Anybody who has been reading this blog for more than a few days will know about my campaign to make the Ontario government aware of the havoc it is causing among small butchers. I mean the kind of small butchers who prepare specialty British meats such as haggis and black pudding.
Welcome "British Canadian" Newspaper Readers
If you read my article on page 2 of the March issue of the "British Canadian" newspaper, I want to thank you for taking the trouble to also read this blog. Keep reading this post to find out how you can help.
What's All the Fuss About John?
I'll give a summary here to save new readers the trouble of finding and reading my previous posts on the topic. The Government of Ontario's Ministry of Agriculture Food and Rural Affairs (OMAFRA) has introduced new regulations for the production of cooked meats. Meat processing plants must now obtain a licence and satisfy OMAFRA's stringent requirements for safety standards.
So far, you may think that all sounds very reasonable. But, OMAFRA is applying the same standards to one-man butcher shops as it does to giant corporations. Small butcher shops are being forced to spend huge sums of money to comply with the new regulations. The amounts involved are way above any reasonable amount that a small butcher shop might be able or willing to invest.
Rather than having the lifeblood squeezed out of their veins, small butcher shops are just closing their doors and giving up their livelihoods. The last time I wrote about this, just a few days ago, the big chopper was hanging over my butcher's head. Blighty's Tuck Store buys meats from Empire Meats in Durham, Ontario. Now that axe has fallen.
Another Butcher is Closing its Doors Forever
Saturday, 14th March 2009 will be the last day of business for Empire Meats. The shop will be closing its doors forever. The auctioneer will arrive a week later and auction off the shop's assets. I spoke with Empire's owner, Kevin Soady-Easton, today when he arrived to deliver the final order to Blighty's. Kevin has been forced into premature retirement and the business he has spent 11 years building will be wiped out by the uncaring hand of the mindless bureaucrats of the provincial government.
Deaf, Blind, Senseless Bureaucracy
Kevin and I will both continue to fight the government in every way we can. We may be able to save other butchers and thereby save the supply of haggis and black pudding in Ontario. We are not optimistic that we can win out over a deaf, blind and senseless government bureaucracy but we are going to give it our very best shot.
Is It Really All That Bad?
Ask yourself a question. Was it small butcher shops or a giant corporation that recently poisoned and killed several people through negligence? The giant corporations will still be with us but the little guys will be out on the street - unemployed. And will the giant meat processing corporations step up to the plate and give us haggis and black pudding? If you don't know the answer to that one try buying a big corporate branded pack of haggis in your local supermarket! So is it really all that bad? Yes, it's a disaster!
How Can You Help?
For a start, you can vote in the poll on this blog. Look over in the right hand column on this page and have your say. The poll is completely anonymous so please, just do it! You can also add your comment to this post (use the comment link below). You can comment anonymously if you wish. If you want to do more, write to your MPP and ask them for help. The battles are being lost but the war isn't over yet.
I have always despised government interference in the private lives of the population that pay its wages. I knew there would be fall-out when Maple Leaf Foods started killing people, and as always the brainless, vote-buying automatons in Queens Park never fail to disappoint. The result is a three-fold problem, and isn’t so much about sanitation as it is about posturing.
ReplyDeleteFirstly, people have been killed, headlines have been made, and so Ms Dombrowsky gets a chance to snatch a career building opportunity out of it by sticking her largely unwanted face into the public eye. As an ex-pat I’ll come to the defense of small British food producers, but the vast majority of people in Ontario couldn’t care a whit. Dombrowsky gets to posture, and the public gets the impression that the government is doing something effective.
Secondly: we as a group, have absolutely no representation in any level of government, anywhere in this country. You see, we aren’t visible. There are programs, policies and departments at every level of government to support, promote and some cases literally enforce the interests of special groups such as: women; visible minorities, aboriginal Canadians, and people with disabilities, but absolutely nothing for the rest of us.
Brit ex-pats have no social cache, there’s no percentage in advocating for us, and anyone who does usually gets derided by the media. Our objections fall on completely deaf ears, even though we pay the same taxes as everyone else, we have no real representation. Dombrowsky and the liberals will do whatever it takes to buy votes, and there is no social or media value in championing us. I’d safely speculate that if these businesses were women-owned, aboriginal or Jamaican, the media would be all over this issue with headlines screaming: “government abuses vulnerable group, government accused of discriminatory policies, and Dombrowsky seen as insensitive and uncaring”.
Thirdly, the shear fraudulent corruption and incompetence of the Canadian civil service. There are so many things going wrong at the moment, so many areas where real action is needed that regulating little neighborhood butchers and specialty food manufacturers is in all practicality, completely worthless. But governmental departments govern the people they can, those with something to lose, such as homes, businesses, and self-respect. The civil service tends to focus all of its efforts and recommendations on the working middle class. Why? Because they can. Ask yourself: are these new regulations really necessary? Were appropriate sanitary procedures in practice before all this? Could the problems at Maple Leaf Foods be more attributable to the attitudes of their front-line workers than the company’s standard sanitary policies? Could their workers even read English, and were they trained and supervised adequately? I wonder; I really do.
Indications are that the biggest disasters of all time were the result of a compilation of small mistakes. I have to believe that if over the years poor sanitary practices were applied throughout the food industry tens of thousands of cases of listeria, salmonella and the like would have occurred long before now, but this is a recent phenomenon. So what happened, and why revamp the regulations now?
Well perhaps with workers rights and labour tribunals and so forth, Maple Leaf, and other large producers simply can’t adequately supervise their work force, and with large scale poisonings happening, maybe the civil service has suggested the government enact a law that would put the sanitary operation of their plants directly under provincial jurisdiction. Can’t motivate or discipline a careless worker? No problem, bring in the very people who protect his rights: the government.
Rather than amend ineffective labour laws and truly get to what could be the heart of the problem, the government creates a regulation that in the long-term supports their friends in big business, postures nicely for the public and produces a neutral response from special interest or labour groups. The civil service gets to do what it does best: mindlessly impose regulations on the only “governable’ people in this country: the working middle class.
Believe me; governments govern the people they can: working, middle class Canadians, people with something to lose and no cohesive chance for rebuttal. Dombrowsky, ineffective, posturing jackass that she is, has done what politicians and the civil service in this country have always done: support big business, pose for the media, and risk as few votes as possible.
Okay for what it’s worth, I protest, but this is just another nail in coffin of Anglo Saxon Canada.
Thanks for your support. We may have no representation, as you say, but if every one of us stands up and protests the government will have to pay attention.
ReplyDeleteSadly, too many people will just bury their heads in the sand, shrug their shoulders and think there is nothing that can be done about it.