Braid: City hall takes E. coli action, and Smith names ex-police chief who won't go easy on AHS
It’s highly unlikely that AHS, a vast and self-protective outfit, will ever blame itself for this health disaster
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The City of Calgary once did food safety inspection of restaurants and other commercial kitchens, until Alberta Health Services took it over in the early 2000s.
Civic grumbling greeted this power grab, just as it would later, when the province also took Calgary’s ambulance service.
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So it seems ironic that the city rather than the province is lowering the boom on Fueling Minds, the daycare kitchen company.
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The Fueling Minds central kitchen is associated with the E. coli poisoning (that’s what it is) of 351 Calgarians, mostly children.
On Wednesday, AHS came the closest yet to pinning down the source of the infection, saying it’s most likely connected to meatloaf and vegan loaf shipped from the kitchen to daycares, and served Aug. 29.
The company and directors face 12 city charges of operating without a food services business licence. The total penalty if convicted is up to $120,000.
The charges are possible because of a weird technicality.
Fueling Minds, the kitchen company, shipped meals to a separate company, Fueling Brains.
The city says that fact put Fueling Minds “beyond the scope” of their provincial licence. Hence the company required a city license.
(Former Liberal MLA and MP Kent Hehr, vice president of Fueling Brains, has said the two companies are separate but share “similar ownership.”)
This quirk gave the city leverage to impose, at least potentially, the only sanction beyond the kitchen closure ordered by the province.
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In the meantime AHS continues to investigate, hunting for infection origins and problems in the system, while coping with the outbreak itself.
Without doubt, the medical system’s response to the sick people and their families has been massive and caring. But there hasn’t been an unkind word from AHS about its own performance as the kitchen inspector.
Questions linger about whether provincial inspectors could have headed off the disaster with more rigorous standards and earlier closure.
The company, if it was negligent, obviously bears the huge responsibility.
But the inspection system is supposed to make sure kitchens are safe and operators comply with the rules. Isn’t that the whole point?
The earlier inspection record at Fueling Minds — 12 visits in two years — is not pretty. It’s still not clear if inspectors realized before the E. coli outbreak that food had been shipped without proper cooling and heating.
Chief medical officer of health Dr. Mark Joffe said Wednesday: “It is common when an inspector visits a facility that the transport truck is not there. Of course these inspections occur without warning. The inspector shows up and investigates or inspects the facility and the transport truck may not be there.”
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But he emphasized that all operators know, or should know, they’re required to cool food below 4 C or heat it above 60 C during transport.
Premier Danielle Smith said: “It’s possible that that may be one area that we have to have more rigour around. Based on what we’ve seen, there’s just a lot of potential points of failure.”
It’s highly unlikely that AHS, a vast and self-protective outfit, will ever blame itself for this health disaster.
Maybe Smith knows it too. She’s been very careful not to pin this on anyone so far; but remember, she’s the politician who once said AHS doesn’t know what it’s doing.
Enter Rick Hanson, former Calgary police chief. Smith has appointed him to head a panel that will review the AHS investigation.
Hanson is expected to have interim findings by year-end, with a final report expected by late January. Dr. Joffe promised Wednesday that the documents will be made public.
Hanson was one of Calgary’s great police chiefs. He will not be a pushover for AHS. If Hanson sees failures that led to this terrible outbreak, he’ll say so without restraint.
That seems to be exactly what the premier wants.
Don Braid’s column appears regularly in the Herald.
X: @DonBraid
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