Canada Plans Tough Food Safety Laws

Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper has outlined radical plans to improve the safety of imported and exported foods — after admitting the country had fallen behind when it came to regulation.

He said last week that the country was a decade behind others when it came to product recall legislation. The Premier said there was a need to improve legislation because of growing concern over safety.

New powers will include giving the government the ability to issue mandatory product recalls.

He said: "There is a growing concern about the safety of some of the products on the market… even worse are some incidence involving food and drug…. the California spinach that was tainted with E. coli.

"The truth is product safety regulation in Canada is not as rigorous as it should be. In the past decade and a half we have fallen behind other industrialized countries, including some of our trading partners.

"We need to set and enforce state-of-the-art safety standards for domestic and imported goods."

Food safety is a global issue, and Harper cited an E. coli outbreak in the U.S. as one of the problems to have faced the industry. In 2006 the U.S. was in the grip of an E. coli outbreak which lead to 205 confirmed illnesses and three deaths. The source of the outbreak was traced back to contaminated spinach in California.

Read the full FoodProductionDaily.com story here.