Vashti Dalipsingh
A woman who was in charge of organizing and labeling chicken at the Cericola Farms facility in Bradford says the company routinely labelled ordinary chicken as organic. The mislabeled chicken was shipped to well-known retailers like Loblaws, Costco, Sobey’s and others. says Vashti Dalipsingh. The Cericola firm has issued a statement tonight which accuses Dalipsingh of seeking money but does not deny that such things occurred. She said she discovered the practice in January but after reviewing the company’s records learned that it had been going on for eight months. Dalipsingh alleged the products were mislabeled to fill orders and ship on schedule. Dorian Persaud, a lawyer for Dalipsingh, says records were falsified and code stickers changed to read that chicken arriving at the plant for processing was organic when it was not. Persaud told the CBC that a Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) inspector was stationed at the Bradford plant “and it was this person’s job to catch exactly the kind of fraud that Vashti is now blowing the whistle on. How that inspector did not catch the fraud is a mystery.” In a statement, Dalipsingh said she confronted her employers between January and April of this year, “and became more forceful” when she cancelled two shipments that she says were “deliberately and falsely labelled as organic.”
