maple leaf foods

Backyard hens provide a cheap, nutritious and regular source of protein for little investment. Cities can do more to help Canadians embrace them.

Your top financial and economic news for Sept. 29

A scorecard on the state of the economy in North America and beyond

This week: the NHL, Twitter over sex, and why going bald is better

Foodies bring charcuterie home, making everything from bacon to prosciutto

Some boys yearned to be firefighters or astronauts—others aimed for the bacon

Canadians’ love of the sub is feeding a new fast-food industry

Randomly selected excerpts from Gerry Ritz’s press conference this afternoon.

Eventually, a nosy reporter with time (and column inches) to fill during the Christmas-to-New-Year’s news holiday may start asking annoying questions about why it still hasn’t gotten underway, which will lead to the revelation that nearly four months later, the government hasn’t even appointed a lead investigator for its promised probe into last summer’s listeriosis outbreak.

The meat maker puts an industry insider in charge of food safety

An as-yet-unnamed prime ministerial appointee, of course, with a mandate to “examine the efficiency and effectiveness of the response of the federal organizations … [and] their food safety partners.”

What’s not clear, however, is whether that will include Maple Leaf Foods or any other private company involved in the recall, despite recent media reports that suggest the outbreak could have been caused by contaminated meat slicers.

NOTE:  Less than an hour after this release came out, PMO put out an updated version, which sets March 15, 2009 as the deadline for the final report.