I wonder if Gerry Ritz will crack a few jokes?

In spite of an apparently gratuitous swipe at his federal counterpart, the Ontario Chief Medical Officer of Health clearly lays the blame for the deaths of two dozen Canadians last summer on the Canadian Food Inspection Agency:

July 16.. . two residents of a nursing home in Toronto became ill with listeriosis. One died. The listeriosis outbreak was traced to deli meats from a Maple Leaf Foods plant in Toronto. But the Canadian Food Inspection Agency did not tell health officials until Aug. 14 that meats contaminated with the listeria bacteria might also have been distributed to grocery stores and deli counters. . . The public did not become aware of the problem until Aug. 19, when the CFIA announced a broad recall of Maple Leaf products.

The CFIA report, which as the Globe reports, was also "quietly posted" today on "a government website", also contains what I think is something of a bombshell.
Buried in section 4.2 of the report, we read that Maple Leaf Foods apparently had found listeria bacteria on surfaces in the problem plant repeatedly between May and August. But they didn't tell CFIA about it until after the scandal broke.

Subsequent to the outbreak, Est. 97B {the Maple Leaf Foods plant] staff provided the CFIA with documentation that the environmental sampling program for Est. 97B had identified positive results for Listeria spp. on a number of occasions between May - August.

Now, they hadn't been finding it in the products they were testing, but they weren't actually testing very many products, only one batch a month. Maple Leaf Food's procedure, when they did find listeria on surfaces, was to clean and retest:

The MLF Directive for Environmental Listeria spp. Swab Monitoring, outlines the corrective actions to be followed when a positive result is found, including additional sanitation action and retesting to verify that the site sampled no longer had Listeria.

So when the listeria bacteria kept on showing up, why didn't anyone think there might be a problem?

Need a lift?

Watch

Thanks

Thanks very much to everyone who voted for me at the F-Word Blog awards -- I am honoured and humbled to report that I made it into the finalist round in the "Best Political blog" category. Here are the other fine blogs also in this finalist round:

Challenging the Commonplace
Womanist Musings
Alison at Creekside

And this is an extremely impressive group of bloggers.
Final voting is this weekend, April 18 and 19.
And thanks again, Alison, for nominating me.

"Party like its 1773"? Huh?

Here are some of the suggestions for protest signs from a tea party event listed on the Pajamas TV website:

Party like it's 1773
Home ownership is not an entitlement
Cut Taxes, Not Deals
Next Time, Read the Bill Before You Sign It
You Can't Borrow to Prosperity
Don't Mortgage the Future
Solve Problems, Don't Sweep Them Under the Table
220 Years to Build the Republic, 1 Month to Destroy It

Pretty incoherent and not particularly snappy -- and what the heck is "Party like its 1773" all about anyway?
"Make Love, Not War" and "No War for Oil" were a lot better, I think, but then those were for protests that actually made sense. The so-called "tea parties" are astroturfed.

Here's your shot of pessimism for this week

Digby refers us to two articles today:
First one by Stirling Newbery says don't look for the American economy because you won't find it:

Taking out the defense and financial sectors, and the unemployment rate in the United States isn't the headline 8.5%, but is, in fact, closer to 15% and marching upwards. There is no domestic economy for all practical purposes at this point, other than what is needed to extract every loose dime from the American public to pay off debts.

And Numerian at the Agonist says this isn't going to end well

. . . When the financing tap is finally shut off by the bond markets, we’ll start making our first interest payments on this new debt. It will come in the form of much higher long term interest rates, a weaker U.S. dollar, an inability to import cheap Chinese goods, and declining living standards. All this will happen because the U.S. will have eaten its seed corn. Its businesses will have been shorn of their retained earnings. Consumers will have depleted the equity in their homes. The ability of the federal government to raise taxes and protect the good faith and credit of the U.S. will be shot . . .
The U.S. will be approaching peak oil and water shortages at the very moment it runs out of financial equity and taxing power. It will be an ugly situation . . .

So what do we do, cash out the pension and head for the hills? Well, I suppose there's nothing wrong with being a little more self-sufficient...

Great line of the day

The War Nerd writes about why there are still aircraft carriers and I think this may also be the reason why it was so damned important in Washington to save Citibank and AIG and all the rest of the financial dinosaurs on Wall Street:

. . . whether it’s knights charging with lances on very expensive horses or top gun brats like McCain zooming onto carrier decks in history’s most expensive aircraft, you’ll always find that the worst, most over-funded services are always the ones where the rich kids go to show their stuff. Seriously: why are there aircraft carriers? For asses like John McCain to crash on. Why do they keep getting funded long after they’ve been shown up? The same reason knights were galloping around pretending that the longbow hadn’t turned half their friends into pincushions: because it was a way of life for the richest and dumbest people in the country and they weren’t about to let it go.

Emphasis mine.

Canadian unity

So at least this recession will be good for something -- Alberta is finally joining the rest of us in bitching at Ottawa for better treatment.

Great line of the day

As quoted by the Freeway blogger

"In this world of sin and sorrow there is always something to be thankful for; as for me, I rejoice that I am not a Republican." - H. L. Mencken

Saturday Morning Cartoon

"Yoiks and away!"

Thanks for the nomination

Thanks, Alison, for the nomination as Best Feminist political blog over at A Creative Revolution's The Canadian F-word Blog Awards.
It is truly an honour to be nominated in this category.

Things I didn't know

I didn't know that CBC Radio had an interview show about bands playing in Toronto.
I didn't know that Willie Nelson was on tour with Billy Bob Thornton's band.
I didn't even know that Billy Bob Thornton HAD a band.
Well, now I do.
It's sort of painful to watch someone I formerly admiredact like a jerk and screw up both their acting career and their music career in one little interview.
But I guess drugs will do that to you.
UPDATE: Buh-bye

Great line of the day

From TBogg

Sometimes it's hard to believe that these people are the end result of the fastest sperm in the load.

Shorter

Shorter Glenn Greenwald:

Old bums exit there; new bums enter here.

How to play golf

A good walk, spoiled.

The Globe and Mail should be ashamed of itself

Oooh, that Barak -- sooo scary!!!
The Globe and Mail should be ashamed of itself, putting John Ibbitson's ridiculous, ideological smear job against Obama on its front page -- illustrated with hammers and sickles, no less.
Wanna-be Villager Ibbitson lashes about with all sorts of labels -- socialist, interventionist, activist -- but nothing sticks.
He quotes those models of balanced bipartisanship like Mike Huckabee and the Hudson Institute and the National Review, all in service of his premise that Obama shouldn't be trying to change America.
He also rewrites history to conform to his storyline:

The best and the brightest is how author David Halberstam dubbed those who advised Mr. Johnson and John F. Kennedy before him. They believed they could win the war in Vietnam while reshaping health care, education, housing and civil rights —the Great Society, it was called.
But they didn't know what they didn't know, as former defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld liked to say. They failed to appreciate the complexity of the issues, and they paid the price in quagmires.
Is Mr. Obama leading us into a domestic Vietnam? Is the ambition and complexity of his agenda bound to overwhelm an administration that has taken on more than any White House could possibly handle?

Actually, this is wrong -- Johnson's Great Society did not fail at all, in fact much of what he did is still benefiting America -- the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, Medicare, federal funding for education, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts, PBS, urban renewal.
Where he failed was with Vietnam, but that failure was so massive that it overshadowed Johnson's successes.
Ibbitson does at least talk to Howard Dean, who derides the premise that Obama is doing too much:

"I hate to ruin your article, but I think that's a ludicrous proposal."

That about sums it up, John.