Canadian Lawyer

on Doering remembers the first time he heard the words food and law together. It was 1996 and more than a year since he'd stepped into the role of assistant deputy minister at Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, tasked with reviewing how Canada carried out food inspection and food-related activities. At that time, responsibility for food inspection was divided among federal departments as well as different levels of government — a fact critics said was causing food safety issues to fall through the cracks. "There had been a very critical auditor general's report in 1994 that had taken on new importance because of BSE [mad cow disease] in Europe, and there had been a number of high-profile recalls in the U.S.," says Doering, now counsel at Gowling WLG. "It was the year before the Canadian Food Inspection Agency was created, and I was at a conference in the EU explaining what Canada was doing," he recalls. "I'd been a lawyer for about 20 years at that point, I'd been [assistant deputy minister] of Environment, I'd been at the Privy Council Office and I'd practised in the private sector. But I can honestly say that when this person said to me 'Oh, so you're setting up a new system for food inspection and related activities in Canada, you must practise food law?' that was the first time I'd ever heard the expression. So, I said, 'I guess I do.' "I started joking when I came back to Canada that I may be Canada's first food lawyer," he says, adding, "that's not to say that there weren't lots of lawyers in government or in large food companies who did corporate commercial law and some regulatory food law, but they didn't see themselves as practising food law. You can imagine my surprise the next year when I was introduced at a conference in Toronto as Canada's first food law lawyer." Today, there are still only a handful of practitioners in Canada who identify themselves as food lawyers, even though food law as an area of practice is becoming an important and emerging field of specialization. As Canada's food industry continues to grow in economic importance, law firms are recognizing the value of building multi-disciplined food and beverage groups to meet the diverse needs of food system stakeholders. And as manufacturers are battered by another massive wave of regulatory changes this year, there will be increasing need for lawyers who understand the unique challenges facing the industry. Canada's complex food system When the CFIA opened its doors in April 1997 with Doering as president, it became Canada's largest science-based regulatory agency, consolidating all food safety, animal nutrition and plant health inspection programs. It was a significant shift in viewing the food industry as an interconnected system rather than a collection of disparate sectors. It was also the start of a federal modernization effort around agribusiness and food that continues today. Doering left the agency in 2002 to join Gowling WLG and build a food law group with the late Joel Taller, who Doering says "was actually the first food lawyer." Taller had originally been a pharmacist, so he knew the intricacies of the Food and Drugs Act and regulations unlike many private practitioners at that time. w w w . c a n a d i a n l a w y e r m a g . c o m A P R I L 2 0 1 9 31

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