“If it ain’t Alberta, it ain’t beef!” Not any more, though, thanks to the efforts of Alberta politicians, companies and the federal food inspection agency. From left to right above: Federal Agriculture Minister Gerry “Cold Cuts” Ritz, Alberta Agriculture Minister Verlyn Olson and Alberta Premier Alison Redford. Actual politicians may not appear exactly as illustrated. Below: The actual Ms. Redford and Mr. Ritz.
Today is Thanksgiving, and we give thanks the XL Foods plant in southeastern Alberta doesn’t process turkeys!
Because XL Foods, its parent company, the Alberta Progressive Conservative Government, the federal Conservative Government and the Canadian Food Inspection Agency have effectively destroyed the reputation of Alberta beef in the span of a single month.
In addition to the as-yet-undetermined problems that caused E. coli contamination inside XL Foods’ massive plant in the town of Brooks, they’ve provided a textbook example of how not to handle a public relations crisis.
First, it’s obvious that no one did any planning about how to respond if something like this happened – even though it was bound to be a possibility in any industrial food processing operation. 
When it did happen, at least on the public relations file, each of the parties involved said and did the wrong thing at every turn!
First they tried to ignore the problem, then they downplayed it, then they refused to respond to questions from journalists and the public, then they looked for someone else to blame.
Meanwhile, when they finally got around to organizing a recall of the products from the plant, the task that should have been Priority 1 on Day 1, the list of already-sold products had gown so long it was impossible for anyone to keep track of it. More than 2,000 products are now on the list, we are told. Cases of E. coli infection tied to the plant have literally spread across the country.
On Friday, media reported cases showing up on Vancouver Island in the Pacific Ocean and Newfoundland in the Atlantic! Yesterday, new cases were reported showing up again throughout Canada – as will continue for months, because many people buy meat, throw it in the freezer and forget about it until they need it.
The public relations implications of this kind of food poisoning, even from a massive meat-packing plant like the one in Brooks, could have been minimized with a swift, honest and open response, with an action plan for fixing the problem that caused the poisoning set out clearly and transparently for the worried public.
Instead, every one of the parties to this public relations disaster turtled, acting slowly if at all on the core problem while insulting us with their explanations and evasions.
Under these circumstances, calls for a public inquiry into what went wrong made by the food inspectors’ union seem entirely reasonable. How else are consumers in Canada, and beef buyers abroad, ever going to be able to trust meat from Alberta again?
After all, when we needed action and openness, everybody in a position to do anything waited for days, effectively denying there was anything wrong at all after U.S. Customs detected E. coli in beef shipped from the XL plant on Sept. 3.
The responses of both XL Foods and its parent company Nilsson Brothers were pathetic. They left recorded telephone messages for reporters, for crying out loud.
Having your spokespeople refuse to appear on camera and describe what’s being done to fix the problem – no matter how uncomfortable it makes them – just doesn’t make the cut. What conclusion are reasonable people left with but that they’ve gone into hiding?
Meanwhile, Conservative politicians at two levels of government blandly assured us we had nothing to worry about and advised us to keep eating beef. “Let’s remember to cook it well,” Alberta Premier Alison Redford patronizingly advised us. Alberta Agriculture Minister Verlyn Olson went shopping for steaks with TV cameras in tow.
CFIA blamed the company (which still wasn’t saying anything) for being slow providing information. It insisted it had enough inspectors. Provincial Tories denied it was their problem and made it clear the feds regulate the plant. Everybody pointed out it was just one plant – forgetting to mention it’s one plant that’s so big it processes 40 per cent of the beef in Canada!
Federal Agriculture Minister Gerry “Cold Cuts” Ritz held a news conference and then had his media flunkies help him escape when he couldn’t or wouldn’t answer the questions reporters threw at him. Someone even tried to blame a cow!
The damage from this gong show to Alberta beef’s hitherto impeccable “brand” – that hard-to-define concept of a promise of values, benefits and costs, consistently delivered, that establishes satisfaction when compared with the competition – is immeasurable.
In the case of Alberta beef, it may take a generation or more to fix it. Photo opportunities of politicians buying steaks in their local grocery stores or right-wing bloviators calling consumers names for being rightfully concerned about the health and cleanliness of the food they plan to feed to their families won’t help one bit.
Damaged brands can be repaired, of course – just look at the successful effort by former Conservative prime minister Brian Mulroney, once the most hated man in Canada, to get good ink in the media. But it takes time and costs money.
Drug-maker Johnson & Johnson’s swift and open response to the 1982 Tylenol tampering murders in Chicago is generally held to be the textbook example of the right way to deal with a public relations crisis.
The company co-operated with authorities, was completely open and honest with the public and media about the nature and magnitude of what happened, immediately and voluntarily recalled the product, and aggressively and transparently moved to ensure nothing like that could ever happen again.
Tylenol sales plummeted briefly, then rebounded. Tylenol, its name unchanged, today remains the one of the most popular painkiller brands in North America, even as we curse the multiple layers of packaging that make another case of deadly tampering all but impossible.
So what’s the plan for cleaning up the XL Foods plant and making sure this won’t happen again either? Informing the public about where their meat originates? Hiring lots of federal inspectors, unbiased and not beholden to the company?
The trouble with these ideas – which would help to solve both the E. coli problem and the resulting PR disaster – is that they’re not what either our provincial or federal Conservatives governments want to do.
No, they’re all for “less regulation” and more privatization. They’re determined to cut government services to “save” us from tax increases. And there’s no way they want to make it easy for consumers to identify where their meat comes from because they know how we would respond – we’d buy our beef from anywhere else and, like General Motors, XL Foods is too big to fail.
So don’t expect any more openness in the weeks ahead from the party whose unofficial motto is “never apologize, never explain” than we’ve seen up to now.
Alberta’s beef producers spent a lot of energy and money on a brand-building campaign that persuaded the world, “If it ain’t Alberta, it ain’t beef.”
In one month, the disaster perpetrated by two companies, two Conservative governments and a frightened, politicized food inspection agency have turned this into, “If it’s from Alberta, it ain’t safe!”
You can’t fix this problem by changing what we call beef, after all, although it wouldn’t be surprising if we discovered these clowns were thinking of something like “If it ain’t from the unnamed territory between Saskatchewan and B.C. … it ain’t … uh … bovine comestibles!” (And I do mean clowns. Who can forget Mr. Ritz’s side-splitter about the death of a thousand cold cuts during the 2008 listeriosis crisis?)
Well, Alberta beef’s brand is going to have to be fixed. Unfortunately, that’s going to cost us taxpayers a lot of money and Alberta’s beef farmers a lot of time, tears and bankruptcies.
This post also appears on Rabble.ca.
It is not the Alberta beef itself that is the problem, its the processing plant. I’d eat Alberta beef as long as it doesn’t come from the XL factory. Part of the problem with plants as large as the XL is that once the food is contaminated its goes all over the country. Plants that large are not able to keep track of the food nor are the able to keep them clean. To have safe food the factories have to be clean. Operations this large are not going to be clean because at no point does everything stop for it to be cleaned.
I for one purchase my meat locally from small operations where you can actually see where it is processed.
The federal cons don’t really care if we die, as long as their friends corporations don’t have topay taxes. What the cons haven’t realized is if people get sick & die, there will be less of us to pay those taxes. The bums need to be tossed out of office. They are putting people at risk for no other reason than they want to reduce the federal service.
A pre-neanderthal federal government and a far too cozy kissing cousin Alberta provincial government are jointly succeeding wildly, willfully and permanently via the great Tar Sands/Pipelines in eroding (nay.. trashing) Canadian identity (ugh.. ‘Brand’) and permanently harming/stripping our actual environment.. How could they possibly fail regarding Food Safety and Alberta Beef Brand husbandry ?
Uh .. the same way they fail re farmed versus wild salmon or asbestos …. sheer ignorance and incompetence & arrogance. And a willingness to roll up their sleeves and practice serious and serial obstruction, secrecy, greed and amazingly transparent and obvious incompetence. Its possible that prayer and chastity may deter cooties, infection and warble flies .. but as a kid on that growed up on a beef farm, I never saw no proof, ever… Perhaps city boy Stephen Harper, the expert on everything including hockey, knows better.. and that things will .. just get better.. umm
If you have strong or incoherent views or short memory span about creationism, omnibus bills, trans genders in public washrooms, election promises, helicopter rides, baseless smears, selling resources to our great friend China,, you can have a seat at the parliamentary poker table farce in Ottawa regarding Alberta Beef, bitumen, the United Nations, global cooling, First Nations treaties, F-35 bomb loads, free trade, Israel.. Muskoka gazebos.. or outsourcing electoral tasks to American live/robo phone call service providers.
I demand to know where Joe Oliver stands on this Alberta Beef Debacle.. Is Alberta Beef not a natural resource ?
Where is John Baird on this foreign matter, e coli? Where is Dean Del Mastro… ? These are two beefy dudes !
Call Tony Clement… surely federal money is involved.. spent or unspent !!
Convene the Ministry of Religious Freedom .. anyone !! help !! Jason Toews (ulp)
Call Ezra Levant … or.. put Pork On Your Fork ! Gobble Gobble …. Alberta Lamb
‘Cook it well’ ……. um, hmmm …. a pinch of salt may help …
I have only the smallest of quibbles. Alberta beef, on the hoof, is just fine, wonderful, and the ranchers by and large are producing a great product. No, the ranchers are not the problem, but unfortunately will be taking the biggest hit. If I were them I’d be finding alternate sources of processing.
It’s the industrial scale processing by an industry obsessed with cutting costs and increasing production that is the problem. It’s the lack of regulation and oversight by the government and agencies responsible. You’ve hit the nail on the head there.
How will it play out in consumer land? Some will go back to their (dare I say it) bovine complacency. Many others are going to be asking hard questions about the supply chain when they buy beef. There are many small producers that would love to have a bigger market share, their sin is that they charge slightly more for their product. And some, some will never again eat Alberta beef. Let’s see, that just leaves lamb, bison, pork, goat, several kinds of venison, several kinds of poultry, and probably a number of other forms of animal protein that are not coming to mind at the moment.
This is a predictable result of Klien’s Alberta advantage. No regulations or at least no regulators to enforce whatever regulations exist. And every man for himself. Some get rich, most don’t. Some live high on the hog (or ‘bull’, as the case may be), some die.
It’s too true that the ‘market ‘ is the ultimate determinent, but in the process a whole society can be wiped out. Is this what we want?
Regarding the comments by E.A.F. and Keith, both have nailed it on separate points. Keith is right that Alberta beef farmers produce the best beef on the planet. E.A.F is bang on in suggesting that the biggest problem here is the sheer scale of the XL plant in Brooks – once there’s a problem, it gets sent everywhere. All the more reason for a swift, transparent response. I am not so confident in the quality of the small neighbourhood operations we’re hearing so many positive reviews about lately. I think the chances of E. coli or other food poisoning problems are about as great in many of them, greater in some. It’s just that the distribution of contaminated food is not as extensive. I will tell you this: as agricultural reporter for the Calgary Herald many, many years ago I toured both the XL plant at Brooks and the Cargill slaughterhouse at High River. Based on that experience, I would prefer to buy my beef from High River. DJC
I must take some exception to Alberta ranchers producing good beef. Most (not all) of them turned their cattle into cannibals by using the bovine protein supplements which polluted our herd (and land!) with BSE (mad cow) prions. It was less than two years ago that yet another BSE cow in Alberta was detected – years AFTER the isolation measures we were told would make BSE a thing of the past were put into effect.
During the BSE outbreak in Europe, Alberta ranchers wholly supported the Klein Conservatives when they dismantled our (35 or so) state of the art animal health laboratories complete with veterinary pathologists serving the ranching community across the whole province.
The cattle people have always been too insular to realize the importance of government and collective action. Now they are reaping what they have sown – they are “free” to be exploited by the oligarchs. My sympathies are not all that they should be.
To be fair, a few of them did try to set up alternative processing plants but they were sabotaged by the Provincial government’s determination to let the market rule in favour of the oligarchs.
Speaking of collective action, Federal Ag Minister Ritz is also privatizing millions of acres of Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Act native grasslands which are critical to cattle grazing in much of the southern prairies.
http://www.cowboycountrymagazine.com/index.php/featured-content/features2?79a998c1d124dfae57c9f97f9e2b9df9=f4799523560bd5c9526dd4d44c2d437a
On the other hand this could be God’s way of telling us to cook your meat until it’s blacker than the ace of spades.
There’s a reason why we were given fire. It’s a lesson our ancestors learned. Fire kills harmful bugs. Fire is our friend.
I believe there’s a reference in the bible about Adam and Eve being banished from pardise (after Eve led Adam astray) and soon after Eve began experimenting with this crazy modern cooking ideas of medium rare and extra rare.
We have been playing with fire ever since.
What a complete and utter mess. I’m glad to hear that the food inspection agency managed to get the word out, even after being interrupted by a “government spokesperson” at a news conference, that they had not received the inspection reports they had requested in a timely fashion. And taking the FIA out of the Health Canada orbit and putting it into Agriculture could obviously cause an clash of interests.
This is the same deadly killer that caused the Walkerton, Ontario water supply contamination. The fact that the beef was cooked at all, even if insufficiently to kill the E. coli, probably did enough damage to it to ensure that people were only sickened and not killed by the bacteria.
There is a vaccine available that can disable, if not completely eliminate, E. coli in cattle but the cost, at $4 an animal, is considered to be “too expensive”. But what did this massive recall, the health care of the people who got sick and the damage to the industry cost?
As for the government response, it was pitiful, as it was when listeria contaminated cold-cuts and when an inadequate supply of flu vaccine and botched delivery system of what there was caused chaos. Cons messed around with an already perfectly adequate system so they could make their response part of the Con “brand”. Their own system was a disaster.
Some of the E. coli was on steaks from Costco, which Costco tenderized. Apparently this could drive the E. coli deeper into the meat so that cooking would not kill all of it.
http://www.edmontonsun.com/2012/09/26/costcos-meat-tenderizing-process-halted-after-e-coli-tainted-steaks-linked-to-edmonton-store
http://scathinglywrongrightwingnutz.blogspot.ca/2012/10/wheres-ecoli.html
HEY FOLKS
THIS IS A WAKE UP CALL TO THROW OUT THE PROGRESSIVE CONSERVATIVES HERE IN ALBERTA AND ELECT A.B.C. ANYONE BUT CONSERVATIVES …WAKE UP ALBERTANS AND THROW THOSE 35 YEAR BASTARDS AND THEIR 35% SALARY INCREASES AND THERE OUTRAGES SEVERENCE PACKAGES PACKING…WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU WAITING FOR…A REFERENDOM MAY BE WHAT IS NEEDED…IF SO THAN SO BE IT…ANYTHING IS BETTER THAN ELECTING THE SAME BUNCH EVERY TIME…DOOOO SOMETHING…..WAKE THE HELL UP.