WINDSOR, Ont.—New Democrat Leader Jack Layton promised to boost the number of federal food inspectors as part of his overall strategy for Canadian agriculture.

“I will take steps to improve food safety,” Layton said during a speech inside a hay barn on a family farm in Stoney Point, Ont., Wednesday.

The New Democrats would devote $75 million a year to the Canadian Food Inspection Agency so that it could hire 200 more full-time food inspectors to work in all sorts of food facilities, including the plants producing ready-to-eat meats.

That is the same amount of money the Conservative government committed to spend over three years in 2009 in order to overhaul the food safety system by implementing every change independent investigator Sheila Weatherill recommended in her report on the deadly outbreak of listeriosis linked to deli meats.

The Conservative government pledged an additional $100 million over five years in the failed federal budget towards achieving that goal and the Liberal party promised $50 million over four years to improve food inspection.

The report on the sweeping six-month investigation into the outbreak that killed 22 Canadians in summer 2008 recommended an external audit of Canadian Food Inspection Agency resources because the food safety watchdog had implemented a new system without fully assessing the resources it would need and was still unable to say how many meat inspectors it had on the payroll.

Ottawa committed quickly to hiring more food safety staff, including 70 positions focused exclusively on ready-to-eat meats like those produced at the Maple Leaf Foods plant in Toronto at the heart of the crisis.

Conservative Gerry Ritz (Battlefords—Lloydminster), who was agriculture minister before the election, conceded last November the audit had never been done, but noted an external firm had reviewed an agency estimate of the number of inspectors required.

The NDP says $40 million would go to the salaries of 200 new inspectors, whereas the other $35 million would go toward other food safety initiatives.

That would include improving laboratories studying diseases transmitted from animals to humans, border inspection, detection of invasive species and facilitating organic food production and marketing.