Put an ex-cop like Rick Hanson in charge of a major inquiry, and chances are pretty good he’ll find a crime.
And so he did, when the government’s investigation into an E. coli outbreak in daycares led to major discoveries of illegal slaughter and sale of meat in Alberta.
There’s no direct link between the two — nobody’s saying those 448 kids were sickened by illegal meat.
But Hanson, a former Calgary police chief, saw that the whole question of food safety was much broader than the daycare outbreak, serious as that was.
“As we got into it, we realized that if we wanted to have any assurance that we were looking at making child-care facilities in centralized kitchens safe, we better look upstream.
“Where’s the food coming from? How is meat and other products making it into the food chain?
“That prompted us to really expand our research. We brought in experts like the RCMP livestock folks and heard from Alberta agriculture about some of the challenges they’re facing.
“We had to look at illegal abattoirs, at what was going on in particularly rural areas in the province, where we learned that there are individuals who are avoiding regulations around safe harvesting of meat and processing and butchering of meat — purposely ignoring the rules, purposely operating outside of areas where they can be regulated and inspected.”
The panel learned, Hanson said, “that meat is finding its way into the two big cities and other jurisdictions, and people are unaware, at times, that they’re potentially purchasing meat that has not gone through a proper inspection.
“So we wanted to make sure that we looked at everything, not just limiting it to a small piece at the end of the food chain but what’s going on farther upstream that needs to be addressed in an environment where people, frankly, are looking to cut costs.
“This is about people who know that they’re obtaining animals illegally. In some cases, they’re processing them in an illegal manner under the most unsanitary conditions you can imagine, and then they’re packaging them up and they’re selling them to people, and the average person would be unaware.”
In June, the RCMP laid charges against four men for illegal slaughter of animals. Seven halal grocery stores in Calgary were shut down. The slaughtering was done on rural properties in the counties of Mountain View, Rocky View and Wheatland.
Mounties provided a photo of discarded cow carcasses covered in snow. In Edmonton, police found live goats destined for slaughter in a rented garage.
Hanson raises the spectre of such meat finding its way into established restaurants, meat counters in groceries and, ultimately, private homes. He has elevated this growing problem to the level of a serious provincial issue.
On the daycare E. coli crisis, Premier Danielle Smith said she may take food safety inspection away from Alberta Health Services and give it to Alberta Health, the government department.
The report shows that the AHS inspectors are a harried bunch, overworked, understaffed and lacking any real authority to force compliance from commercial kitchens.
They took a lot of heat over the failure to prevent the E. coli outbreak despite multiple visits to the Fueling Minds central kitchen.
But this is clearly a system problem rather than blunders by individuals.
In one year, AHS calculated that 34,000 inspections should be done. Only 28,000 actually happened. Even many high-risk locations are only inspected once a year.
Last year, AHS began posting inspectors’ food safety reports for daycare and other facilities online.
But they did not order daycare operators to display the reports where parents can easily see them.
If parents had seen those reports for Fueling Minds (12 over two years), the operators would have faced hard questions and demands for improvement.
Posting those reports will soon be mandatory. That’s just the most obvious of many essential reforms outlined in the report.
The inspection system should be pulled from AHS and overhauled with real authority to make kitchen operators comply. Those illegal slaughter operations must be shut down.
Otherwise, that daycare outbreak may someday look like a minor early warning.
Don Braid’s column appears regularly in the Herald
X: @DonBraid