection is one of those. It’s the reason that we need regulations and limitations on things. That’s the final issue that I wanted to raise: how do we reassure consumers that there is the highest level of safety?

This is an interesting one for me, Mr. Speaker, because I can’t eat meat. I’m allergic to red meat protein and have been my adult life. I’ve only had the children’s version of meat dishes. I’ve never had grown up, fancy meat dishes. I was saved from McDonald’s because I couldn’t eat there. When they first opened McDonald’s, when I was a teenager, I think, there was nothing I could eat there, so I never went. I never got into it, and I never had the famous french fries. So there I was, saved.

I’m very aware of how frightened people get around food products and food safety. I have relatives in England – and I heard my colleague from Edmonton-Riverview referring to a similar story – who will not eat any meat product now, this many years past their BSE crisis. My Lord, they’ve worked hard there to get over that. They’ve worked hard to prove to people that they were going to be as safe as possible. But there is a population there that will not eat meat, and that would have very serious repercussions for Alberta and Alberta’s beef producers.

So even though I can’t consume their product, anything I can do to help the government to strengthen consumer – what’s the word I’m looking for? – confidence, I am happy to do. I hope that this bill will move that along. I hope to hear some of the answers to the concerns that my colleagues and I have raised in second reading. We are going into Committee of the Whole shortly on this, so I look forward to those concerns being addressed. Thank you very much, Mr. Speaker.