Food safety on back burner: Auditor general's 2001 concerns about restaurants were ignored

24.oct.06
Halifax Chronicle Herald
Jeffrey Simpson
http://www.herald.ns.ca/Front/536319.html

The auditor general urged Nova Scotia five years ago to look into stronger enforcement tools that would enable restaurant inspectors to post results publicly and issue tickets to violators.
An audit of the Agriculture Department in 2001 also found shoddy record-keeping and a failure to follow up on serious food-safety violations.
But the government has seemingly done little in response to the criticisms.
Jacques Lapointe, who recently took over as the province's new auditor general, was quoted as saying in an interview that, "I'm not aware of any changes that have been made. There was generally a feeling that it wasn't a very strong process. Our guys back then recommended there were better tools for this and that they look at strengthening it."
Food-safety inspectors noted many health risks -- from unsafe meat to rodents -- at Halifax restaurants in 2005, The Chronicle Herald learned after obtaining the inspection reports through the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act.
Yet no restaurants were closed or fined, according to information provided by department staff.
An examination of the documents showed they often contained incomplete and undecipherable information. And the province didn't want to voluntarily release them for public perusal.
Requests for any more than the latest inspection reports for three restaurants were directed to the time-consuming freedom-of-information process, where Agriculture Department officials asked for hefty fees before agreeing to supply the records.
That means diners in Nova Scotia don't have the ability to verify the place they've picked to eat at is without a history of health hazards, as diners in other cities across Canada and the United States do.
"We observed room for improvement in the department's reporting on performance with respect to its food-safety responsibilities," the audit from 2001 said.
Documentation in inspection files was sometimes inconsistent and incomplete, missing inspection dates, risk ratings or even the inspection reports themselves, the audit noted after selecting the records from 2000 of 55 food-selling establishments to analyze.
Four of those places hadn't been inspected at all during the year, even though one was categorized as a high-risk establishment requiring three annual inspections and another as medium-risk, needing two inspections a year. The guidelines for these inspection frequencies were being phased in at the time.