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A plan to end ‘dirty dining’ in the city

The current carnage of the restaurant industry by the City of Toronto health inspectors is unfortunate — mostly due to the fact that the City and the industry have put themselves in battle against each other rather than join forces to ensure customer health and safety.

The problems which are currently being brought to light are the fault of both the City and the industry and a solution should be sought to fix the problem, rather than just allocating the blame in the deplorable manner in which it is currently being done. The answer lies in a partnership between the City and the industry — a solution which will need — and the cooperation of all.

The City, over the years has not been diligent in its responsibility toward the maintenance of public health and safety, and several restaurateurs have become lax with regard to health and safety as a result.

However, the leaders of the restaurant industry agree that the health and safety of the public is paramount and as a result many have made considerable efforts to monitor and police their operations in order to ensure the highest standards. In 1999 over 60% of the restaurants in the industry were provincial or national branded operations and all have an understanding of, and an emphasis placed on, heath and safety standards. A large portion of the independents have this understanding as well, and if you pardon the pun, ‘it is only a few bad apples’ along with hyped up media, that have put a disparaging mark on the industry.

Given that every responsible restaurateur, the City and Mayor are all on side — let’s create a program which can be put into effect and which will protect the restaurant using public and not negatively impact the restaurant industry with un-called for scares. So let the industry and the city create a plan of attack to not only rid the community of bad restaurant operators but also set up a system, ensuring that they do not return. A process which is easy, effective and inexpensive to implement follows:

First, the City should not license anyone to open a restaurant unless they have specific training in the foodservice industry and have a certification in health and safety or sanitation. Existing restaurants should not be allowed to be sold unless the restaurant has passed an health and safety inspection (similar to certifying a car) and the person buying it has a certification in sanitation (similar to having a driving license) and finally, all current owners should be required to pass a health and safely course within a two year period or be forced to close their doors. This process would ensure that we have knowledgeable people operating safe foodservice establishments.

Second, we should develop a rating system, whereby restaurants would be rated on their health and safety reports. Restaurants would achieve ‘A’, ‘B’ and ‘C’ ratings, which would allow for an appeal process but which would be reissued every second month. This rating would allow restaurants to compete for business based on their cleanliness and as a result every restaurant would strive for an ‘A’ rating (as customers will likely not patronize a restaurant with a lessor rating) — creating a health and safety standard which in essence would monitor itself — which would actually ‘raise the bar’ significantly — in a very short period of time.

Third, each restaurant in the City would have to be inspected and graded every two months. Upon the completion of the inspection, the restaurant would get a certification of health and safety as noted above, and they would be required to post that certification in a conspicuous place in their front window or near their front door. This would allow the public to know whether the restaurant was rated as an A, B or C by the City — allowing customers to make their choice of restaurant based not only on the quality of food and service offered but also by the level of cleanliness as well. The dirty restaurants will go out of business — the clean ones would continue to prosper — the quality of foodservice would increase — and Mayor Mel could get a good night sleep once again.

Fourth, while the City has high quality health and safety inspection programs and inspector training, restaurateurs will have to be given insights into the standards in order to ensure that both the inspectors and the restaurant operators are ‘working from the same book’. The process would ensure that all inspectors review restaurants in the same manner and that each inspector is rotated throughout the systems, so they never visit the same restaurant twice in one year (thereby ensuring that relationships between inspectors and restaurateurs can not develop).

In order to accomplish the above, the City will have to hire 50 health inspectors or one for every 160 restaurants in Toronto. Each health inspector should be required to inspect four restaurants per day and every restaurant should be inspected six times per year. They would then rate the restaurants and post their score. Restaurants which did not achieve a C rating would be closed.

The cost of adding so many health inspectors would be about $2.5 million dollars, which the City could get back by charging a $350 licensing fee to each restaurant in the City. The restaurants could charge an extra penny a customer (passing on the cost — but what customer would not want to pay the surcharge) and if every restaurant did that, there would be no competitive advantage nor disadvantage. I am certain that customers would happily pay a penny more a meal and shoulder the expenses of implementation in order to be ensured that the restaurant is safe from a health and safety perspective.

And all of a sudden we would have a working partnership between the restaurant community, the City and the customer as it relates to the health, safety and well being of City residents — which might well be a first in North America — keeping Toronto on the leading edge — and turning our current crisis into an opportunity.

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