Banning the Sale of Israeli Wine from the West Bank Labelled “Made in Israel”: The lack of proper investigation to establish the true facts

Saturday, 22 July 2017

In my note of July 13, inst. on this subject, I raised a number of questions and to date, none of these have been publicly fully answered.

The only thing we are told is that the CFIA’s directive to Liquor Control Board of Ontario (LCBO) was issued by a person in a low level position.

For an agency established to insure the safety of  food and the food chain,  it is still not clear how that person,  managed to come up  with the idea of writing a directive on a subject which is completely out of the CFIA’s mandate, surely deserves an explanation and so does the timing of it.

Nor has the CFIA explain whether the directive was issued across the country to every provincial agency responsible with the control and sale of wines and liquors.

If this was not done, surely, surely the CFIA is duty bound to explain why the person who issued the directive targeted only the OLCB.

In turn, OLCB’s handling of this matter raises serious questions to warrant. Looking into any relationship that may exist between the person who issued the directive the senior advisor who in turn appears to have issued a letter to all the outfits affiliated with the LCBO to comply with the directive, in an almost obscene haste.

I would have thought that a person occupying the position of senior advisor would be, if nothing else, familiar with the mandate of the CFIA, and wonder what this unprecedented move was all about before putting all the outfits selling the two Israeli wines in question to all the trouble of removing the bottles from their shelfs and possibly losing some sales.

Who knows, considering the objectionable kind of ethnic and religious politics played by the Premier of Ontario going back at some point during her tenure as Minister of Education, the senior advisor may have thought it wise to follow the party line. 

Then again, the present government, keen to enter into a free- trade agreement with the People’s Republic of China, at seemingly any cost, to the extent of letting them buy whatever Canadian assets they fancy in exchange for nothing of any practical value, seems to have no qualms allowing the importation of a product originating from occupied Tibet bearing the label “Made in China” notwithstanding Canada’s long-standing position against China’s unlawful occupation of Tibet.