Toronto, June 24th, 2007:

In reasons released Friday, June 22nd, 2007 the Ontario Court of Appeal ruled that the mad cow class action involving as many as 100,000 Canadian cattle farmers against the Federal Government will continue in Ontario on behalf of the cattle producers of British Columbia, Manitoba, Ontario, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, P.E.I. and Newfoundland. Similar actions have been filed in Alberta, Saskatchewan and Quebec. The Quebec action was authorized to proceed as a class action in the Superior Court of Quebec on June 15th.

The class action lawsuits allege that the BSE crisis, the closing of the U.S. and other international borders to Canadian cattle and beef, and the loss of billions of dollars by the Canadian cattle industry, was the result of gross incompetence and negligence on the part of the Canadian government.

In January of 2006, then Regional Senior Justice Winkler, now Chief Justice of Ontario, dismissed a motion brought by the federal government to strike out the cattle farmers' claim. The Ontario Court of Appeal has now upheld Chief Justice Winkler's decision to allow the action to proceed.

BSE is an incurable neurological disease of cattle that is transmitted when healthy cattle eat the remains of infected cattle or other ruminants (cud chewers). The claim alleges that the federal government was negligent in enacting, or failing to enact in a timely fashion, regulations with respect to permissible ingredients in cattle feed.

Following a serious outbreak of "mad cow disease" in the United Kingdom in the 1980s, the Canadian government responded in 1990 by banning the importation of live cattle from the UK and Ireland and placing the cattle that had been imported since 1982 in a monitoring program. When one of the monitored cattle from the UK in Alberta tested positive for BSE in December, 1993 the government took stock. They discovered that at least 80 of the original 191 cattle imported from the UK and Ireland since 1982 may have entered the Canadian animal feed system through rendering after slaughter or death from some other cause. In early 1994 the government ordered the remainder of the original 191 cattle then in Canada to be exported or destroyed. What the government did not do, however, was immediately ban the use of ruminant tissues in cattle feed, an action that the lawsuit alleges would have prevented the BSE crisis.

On May 17, 1994 the government's own internal risk assessment on past importations of cattle from the UK concluded that "the probability of entry of BSE infected cattle through the 1982-89 importation of 183 cattle from the U.K. appears to be very high" and that "further cases of BSE would likely prompt a trade embargo against Canadian exports of cattle, beef and dairy products for an indefinite period of time". The assessment identified potential losses to cattle producers amounting to billions of dollars. The government finally enacted a ruminant feed ban which came into effect in October 1997, in response to recommendations by the World Health Organization and a similar ban in the United States which became effective in August 1997.

Cameron Pallett, legal counsel for the Ontario plaintiff commented, "One can only wonder why, once the federal government determined in December 1993 that more than 80 British cattle had been ground up and turned into cattle feed, it took them until October of 1997 to enact and enforce a ruminant feed ban. Why did it take almost four years to act when the government knew that even a single case of BSE in the Canadian herd would cause untold suffering and potential destruction to the livelihoods of thousands of hardworking Canadian families? Had they acted prudently and in a timely manner this would never have happened."

Although findings of liability against the federal government remain to be made, Mr. Pallett and his colleagues find this a positive development for cattle producers and urge them to visit the BSE class action web site for more information: www.bseclassaction.ca.