CANADIAN LIFE SCIENCE
By Adrienne Blanchard, Ronald Doering, Joel Taller and Lewis Retik
Canada keeping pace on
food safety Food safety is an important part of the health and safety of Canadians, but we often don’t consider what it takes for a product to arrive at the dinner table.
Food safety in Canada In 2008, Canada went through a period of reflection when 23 Canadians died due to the presence of Listeria monocytogenes in ready-to-eat meat products. Following this unfortunate event, there was an independent investigation that culminated in what is referred to as the Weatherhill report. This report set out 57 recommendations ranging from reporting requirements at meat plants and recommendations on equipment design, to the training of inspectors and reviewing inspector resources. Many steps have been and continue to be taken to comply with the recommendations such as the Canadian Food Inspection Agency increasing food safety controls and implementing new procedures to reduce safety risks. Furthermore, the concept of food safety is evolving beyond just meat products to the food chain as a whole, and to food-like natural health products (NHPs). While NHPs are currently regulated as a subset of drugs, Health Canada is now taking a position that certain NHPs that look and feel like food may more appropriately be regulated as food. Health Canada is also looking at increased import controls with respect to both food (in the form of an import licence requiring each importer to have a Preventive Food Safety Control System) and natural health products (in the form of increased monitoring of good manufacturing practices).
Genetically engineered (GE) foods A topic of continued interest is that of labelling for GE foods. In the 1990s, environmentalists and others coined the term “frankenfoods” to imply foods containing genetically engineered (GE) ingredients were not safe. In the 17 years consumers have been eating GE foods, there have been no documented cases of any one taking ill by eating GE foods. Under our existing regulatory regime, which requires premarket approval for GE crops, if there is a clear, scientifically-established health risk or if the genetic modification significantly alters the nutritional value of the food, labelling is mandatory. These risks, however, have never been found and the labelling of GE foods continues to be an issue. Some groups continue to argue the public’s right to know should require mandatory labelling, enforced by government regulation. The issue is not that simple however. If GE and non-GE foods are substantially equivalent as Canada and the U.S. maintain, requiring labelling would likely confuse consumers. Consumers may conclude the labelling must mean something, but with more than 90% of processed food containing GE ingredients, labelling would not provide the consumer with much information that would be useful for decision-making. Moreover, mandatory labelling would be illegal under trade laws because without a scientific basis, the regulation would be a technical barrier to trade. The labelling issue became a hot topic in October 2011 when several media stories erroneously reported the United Nation’s Codex Alimentarius Commission (Codex) received consensus for a mandatory labelling scheme. Codex did not. What Codex did was finally achieve consensus on the rules for what would be described as containing, or
not containing, GE. Countries could adopt the standard or not as Codex is a voluntary system.
Canada’s labelling system Canada has a voluntary labelling system for genetically engineered products, which was formally adopted in April 2004 as the culmination of four years of meetings, drafts and lobbying. Under the Canadian General Standards Board, a draft standard was developed, later adopted by the Canadian Standards Council of Canada and set the voluntary standards for labelling and advertising of foods obtained, or not obtained, through genetic engineering. The Standard may be found at: http://www. tpsgc-pwgsc.gc.ca/ongc-cgsb/programmeprogram/norms-standards/internet/032-0315/ documents/commite-commmittee-eng.pdf. The essential provisions of the standard include, in section four, governing the claims that may be made about such products, requiring that they be understandable, informative, not false, not misleading and subject to verification. Section five sets out more detailed rules about making claims that foods are products of genetic engineering, setting out different rules for single-ingredient foods and multi-ingredient foods, providing for a level of 95 per cent for each, meaning that such a claim can only be made if, for single ingredient foods, more than 95 per cent of the source of the food is a product of genetic engineering. For an ingredient in a multi-ingredient food, such a claim can only be made when MARCH 2012 BIOTECHNOLOGY FOCUS 27
Hot button Issues
We typically hear about food safety issues only when something goes wrong. Canada has robust food and beverage regulatory structure and food safety policies and procedures designed to protect Canadians. This article will examine Canada’s food safety system with regard to food labelling, including that for genetically engineered foods, as well as recent changes with respect to how Natural Health Products and beverages are regulated.
