NOR DICITY
Al Pope, August 27, 2008
The listeria outbreak: Walkerton revisited?
In June 1995, the Harris Conservatives took office in Ontario. Having promised the voters a “Common Sense Revolution” of smaller government, lower taxes, and less regulation, they went swiftly to work. They cut education funding, slashed welfare and closed hospitals, but they saved their sharpest knives for environmental health and public safety.
They cut the Ministry of the Environment by 42%. Although they had campaigned on a promise to “cut the fat” from government, they barely touched head office. Instead, they laid off front-line workers – inspectors, and enforcement and research staff. Out of 2400 front-line employees, 900 were cut. Regional offices were closed and programs such as the Drinking Water Surveillance Program were axed.
In a marvel of doublespeak, the Conservative government passed the Water and Sewage Service Improvement Act, which shut down all the province’s water testing labs, and downloaded the responsibility for testing onto the municipalities, at the same time as Harris was cutting their funding.
The tragic result could not have been more predictable. In May 2000, residents of Walkerton Ontario began to experience bloody diarrhea and severe cramps. More than two thousand people were infected with e. coli from the town’s drinking water, and seven people died.
In August 2008, an outbreak of listeria that has killed at least six Canadians has been linked to meat from a Maple Leaf Foods plant in Toronto. On Wednesday, the Globe and Mail reported that the Canadian Food Inspection Agency began last March to “give the food industry a greater role in the inspection process,” and that the Maple Leaf plant had experienced a marked reduction in government oversight.
In true Common Sense Revolution style, a federal inspector who covered Maple Leaf and several other plants was reduced to “auditing company paperwork”, rather than conducting regular inspections of the actual facility. Bob Kingston, national president of the Agriculture Union and a former CFIA inspector told the Globe, “"We don't swab for listeria any more. The industry does all that themselves. They just document all this stuff. We read their reports. If their reports say they do everything fine, then they do everything fine."
This month a leaked cabinet document revealed plans to cut back federal food inspections and replace them with industry self-regulation. It appears that some of these plans quietly went into practice in March. If more is to follow Canadians need to ask, will that mean more deaths?
Perhaps the greatest mystery of the Walkerton tragedy is that there were no consequences at the top of the political food-chain. Tony Clement, once Harris’s Minister of Health, now occupies the same job in Ottawa. Likewise, Jim Flaherty has parlayed his pathetic failure as Ontario’s Finance Minister into a leadership role in Canada’s economic decline. To top off the madness, Harris’s anti-welfare bully-boy John Baird is now Canada’s Minister of Environmental Inaction.
What were the voters thinking? Harris’s regime was an abject failure even by its own yardstick of “fiscal responsibility”. Having inherited a steadily-shrinking $3 billion deficit from Bob Rae’s NDP, Harris, Flaherty and friends built it up to $5 billion before they left office, despite a hot international economy.
Eight years of the Bush administration has further demonstrated what these neo-conservative tax-cutting program-cutting governments are good at: gutting the economy, running up debt, and leaving the country without the protection of basic government services. But the Harper/Harris ideologues are plunging forward. When people start dying because of cuts to the inspection of the food and water supply, that is not “cutting the fat” from government: it’s abandoning responsibility.
Harper is about to call an election, violating his own fixed-date law on the improbable grounds that Parliament is too dysfunctional to continue. A more likely explanation is that the Conservatives want to go to the polls before all their chickens – the in-and-out election financing scandal, the shambles in Afghanistan, the declining economy – come home to roost.
Oh, and one other barnyard fowl that may be on its way home: according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, Canada may be heading into a deficit “as both tax cuts and the business cycle eat into government revenues."
Well, surprise, surprise.
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