Despite a number of warnings from officials about the tainted meat scare, CTV has discovered that a major grocery store chain, Safeway, was still selling the banned products as recently as Sunday.
Robert Lauder said he had no idea the cold cuts he had bought at Safeway, and was planning to eat for dinner Sunday, could have made him sick. It wasn't until after his family saw news coverage on CTV that they thought to check the batch number.
"Right there, 97 B, the bad one,'' he said, pointing to the meat.
His family purchased the Maple Leaf brand luncheon meat at a Surrey Safeway store on Sunday afternoon, the day after an expanded recall was announced, covering all of the company's products with the establishment number 97-B.
Those meat items were produced at Maple Leaf Food's Toronto facility, which health officials have now confirmed is the source of the deadly listeria outbreak that's connected with up to 12 deaths nationwide.
"This meat was for me, I was going to eat some meat, and now I could have gotten sick, could have died, I'm not happy," Lauder told CTV.
Canada Safeway would not respond to CTV's request for an interview--a spokesperson would only say the company was notified of the expanded list of recalled products on Monday morning, even though other retailers across the country had begun pulling the sliced meat off their shelves on Sunday.
The Canadian Food Inspection Agency is responsible for making sure retailers are notified about recalls, but it's a voluntary process.
"What we do to ensure that it's effective, is to visit the stores, [and ask them] did you receive the notification, is product removed from sale, and where is the product. So that's the verification process,'' said Garfield Balsom of the Canadian Food Inspection Agency.
Maple Leaf Foods admits it's tough to track down all the recalled products distributed to stores. In a television advert released on Monday, the company's chief executive officer made a candid apology.
With a report by CTV British Columbia's Jina You
