Food-safety reports getting lots of clicks

By JEFFREY SIMPSON Staff Reporter 
Thu. Jan 15 - 5:40 AM The Chronicle Herald, Halifax, NS

The province's new system of posting the food-safety inspections of
restaurants, supermarkets and other food sellers online has attracted a
huge amount of public interest.

Millions of people went to the Agriculture Department's website in the
days following its launch in October, Leo Muise, executive director of
regulation and compliance for food safety, said Wednesday.

"The first week was what we consider to be an almost unbelievable
response," Mr. Muise told reporters in Halifax. "It seems to be going
over well."

On the second day alone, about 1.5 million people checked out the
food-safety inspections of restaurants and other businesses. The numbers
gradually dropped over the next few months and now about 1,000 people a
week use the site to look up the records for several eateries at a time.

"Each person that's tapping on is probably checking, on average, four or
five different establishments," Mr. Muise said.

"It seems to peak around the weekend when people are naturally maybe
going out to restaurants and those places."

Officials with the food-safety division of the department appeared
before the public accounts committee at the legislature in Halifax to
answer questions about inspections and last summer's listeriosis
outbreak.

Mike Horwich, the director of food protection for the province, said the
department is continuing to work the bugs out of the online database and
didn't rule out taking the extra step of requiring restaurants to post
their inspection reports on their premises.

"I'd rather not speculate on that," he said.

The website provides the public with specific information about
food-safety violations and the action required of each offending eatery
to comply with regulations. It replaced two outdated databases that
contained sketchy records the public couldn't access.

The Chronicle Herald published a series of stories in 2006 and 2007 that
exposed deficiencies in Nova Scotia's system of inspecting restaurants.
The inspection reports obtained by this newspaper noted infractions such
as rodents, unsafe meat and cross-contamination of food. 

But few restaurants faced penalties for their violations and people had
little access to this information to tell if they were putting
themselves at risk.

At the time, the department wasn't in favour of creating public online
access to a database of inspections and cited concerns that such a
practice might be bad for business at some restaurants.

Luc Erjavec, of the Canadian Restaurant and Foodservices Association,
had also been skeptical of how interested the public would be in such a
system.

"That first number did shock me a bit," he said of the millions of hits
the website initially attracted. "But as you can see it has quickly
waned.

"I don't think it's changed consumption habits, I don't think it's a big
number and I think over time we're going to see it decline even more as
the public sees there's really no smoking gun there."

Mr. Erjavec questioned whether it was worth the province spending
$325,000 to create the online database.

"Maybe we could spend a half million dollars stimulating our industry.
Stimulating our industry would be a better way to do it."

Mr. Horwich said there's also a movement to harmonize food-safety rules
between the provinces and Ottawa.

"That would definitely streamline things."

( jsimpson@herald.ca )