CFIA plans October meetings to gather feedback on food labeling rules

Wednesday, September 11, 2013

by SUSAN MANN

Two of the Canadian Food Inspection Agency’s meetings next month to consult people on its plans to modernize food labelling rules are in Ontario.

A meeting is planned for Oct. 8 in Ottawa while another will be held Oct. 22 in Toronto. They’re both on from noon to 4:30 p.m. and preregistration is required. The registration deadline for the Ottawa meeting is Oct. 1. For the Toronto one it’s Oct. 15.

Other meetings are planned for Halifax, Montreal and Vancouver. CFIA advises people to register early because space is limited and it asks that only a maximum of two representatives per organization attend the meetings.

In a notice on its website, the CFIA says the key objectives of the meetings “are to identify your food labelling issues within the focus of the food labelling modernization initiative. Our aim is to work together to collect and prioritize the issues that are important to you.”

Ontario Federation of Agriculture president Mark Wales says their long-standing concern is “product of Canada” labelling. “The last change they (the federal government) made, they got it wrong.”

OFA isn’t planning to attend the meetings but the Canadian Federation of Agriculture will be going to the Ottawa meeting, he notes.

Wales says the previous change requiring the product to have 98 per cent Canadian content to be labelled ‘product of Canada’ was wrong. But 85 per cent Canadian content to be able to use that label is workable, practical and achievable.

So anything that has 85 per cent of the product coming from Canada should be called ‘product of Canada,’ he notes.  

“If you’re making a processed product and you must have anything specialty in it, getting 98 per cent content is unachievable unless it’s an absolutely pure product and it’s only one thing,” he explains.

Wales also recommends the government get rid of terms such as “roasted, toasted, packaged, washed or bagged” in Canada for items using the product of Canada label because they mislead consumers into thinking the product is Canadian. Consumers only see the “Canada” in that label and don’t realize that the item wasn’t grown here. “They think it’s Canadian because they see Canada but they don’t get the roasted or the bagged or the processed part,” he says. BF