City left out of restaurant inspection plan
Lloydminster is the only Alberta city not taking part in a program that will allow people to check out the cleanliness of restaurants online.

Meridion Booster,SK - Christopher Heffernan
Friday July 04, 2008

Lloydminster is the only Alberta city not taking part in a program that will allow
people to check out the cleanliness of restaurants online.
On July 1, the Alberta government launched a website that will post public
inspection reports of restaurants online. The reports will allow Albertans to see
when a particular establishment was last inspected and if there were any violations
of food regulations noted - such as hand washing, food preparation or storage
infractions. 
However, no Lloydminster restaurants can be found on the website because the city
falls under the jurisdiction of Saskatchewan in the area of public health.
"When Lloydminster was set up through the city charter, they chose to have the
Saskatchewan public health act applied to the whole city," said Richard Koroluk, who
heads the team of public health inspectors for the Prairie North Health Region.


Saskatchewan is in the process of setting up a similar system to the one in Alberta.
Once new food and safety legislation is passed this fall, the public will be able to
request hard copies of reports for any restaurant in the province but these will not
be accessible online and they will have to pay a fee.
It won't be until next year that residents will have access to the online reports.
Koroluk says the delay is due to the amount of work it will take to get the site up
and running. 
"It will give you information on any restaurant," he said. "It will give you
information on when it was inspected last, it will give you information with regards
to if there were any health orders against it or those types of things."
Under the current system, a member of the public can only obtain a health report by
making a request under the Freedom of Information Act - a long and potentially
costly process with no guarantee of success.
The way the system has been set up in Alberta, where the public can see the types of
infractions found in a restaurant, is supported by the Canadian Restaurant and
Foodservices Association, a national industry lobby group. 
"Food safety is obviously a very important consideration for restaurants," said Mark
von Shellwitz, CRFA vice-president for Western Canada. "And we've always been of the
opinion, our members have, that we are supportive of full disclosure of restaurant
inspection reports being available to the public."
The CRFA supports the full-disclosure model as opposed to the grading model, where a
restaurant is given a certain ranking but the details of the inspection are not made
public. A less-than-perfect rating may cause the public the shy away from a
restaurant for minor infractions that have nothing to do with food safety, said
Shellwitz.