Moldy pieces of meat and contaminated equipment. Carcasses whose provenance cannot be established. Beasts that regain consciousness during bleeding. Twenty lawsuits related to hygiene and animal welfare have been filed in two years against the Les meats B & B slaughterhouse in Marieville, which collects violations, according to hundreds of inspection reports obtained by The duty. Its owner maintains that “there has never been any moldy meat found on the market” and claims to be the victim of a “witch hunt” by the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Agriculture. Food of Quebec (MAPAQ).
June 27, 2022. While visiting the slaughterhouse, a MAPAQ inspector seized around thirty beef half-carcasses “with the presence of mold or slimy parts”. It also requires the elimination of five cases of hams packaged a month and a half earlier which were about to be delivered.
In telegraphic style, she describes the scene as follows: “Presence of mold on the ceiling, door, wall and rails. Dirty handle. Dirty corridor wall, missing tile on the ceiling. Condensation on the ceiling of the large cold room. […] Rust on some doors. »
Exceptional situation? No. The following week, MAPAQ seized fifteen beef carcasses, seven calves, two bears, one pork and one horse carcasses due to mold or contamination.
The duty obtained hundreds of inspection reports carried out between May 2022 and April 2023. These report frequent seizures of pieces of meat which, after analysis, must be either eliminated or removed from inedible parts. A number of breaches of Quebec standards are described every week: unclean equipment, inadequate storage of meat, too high temperatures in cold rooms, etc.
MAPAQ inspectors regularly denounce shortcomings in terms of traceability. In the spring of 2022, “heavily contaminated” pieces of meat were found in the delivery truck parked at the rear of the establishment. The carcasses, without stamps allowing their origin to be known, are then destroyed.
Added to this are repeated breaches of animal welfare. Among other things, the inspectors describe inadequate techniques for insensitizing animals: hanging from the rail, piglets show signs of waking up after the start of bleeding; a young ox is “hit 7 times” before being properly stunned…
In less than two years, MAPAQ’s observations led the Director of Criminal and Penal Prosecutions (DPCP) to file 20 lawsuits against the establishment, including 7 related to animal welfare and 11 to the quality of food products. For more than a year, the risk load of the delicatessen adjacent to the slaughterhouse has been considered higher by the MAPAQ.
The slaughterhouse was found guilty in four of these cases and ordered to pay $16,750 in fines. For several cases still pending, a judge should decide by the end of the year.
” Witch hunt “
Owner of the Marieville facilities since 2020, Benoît Bouffard believes that in recent years he has been the victim of “a witch hunt” by MAPAQ inspectors. He also attributes part of the company’s problems to vandalism by a disgruntled ex-employee whom he fired in recent months.
He also concedes that “small parts of offal can actually be expired”, ensuring at the same time that these are always removed: “There has never been any moldy meat found on the market. Never, never, never. We would be closed if that were the case. »
Everything is done to ensure that provincial standards are respected, assures Mr. Bouffard during a visit to the Duty in its facilities. He then shows the non-slip mats rolled out in the stable, and mentions the change in the water heating system which is used to disinfect the knives and which MAPAQ inspectors have denounced as malfunctioning for months. “And we plan to hire someone in quality control to “upgrade” and reverse engineer even better,” he says.
Mr. Bouffard maintains that by purchasing the slaughterhouse three years ago, he inherited a business that was not only in financial difficulty, but above all dysfunctional: “It’s as if we had bought a car that was beautiful from the outside.” , but who, inside, had many problems. »
Former owner Martin Noiseux – whose name the company kept until this year – refutes his accusations. The latter continued to manage the activities after the acquisition, until April 2022. He confirms that he and Mr. Bouffard had significant financial disagreements when he left, but above all that their position was irreconcilable regarding practices that could affect product quality. He cites as an example carcasses seized by MAPAQ which would have been cleaned at the slaughterhouse without the supervision of inspectors.
In the spring of 2022, former employees of the company described similar practices in depositions made to MAPAQ, which The duty consulted. In July of the same year, inspectors wrote in reports that they had noticed that pieces of meat seized because of mold had been cleaned without the supervision and authorization of inspectors.
Banned, this practice would have been committed by mistake, concedes Mr. Bouffard. “It’s true, we don’t have the right. If an employee did this, he didn’t know it, he washed [les carcasses] », he said, assuring that he never asked a worker to handle a piece of meat seized by the MAPAQ.
Loss of credibility
Mr. Bouffard also confides “learning on the job”. The businessman is above all a major broker specializing in the purchase and sale of cattle at auctions. His herd of 1,500 animals alone now constitutes “between 80% and 90%” of the animals slaughtered at the Marieville facilities.
Gold, The duty discovered that there is not only B&B meats in the sights of the authorities. Since April 2022, the DPCP has filed four lawsuits that personally target Benoît Bouffard for offenses related to product quality and animal welfare. At the end of September, he was fined $2,500 for failing to ensure the well-being and safety of an animal on one of his facilities in Sainte-Catherine-de-Hatley. The other three are awaiting trial.
His company Transport PAB Bouffard – specializing in the export of hay and beef to the United States – was the subject of two searches as part of investigations carried out by the MAPAQ in 2021. It has since been convicted for offenses related to animal traceability as well as animal welfare violations.
In the first file, the MAPAQ inspector writes that he observed cattle “in great pain” which had to be euthanized on site. The MAPAQ ordered that two animals likely to “die during transport” be sent directly to the Marieville slaughterhouse, which was ultimately not done. “ Mr. Beno[î]t Bouffard declares, after reading his rights […] that he does not know where the cows have gone and whether they have been slaughtered or not,” we read in the offense report, which led to a fine of $5,000.
The department’s second investigation into Mr. Bouffard’s transportation company stems from “numerous complaints” from the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). “The USDA is starting to question our certification system and losing its credibility,” notes a MAPAQ investigator in a document filed with the Court. There are reports of cows and a bull dying during their transport.
Questioned about these searches, Benoît Bouffard puts their importance into perspective. It would be normal for “Quebec’s largest cattle exporter” to record a few deaths, according to him. Here again, he claims to have suffered the relentlessness of a MAPAQ inspector who “wanted [s]has skin” and who “was in cahoots with an American veterinarian, from the state of New York”. He maintains that everything is fine now.
MAPAQ, for its part, refused to grant an interview on the subject of Viandes B & B, arguing that it does not comment on any particular issue. Do other slaughterhouses record as many failures and prosecutions by the ministry? A spokesperson responds: “The majority of slaughtering or processing establishments comply with the regulatory framework. »
With Lisa-Marie Gervais