SECOND OPINION Food inspections take hit in budget

A Windsor Star editorial: If you think grocery shopping is a chore now, it’s about to get worse. Tucked virtually unnoticed into last week’s federal budget was a significant change to the way the Canadian Food Inspection Agency will operate.

Finance Minister Jim Flaherty said the CFIA was going to stop policing manufacturers on all “non-health and non-safety food labelling regulations.”

How will the federal government make sure all those labelling claims are true? That’s your job. It will be up to you to figure out whether the manufacturer is telling the truth. And it will also be up to you to make the company right the wrong.

Here’s exactly how the CFIA worded the change to its monitoring and enforcement policy: “CFIA will introduce a webbased label verification tool that encourages consumers to bring validated concerns directly to companies and associations for resolution.”

Translation: if your new-found nutritional expertise makes you suspect manufacturers are fibbing, you must prove that errors exist, confront the offenders, then seek their co-operation in telling the truth. And you must do all this without the threat of government fines and penalties to back you up. As those who took on the big tobacco companies years ago would say, “Good luck with that.”

To say the federal government is being reckless with this decision is an understatement. Its “non-health and non-safety” labelling list include cholesterol content, sodium levels, sugar and allergens. It could, conceivably, also include best-before dates. For those with serious health conditions, like hypertension, peanut allergies and diabetes, false claims could prove deadly.

The Tories made a dangerous mistake when they chose to put cost cutting above health and safety. This is one budget initiative that must be scrapped.