New Certificates and Reporting Procedure

Beginning in the New Year, the procedure for issuing poultry carcass condemnation certificates will transition from a CFIA responsibility to that of the processor. The new condemnation certificates are customizable, but must include some minimal data fields. Additional information can be added at a processor’s discretion.

As the transition takes place over the following 6 months, processors will become responsible for maintaining their own condemnation data electronically and reporting the information back to their producers. Ultimately, condemnation data will be submitted electronically by the processor to Agriculture Agri-Food Canada, a task currently undertaken by CFIA veterinarians. AAFC is developing an online submission system which should be functional by November 2008.

The process and certificate contents were agreed to through a joint development process and were officially rolled out by CFIA to the processing industry at the CPEPC fall meeting. The intention of the change is to simplify and improve the reporting process, reduce the number of condemnation categories, simplify data entry, improve consistency and to make national statistical databases more robust and easier to manage. Certificate templates have been provided to the industry contacts and are also available from CFIA field staff.