As if farmers and meat-eating consumers hadn’t faced enough financial trouble in the wake of the Mad Cow scare, along comes a new reason to worry about the food on our plates.

On August 21, after a two-month investigation by provincial inspectors, Aylmer Meat Packers had its operating license suspended due to fears about tainted-meat products. Four days later, a recall was issued for all beef and beef products produced by the plant. The recall order was issued, not by either of the provincial ministries responsible, but by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency.

The fact that there was a four-day delay was inexcusable in itself. Consumers should not have to wait four days to hear about potentially unsafe food. They should not have to worry that the meat that they buy may have originated from a contaminated source. The picture that has emerged over the last two weeks, however, is of a plant that should have been shut down long before August 21. The warning signs were simply too numerous to ignore. According to reports in the Toronto Star and other media:

· In the dozen years that the plant’s current owners have been in charge, the company has been involved in eleven license hearings;

· In 1999, the factory’s owner was convicted of assault and obstruction after roughing up a 60-year-old veterinarian and chasing labour officials from the plant;

· In December 2002, the company and its owners were each convicted of six counts of “disposing abattoir waste without approval”;

· In January 2003, the company and its owners were charged with “spreading liquid abattoir waste on lands not approved for that purpose and in doing so violating conditions of the certificate of approval”;

· The company and its owners will be in court later this month to answer charges of “permitting discharge of material into a drain that may impair water quality,” and six counts each for “runoff from a feed lot that may have caused an adverse effect” and “failure to comply” with orders from provincial officials;

· During the investigation, provincial inspectors reportedly witnessed at least ten dead animals being butchered, contrary to both regulations and criminal law, but let the plant continue to operate. Inexcusably, no investigator blew the whistle after the first carcass was cut up; and

· Illegal slaughtering was widely known to occur after hours, when inspectors were not present (no animal is to be slaughtered in the absence of inspectors).

Have you lost your appetite yet? If you haven’t been turned off eating meat, you should at least have been turned off voting Tory. While Ernie Eves has been practicing the same kind of “leadership” that he demonstrated following the power blackout (i.e. he’s been appearing daily before microphones, while carefully avoiding answering any question regarding his government’s policy failures), he’s going to have to carry the vile stench from this debacle as he campaigns around the province.

Claiming, as Eves did last week, that he’s “frustrated” and “disappointed” about overlapping jurisdictions and the lack of information being provided to the public would be laughable if we were not dealing with such a serious issue.

After all, it was his government that created the overlapping jurisdiction, moving investigative responsibilities from the Ministry of Agriculture and Food to the Ministry of Natural Resources. It was his government who laid off all but eight full time meat inspectors in favour of poorly trained part-time contract inspectors. It was this government that ignored a warning from provincial auditor Erik Peters, who in 2001 criticized the government for “inadequate inspections, audits and follow-ups of violations” that threatened our food supply.

As we learned after the deaths in Walkerton, trying to save money by reducing inspections and so-called red tape, not only isn’t worth our health, it doesn’t really save money (since the negative impact on the economy is enormous).

Having created the conditions for the Aylmer situation to occur, the province has done an even worse job of dealing with it. Ontario’s Privacy Commissioner, Ann Cavoukian, pointed out that the province was actually breaking the law by refusing to give answers. “Openness and transparency, especially at time like this, is essential. Governance is based on disclosing information to the public. Transparency breeds trust.” If that’s the case (and I think it is), Ernie Eves certainly has a long way to go before he earns our trust. The fact that he thinks that now is a good time to go to the polls demonstrates how little he understands that. It’s your job to let him know on October 2.

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Scott Piatkowski

Scott Piatkowski is a former columnist for rabble.ca. He wrote a weekly column for 13 years that appeared in the Waterloo Chronicle, the Woolwich Observer and ECHO Weekly. He has also written for Straight...