By Daniel Smith
Ottawa Public Health is still coming up short of provincially-mandated targets for food inspection.
.The city manager in charge of the program says staffing increases over the past two years have helped to improve the situation substantially since a 2003 report showed that inspectors had only done about one third of the checks required by law in that year.
Andrew Roche, program manager for the Environment and Health Protection division of Ottawa Public Health, says the city’s food inspection team had fallen behind three years ago because of staffing issues, but has been doing its best to get back on track.
“We have very much improved since then,” he says. “Our ability to increase staffing has allowed us to improve substantially.”
In 2004, City Council approved eight new jobs for food inspection. At the time, many groups lobbied council in favour of the new funding, including the Ottawa Restaurant Association, a local network of about 600 restaurateurs.
Association member Phil Waserman, who owns the Courtyard Restaurant and Mama Grazzi’s downtown, says that restaurant owners generally want regular health inspections more than anyone.
“Most of the people I know much prefer to have the correct number of inspections per year,” he says, “because it serves as a check on our procedures.”
Roche says the department has been working hard since the funding approval to recruit new blood and they are nearly finished.
“We are very close to having those positions filled,” he says. “I would say we have hired seven of the eight positions already.”
Food inspection is an issue of particular importance to Somerset Ward, which encompasses most of the Centretown area, because it has more food premises than any other ward in the city.
In 2003 it had 777, according to Roche. Of those, about 40 per cent were classified as high risk for food-borne illnesses under provincial rules.
This label is not the result of a record of poor food safety. It only means the kind of food prepared involves a lot of handling or contains ingredients more prone to food-borne illnesses. In contrast, a grocery store selling pre-packaged goods would be considered low-risk.
Before the hires, there were just over 20 inspectors on staff. The new additions represented roughly a 30 per cent increase in workers.
Roche says the added manpower has been reflected in the team’s improved record over the past two years.
Roche says 7,629 inspections were performed on the city’s 5,555 food premises in 2004.
Establishments classified as medium risk or high risk must be checked two and three times per year, respectively, meaning that 7,629 represents roughly half of the inspections that should have occurred by law that year.
In 2005, however, the team did 10,500 checks on 5,606 food vendors, which represented closer to 90 per cent of the mandated inspections.
Roche says that while stats won’t be available for 2006 until the end of the first quarter, he believes they will only bring news of further improvement.
“I am confident that the totals will reflect our aim to come as close to compliance with the provincial standards as possible.”
For those who live and eat in the area, this improvement is good news.
Centretown resident Nick Toller says the city’s inspection program is important because he trusts inspectors to tell him which establishments he should not frequent if he’d rather avoid a bout of food poisoning.
“Any place I am going to be eating at frequently, I can trust my own judgment on whether or not it is safe,” he says. “But food inspections ensure that when I’m randomly eating at different restaurants in town once or twice, I can feel more certain.”
Waserman says that restaurant owners are happy to see the increased staffing has helped Public Health gain some ground.
“I don’t know anybody who isn’t thrilled with being back at the level we were at prior to 2003,” he says. “We are quite happy to have that regularity again.”