ONTARIO: Plan would pay tuition for food inspectors

14.apr.09
The Ottawa Citizen
Jake Rupert

OTTAWA -- The municipality's public health department wants to subsidize food
inspection students' last year of school to entice them to work for the city.
The initiative is part of the department's drive to improve public health and safety
inspections of businesses that serve or make food in the city after an internal
audit found serious shortcomings a year ago.
The department's request is designed to get these students working for the city at a
time when not enough qualified inspectors are graduating to replace retiring
inspectors or to keep up with growth across the province.
This has led the city to fall well below the provincial rules on how often
restaurants and other businesses are to be inspected.
Indeed, the city's auditor general found in 2007 that the provincially mandated
rates of inspection at restaurants were only being met 63 per cent of the time. The
main reason, he found, was there simply aren't enough inspectors to do the work.
One of the auditor's main recommendations was to start paying inspectors better. At
the time, the city's pay rate for inspectors was low compared to other jurisdictions
in the province, with the salary for an inspector topping out at $63,000 per year.
Since then, council has approved a nine-per-cent pay raise.
In a report on the subsidy request going to the community and protective services
committee Wednesday, the public health department says the numbers improved slightly
in 2008 with the required inspections being done at 69 per cent of establishments.
Still, the department is short of inspectors.
To cope with the shortage, the department is proposing that it cover the cost of
tuition and books to a maximum of $8,000 for a student in his or her last year of an
environmental health degree program in return for an agreement to work for the city
after graduation.
The report says a similar program worked well more than a decade ago.
If approved by the committee, council will deal with the matter next week.