Canada’s tainted meat scandal is growing. For beef eaters across the country, this is a serious health worry. For Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Conservatives, it is a defining moment.

The bad meat affair began last month as a local Alberta story. It has now sparked the biggest food recall in Canadian history — one that involves all 10 provinces and 40 U.S. states.

So far, no deaths have been linked to the discovery of deadly E. coli bacteria in meat processed by the XL Foods plant in Brooks, Alta.

But politically this affair has the potential to do to Stephen Harper what the Walkerton water scandal — and the same virulent E. coli strain — did to Ontario’s Mike Harris 12 years ago.

Like the XL affair, Walkerton had its roots in deregulation. Harris’ Conservative government came to power in Ontario promising to cut what it called red tape.

A judicial inquiry later concluded that his casual approach to regulation set the table for actions that eventually resulted in seven people dying after drinking tap water contaminated with cow dung.

Neither Harris nor Harper invented deregulation.

In Ontario, Bob Rae’s New Democratic Party government cut back drinking water inspections well before Harris became premier.

In Ottawa, Liberal prime minister Jean Chrétien’s 1997 decision to hand over meat inspection to his industry-friendly agriculture ministry set the stage for deregulation there.

But like Harris, Harper accelerated the trend.

Indeed, federal efforts to eliminate so-called red tape not only mirror those of Harris but are championed by former Harrisites like Finance Minister Jim Flaherty.

For food safety, the results have been disastrous.

In 2008, an outbreak of listeriosis at a Toronto meat packing plant killed 23 people. Two years later, tainted meat from another Toronto plant hospitalized three more.

As the Canadian Medical Association Journal noted, the 2008 deaths came after Ottawa took the primary inspection function away from federal regulators and handed it over to the meat packing companies themselves.

The journal called this decision “risky.”

But to Harper — like Harris — deregulation only made sense. Harris assumed that small Ontario towns like Walkerton would have the good sense to keep their drinking water clean.

Harper assumed that profit-making companies would make sure that their consumers received safe products.

In both cases, they were wrong.

In Walkerton’s case, as the judicial inquiry later found, those in charge of the town’s water supply exhibited a bonehead determination to break the rules. Because there was no provincial oversight, no one noticed that a particularly virulent strain of E. coli called 0157:H7 had entered the town’s tap water

In the XL case, the same deadly strain has infected an unknown quantity of beef. We don’t yet know how.

What we do know is that XL’s Lakeside plant in Brooks is a poster boy for Harper’s vision of the economic future.

It is big — one of the biggest in the country. It is Western. It is resource-based. And it employs plenty of those temporary foreign workers that the current government has encouraged to come to Canada.

There are federal meat inspectors assigned to Lakeside. But it is not clear what they do — or if there are enough to handle the volume of meat processed.

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Up to now, the Harper government had sailed through its deregulation disasters unscathed. For his first five years in power, so did Mike Harris.

But in the end, Walkerton became the symbol of everything that was wrong with Harris’ regime. And the government he had so painstakingly built was wiped out.

Thomas Walkom's column appears Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday.

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