It’s maddening to watch governments mess up in monumental fashion and the media offer as a solution - more government.
Cases in point: the Maple Leaf Foods listeriosis outbreak and the Sunrise propane explosion in Toronto.
Two decades ago, it was suggested that deli-style foods be irradiated after processing to kill hitchhiking bacteria. The usual suspects from the anti-nuclear and anti-innovation crowds objected, and craven governments bowed to the pressure.
A former Liberal government, reacting to the failure of government inspection that levelled a propane facility in 1986, said it would propose a model bylaw for propane storage.
What happened? Nothing.
Much of the media have used both incidents to campaign for more inspectors and more direct government control, which is exactly the wrong approach.
In the particular case of propane, there is a concerted push on to dismantle the Technical Standards & Safety Authority, the not-for-profit stand-alone agency that is responsible for public safety inspection.
Until Sunrise, TSSA appeared to have produced results, in terms of safety (higher) and cost (lower), better than those of the civil servants who previously had the task, hobbled as they were by competing priorities and rigidly bureaucratic operating procedures. TSSA’s only mandate is public safety.
Yet, even before investigations are concluded, the critics now want to return that inspection duty to government departments.
They even dredge up, like the Creature from the Black Lagoon, the tainted water tragedy at Walkerton and attempt to blame it on “privatization” and the premier of the time, Mike Harris.
(Whenever you hear Ontario’s chattering classes intone the phrase “Mike Harris,” think of it not as the name of a real person but simply as the ritual calling-up of the source of all evil.)
Walkerton’s water supply was public when it had its problems. Back then it was run by the municipal government. Incompetent unionized municipal waterworks officials tried to lie and bluff their way through an E. coli contamination. The supposed watchdogs from the provincial environment ministry didn’t seem to notice.
It was a private water-testing laboratory that discovered the problem and promptly informed Walkerton - only to have the information ignored.
Walkerton’s water has since been privatized, to the benefit of everyone.
The case of Maple Leaf Foods is even more bizarre. Heavy duty scrutiny by on-site inspectors missed the listeria contamination - yet the critics laud even more government inspection as the solution, and issue dire warnings against a mythical “privatization.”
To his credit, Premier Dalton McGuinty refused to rush to judgment on whether TSSA was doing its job properly, although it is problematic whether his ban-happy and union-dependent government will continue to hang tough on the agency. It’s an easy way out for him to shift blame to “Mike Harris.” (There’s that name again; reach for your cross and garlic.)
In contrast, the federal government, which has hired 200 more food inspectors in the recent past, panicked and announced it was going to hire 58 more.
Unfortunately, neither governments, nor their media lickspittles, want people to know the dirty little secret of all public-safety regulation: it is actually and always has been self-regulation, even in plants like Maple Leaf Foods where inspectors are stationed full-time.
Just think of the last time you ate in a restaurant. No inspector was watching the food preparers, and the chance of the ingredients in the food you are getting having been “inspected” before it got to the restaurant is probably in the one-per-cent range.
The underlying premise of regulation is that people want to do the right thing. Regulation provides them with a framework within which to safely work out the delivery of the service or product that they are putting into the marketplace.
Safety is a process, and a culture, not a conclusion.
Does anyone doubt that Maple Leaf Foods wants to produce contamination-free food regardless of whether an inspector sits at every employee elbow?
Or that propane operators don’t want their businesses to blow up?
What is noticeable about the listeriosis outbreak is that it was caught by what amounted to system analysis, a statistical bump in the iPHIS (Integrated Public Health Information System) reporting data - in other words by a public-sector agency doing its proper overview job, not staffing a production line.
As a society, we’re getting better and better at making systematic rather than spot approaches to safety work well; for example, HACCP (Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point) in the food industry.
No safety system is foolproof, of course, because humans are involved, and people will make mistakes. Some will even deliberately dodge rules, and systems should be aimed at ferreting such people out.
But making civil servants responsible for either propane safety or food safety in the old-fashioned, government-department, eyeballing way is not the answer, and, despite a Luddite media, never will be in the 21st century.
Derek Nelson is a freelance writer who spent 19 years at Queen’s Park. His e-mail is [email protected].
