Put food inspections on the menu

13.oct.06
Halifax Daily News
Rick Howe

The Calgary Herald reported this week restaurants in the city were hit with 48 closing orders because of health violations. The infractions ranged from rodent droppings to thawing food on the floor.
The past year in Halifax has, according to this story, seen no such closings. Indeed, the few facts available indicate no restaurant here has been forced to shut down for food-safety reasons.
Calgary's 9,000 restaurants outnumber eateries in our fine city. The point is that Calgarians and Canadians in many other provinces have access to such information, while restaurant patrons in Nova Scotia have restricted, or no access at all, to similar statistics
The newspaper says Calgarians have access to information that tells them 52,000 citations were issued in 2005-06, along with the forced closings. The information is posted on a website as part of the Calgary Health Region's environmental health division.
The program was sped up after Alberta's auditor general slammed the province's health-inspection program in his most recent annual report, saying critical food-safety violations were often not prosecuted.
In Nova Scotia, the story says, we have only assurances our health-inspection system is up to par.
Agriculture Minister Brooke Taylor was quoted as telling Howe this week that, "I would ask that Nova Scotians have confidence in our food-safety inspections,". "They are certified national health inspectors. They carry out some 6,500 inspections on a yearly basis. They have ordered food destruction in the past, and things of that nature."
Learning the details of those thousands of inspections to determine the number of infractions and subsequent consequences is - as can be expected in a province labelled the country's most secretive by the Canadian Association of Journalists - difficult. Recent media reports that outlined infractions ranging from food stored in garbage cans, in washrooms and on floors to re-using leftovers were discovered only after much effort and cost.
Rather than express alarm at the intrepid reporter's expose and ensure Nova Scotians be more informed of such violations, the Canadian Food and Restaurant Association called it "a hatchet job." The agriculture minister even foolishly suggested revealing such information was bad for business.
Taylor was quoted as saying this week that, "We're working as hard as we can to make it more transparent."
Taylor says current policy allows an individual, within 24 hours, to receive the most recent food-safety reports for any three restaurants - though he admits this policy isn't well known.
Health Canada estimates as many as 13 million Canadians each year suffer from food-borne illnesses easily prevented in many cases by proper handling and preparation. We have a right to know whether any restaurant or fast-food outlet is up to standards and has a good track record. To do otherwise is to put our health at risk.
Nova Scotia's auditor general should follow his Alberta counterpart's lead and immediately launch a probe into the quality of the province's food-safety inspections.
The MacDonald government must also begin sincere efforts - not the lip service it gives now - to provide Nova Scotians with complete and up-to-date information from those inspections.
Only then will we be able to dine with confidence we will not one day be one of those Health Canada statistics.