The change from federal to provincial employees to inspect meat at BC’s abattoirs has been taking place over the last few months. For us the official change over is on January 1st. We have said goodbye to the federal team who were incredibly helpful and patient as we were learning. In February we will start working with the new provincial team. They are all newly hired and trained, and may have slightly different methods compared with their predecessors, even though their purpose, safe food, is exactly the same. We are therefore scheduling smaller numbers of animals for the first few slaughter days until we see how things work.
At present abattoirs do not have to pay for inspection services. It comes out of our tax dollars.