Mark Tijssen and his church friends worry about the quality of animals that end up in the commercial food chain.
The Ottawa area group, which jokingly calls itself the Christian Meat Cutters Association, refuses to have anything to do with what they say is Canada’s listeriosis-plagued meat processing industry, so each November they pool their funds and personally select a few locally-grown, healthy beef cattle at a livestock auction in Greely. Their only concession to the beef industry is to allow a trusted and licensed slaughterhouse owner to kill and butcher the animals, leaving them with legally-inspected quarters of meat to share.
After that, they cut the meat themselves into smaller pieces. No one else touches their meat.
That includes a group of intelligence officers from the Ministry of Natural Resources and Ottawa police who are in the thick of a criminal investigation into what they think is an illegal slaughterhouse run out of Tijssen’s garage. Last month, they set up a stakeout at his house and at another Ottawa area farm. For the past three weeks, they’ve been stopping vehicles leaving Tijssen’s property in a hunt for illegal meat.
Tijssen became aware of the investigation on Nov. 11, when officers stopped a car and seized what Tijssen admits was a few pounds of uninspected and, therefore, illegal pork from a pig killed at his house.
Tijssen said he told investigators that he and a friend had bought and slaughtered the pig together to share the meat, not knowing they had broken Ontario’s Food Safety and Quality Act by transporting it off his property.
The seizure spooked the members of the Christian Meat Cutters Association. Fearing confiscation of what they believed to be their legal and properly inspected beef, hanging in Tijssen’s garage, they decided to hide it.
By the time four police cruisers and two MNR trucks came “screaming” into his driveway two days later in what Tijssen called a “show of force,” the $2,300 in beef was gone. Despite stakeouts and interrogations, the investigators have yet to lay their hands on the meat or even to identify other members of the Christian Meat Cutters.
“It was a good thing because it would all be impounded right now and rotting somewhere. It wouldn’t be the wholesome food it was meant to be,” says an unrepentant Tijssen, who, with a University of Guelph degree in biomedical toxicology, knows more about food safety than the average citizen.
He says MNR officials should have realized “immediately” upon entering his garage that he was not running a slaughterhouse. The garage has not been modified to process meat, doesn’t even have drains or a source of high-pressure hot water, nor does it have the tell-tale blood spatters on the walls.
He says he only butchers an average of two pigs a year and the Christian Meat Cutters Association “cuts and wraps” two or three cows a year. It’s all for personal use.
He says he was interrogated by MNR officers at his dining room table while a friend put his eight-year-old son to bed. He readily admitted that the pork was transported illegally, but said he was unaware the law had been changed in 2001 and 2005, making it illegal to move uninspected meat off his property.
“If anybody had dropped that in my mailbox, no pork would have left here from an uninspected pig,” Tijssen says, adding he’s willing to take future pigs to the slaughterhouse.
The officers then began questioning Tijssen about the beef.
“I asked, ‘What beef?’ I was told the beef that was hanging in the garage. I said, ‘What beef hanging in the garage?’ At that point I was starting to get fed up with them,” Tijssen says.
He says he refused to reveal the whereabouts of the beef because it was killed, cut into quarters and stamped as having been legally inspected at the Russell Slaughterhouse. He has the receipt to prove it.
“They had no case to build on the beef, and I didn’t want to discuss the beef.”
He believes a long simmering dispute with a neighbour led to erroneous reports about a slaughterhouse operation to MNR officials.
For two years, Tijssen’s Carlsbad Springs home was used for church services for Faith Anglican Church, a relatively new congregation made up of disaffected members who have left the Anglican Church of Canada in order to follow more traditional values. Combine the heavy traffic into his home with the chance someone saw meat hanging in his garage, and Tijssen says it’s not unreasonable that MNR officials thought they had made “a big score.”
Tijssen says he has no intention of breaking the law, but is concerned that MNR officials are “looking to charge someone.”
“I disagree with that law, but disagreeing with that law doesn’t mean I’m going to flout it. I have a career,” says Tijssen, a major with 24 years of military service.
The only charge laid to date is for improper insurance on a friend’s rental truck used to move a fridge and cutting table from Tijssen’s property. The fridge and table were also confiscated. Graham Ridley, the MNR’s lead investigator in the case, says he won’t comment specifically on Tijssen’s case, but says there is no problem with someone moving legally-inspected meat from a licensed slaughterhouse to their own property. He says people can even process that meat or cut it up into various pieces, as Tijssen and his group had planned to do. He says it would not be illegal for a group of people in a similar situation to then take the beef home and consume it, as long as none of this is done as a commercial venture.
“The issue in some cases, and again I’m not referring to this case, is that, when the officers would perhaps go to the house to look to see the inspection on the meat and the meat has been removed … they can’t verify it (that it has been inspected),” Ridley says.
It may not be that simple, however. Dr. Steven Palmer, a veterinarian with the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs, and an expert on the Food Safety and Quality Act, disagrees with Ridley and says that in a scenario like the Christian Meat Cutters Association, they would be acting illegally if they took the meat from a slaughterhouse and did any further processing to it at someone’s residence. He says the meat then would lose its status as inspected and transporting it would be illegal.
Palmer also says Tijssen’s group would likely be considered a co-operative and would need the meat to be inspected again before it is redistributed to its members, in this case, the Christian Meat Cutters Association. The group is made up of about eight Ottawa-area families, loosely based around their church.
It’s agreed, however, that, if someone slaughters an animal on their property and it has not been inspected, the meat cannot leave the property and can only be used to feed the family of the person who owns the animal. This provision allows farmers to continue to raise their own food, but prevents them from distributing uninspected meat to non-family members or even feed it to non-family guests for dinner.
“For all intents and purposes the (aim of the) legislation is food safety to ensure the general public is not ingesting stuff that is dangerous,” Ridley says.
Palmer also says the legislation is there to protect consumers and that the ministry shuts down two to three large-scale illegal slaughterhouses every year.
Rural activists in the Carleton Landowners Association and the Ontario Landowners Association have rallied around Tijssen, saying their way of life is under threat. Tom Black, president of the Carleton Landowners, says the law prevents a group of rural residents from even having a pig roast with a farm-raised and slaughtered animal because only the farmer’s family may consume the meat.
“That’s as traditional as you can get, but, if I was to serve that to you, I would be breaking the law,” Black says.
He says many farmers are reluctant to buy food through the meat processing industry, referring to the deaths of 22 Canadians in 2008 because of listeriosis contamination.
“That’s what’s driving this: people wanting to do their own. The only other choice is buying from those big guys who are killing people,” Black says.
He says farmers are keenly aware of some of the poor quality of livestock that gets into the food chain.
“The (livestock) auction? Well, that’s where I take the ones that I won’t eat. Everybody takes their junk (there),” Black says.
Food activists are not the only ones affected by limits on the movement of meat. There are implications for religious groups as well.
On Nov. 27 several dozen Muslims gathered at Black’s Fallowfield Road farm for the ritual slaughter of lambs as part of the Muslim festival of Eid Al Adha. For more than 20 years, Black has been raising sheep for the annual slaughter. In years past, customers have had the choice of slaughtering the lambs on the property or taking them home for the kill. Black says he doesn’t do any of the killing and doesn’t make a profit from providing the lambs to Muslims.
This year was a bit different. Concerned about what he had learned from Tijssen, Black met with his Muslim clients ahead of time to explain he could not allow them to take live lambs off the property.
“They couldn’t believe this kind of stuff was happening in Canada,” Black says. “They said, ‘We thought we had this freedom.’”
Nevertheless, on Nov. 27 as several dozen Muslims gathered at Black’s farm, a car belonging to MNR was parked at the end of the driveway.
Akram Elmurabi of Ottawa says it is becoming increasingly difficult for Muslims to be able to carry out their religious responsibility of slaughtering an animal.
“It’s extremely hard to find a place that will slaughter,” he says. “That’s why I’m fighting with Tom because we both have a common interest.”
Black says the only reason he still provides lambs for ritual slaughter is because he believes people should have the right to do this.
“It’s more of a protest than actually making money at it,” he says.
He is not sure if he will continue next year.
Tijssen says he has been slaughtering animals his entire life, continuing a tradition taught to him by his father. He and his friends from his church began to buy beef together several years ago, when BSE (also known as mad cow disease) was found in Canadian cattle.
He and some of his supporters believe the act is designed to ensure that people have to buy all their food from large food processing companies.
“We take control of our own food supply this way, and this law is very determined to stamp that out,” Tijssen says. “That is no longer a right. This act has a lot less to do with health than with economics.”