CANADA: Aylmer Meat Packers guilty

20.dec.07
K-W Record (Canada)
Jim Romahn

LONDON, Ont.--Richard (Butch) Clare and his company, Aylmer Meat Packers, have, according to this story, pleaded guilty to selling meat that was not inspected and have been fined $125,000.
Clare immediately paid the fine. He has also been barred from the meat-processing industry for a year.
Clare told the judge he’s still involved in the livestock industry in everything short of meat packing. He also said he never sold any meat he would not eat himself and described his plant as so spotless people could eat off the floor.
Charges against his two sons were withdrawn. One of the sons, Jeff, operating at Butch Clare Livestock Ltd., was recently fined $25,000 after he pleaded guilty to charges laid by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency for moving cattle more than 30 months old into the U.S. in early 2006. Jeff was also listed as the principal investor in the purchase of the former Barton Feeders horse-packing plant at Owen Sound.
The Aylmer Meats case was sensational because police and government inspectors raided the plant during the summer of 2003, claiming they had seized deadstock being processed while none of the required government meat inspectors were on the premises.
Clare has now admitted he did that and also admits that he used packaging materials with federal inspection logos from a plant he bought in Kitchener. Some of the packaging from the former MGI Packers plant were found at the plant at Aylmer and in some retail outlets.
Clare said he used the packaging to save money, not to mislead customers into believing the meat had been federally inspected.
Clare bought the shuttered MGI Packers plant in Kitchener in 2002 and later sold it to Gencor which has renovated and re-equipped the plant to bring it back into operation to deal with a huge backlog of cull cattle that could not be sold to U.S. packers because of the trading ban after an Alberta cow died of BSE (bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or mad cow’s disease).
It’s not clear how the Canadian Food Inspection Agency lost control of the packaging from the MGI plant. The CFIA has been heavily criticized in the past for losing control of meat inspection stamps and promised that it has instituted tighter controls.
Records that Ontario Farmer obtained via the Freedom of Information process two years before the police raids and charges spelled out serious infractions at
Aylmer Meats. For example, Clare threatened inspectors to the point that the top management at the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs hired security guards to protect meat inspectors.
The inspection reports indicated there were times when the floor drains were blocked, so floor guck was splashing on carcasses and meat, and all of the sanitizers to sterilize knives were out of commission. Clare invested more than $2 million after that to improve and expand the facility.