A website designed to help NWT residents monitor the cleanliness of restaurants and cafés has not been updated for a year.
The Department of Health and Social Services once published the results of food inspections to an online database that allowed residents to read environmental health inspectors’ reports.
In the past, those reports served as the only public notification regarding issues like the efforts of some establishments to battle cockroaches in downtown Yellowknife.
However, no reports have been uploaded since March 2022 (despite one report being incorrectly dated “November 2022”).
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Department spokesperson Jeremy Bird said in September last year that inspections were still happening but their results were not being posted due to an “admin resource shortage.”
Asked again last week, Bird said inspections continued but results were now not being posted “due to the focus on shifting environmental health operations, including food inspections, to a new system.”
“This work is taking longer than expected but we anticipate having this work completed in the near future and will then resume posting inspections,” Bird stated by email.
He said anyone with questions about a specific establishment can email environmental health officers for a copy of the latest inspection.
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The GNWT was posting around 10 reports monthly before the service stopped last spring.
This isn’t the first time in recent years that the territory has temporarily abandoned the publication of food inspection reports.
The same issue occurred in the six months immediately following the declaration of a pandemic-related public health emergency in March 2020.
Covid-19 had caused an administrative backlog, a spokesperson said in September that year.
