By Milton Dyck, National President of the Agriculture Union
September 18, 2026
Imagine this scenario: you’re hosting an end-of-summer BBQ in your backyard with some of your closest friends and their families. You ask your guests beforehand if anyone has any food allergies (just to be on the safe side), and one of your friends replies that their daughter is allergic to eggs. So, you go out shopping beforehand, carefully checking the ingredient lists of all the frozen burgers you’re buying. On the day of the party, you’ve fired up the grill, and you throw on some chicken burgers for your friend’s daughter, confident that they will be safe to eat. But she eats them and breaks out into hives, with difficulty breathing. Lo and behold, that chicken burger you just served her actually had egg in it, despite it not being in the ingredient list.
It sounds scary, but this scenario could have easily happened at any BBQ in the last few weeks. Just before Labour Day, at the height of BBQ season, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) issued a massive nation-wide recall on Compliments brand chicken burgers because they had undeclared egg (a common allergen) in the ingredients.
What makes this even more concerning is that several recalls issued so far in September have been for undeclared or improperly labelled allergens, including protein puffs (milk), pesto (cashews) and soybean paste (peanuts).
Food recalls are a sign that our food safety system is working, at least in part. CFIA inspectors catch a faulty product or mislabeled ingredients, and it gets removed from store shelves. Because of this work, potentially dangerous foods don’t end up on your grill or in your fridge. But if you diminish the capacity of the CFIA, you weaken the shield that protects the 3 million Canadians who live with food allergies, and who depend on the agency to keep them from getting sick, or worse.
As workers on the frontlines of food inspection, we see the warning signs of the fragility of our system on a near-daily basis. The Canadian government is threatening to shut down a CFIA lab in Longueuil, Quebec, by March 2028. The closure is part of Carney’s Comprehensive Expenditure Review, which forced nearly every federal agency and department to slash 15% of their budgets. The problem, though, is that unlike other departments, CFIA has already shrunk by 3% since 2012, while our population grew by 13% in that same period. When it comes to food inspection, there is simply no more fat to trim.
The Longueuil lab serves as the only food allergy testing lab in all of eastern Canada. To come back to our backyard BBQ story, people literally depend on this lab for their lives.
Shutting down this lab would be a disaster. But the workers at the lab who we represent aren’t the only ones saying that. In fact, members of Carney’s government agree. A unanimous report published by the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Agriculture recommended that the government reverse course on the CFIA Longueuil lab closure.
Parliament resuming its Fall session on September 21st and will soon have to respond to this report. It is imperative that the government follow the recommendations of the report and keep the Longueuil CFIA lab open.
Let’s not wait for the next major food illness outbreak or avoidable allergy attack to happen before we act. Less oversight and fewer resources for food inspections spells disaster. If the CFIA is our shield against nasty illnesses or undetected allergens, let’s keep it strong.