Canada's border controls need to be tightened and the country's safety systems for food recalls and rail need to be improved, according to the annual fall report released by Canada's Auditor-General Tuesday.

The Canada Border Services Agency's (CBSA) collection, monitoring and assessment of information systems and practices "are often not working as intended [and] as a result, some people who pose a risk to Canadians' safety and security have succeeded in entering the country illegally," Michael Ferguson says in his report that looks at the Canadian government' s performance and spending.

Auditors looked at how the CBSA -- responsible for preventing illegal entries at ports of entry -- conducts lookouts to intercept known high-risk individuals connected to such activities as terrorism or organized crime and who are attempting to enter Canada.

The auditor-general's office reviewed 34 cases of advance notifications concerning immigration-related lookouts in February. It found that in five cases the individual identified at the border was not examined as required, and four of the travellers entered Canada, with no record of what happened with the fifth.

"Given the seriousness of the threats that lookouts are designed to address, even one missed lookout is cause for concern," says the report.

Auditors also examined a sample of 49 travellers sent for secondary inspection upon arrival, and reported that four of the targets were missed, despite being flagged or human smuggling, criminal inadmissibility or immigration fraud.

On food safety, the auditor-general found the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, which manages the food-recall process, did not have the documentation it's required to collect. The documentation is to verify that companies had properly disposed of recalled products "or taken timely actions to identify and correct the underlying cause of the recall to reduce the likelihood of a food safety issue reoccurring."

The presence last year of E. coli bacteria in beef products from a meat-processing plant in the western Canadian province of Alberta led to the largest meat recall in the country's history, with over 7 million kilograms of beef products pulled from store shelves across Canada and the United States.

One of the deadliest rail accidents in Canadian history occurred this year in the Quebec town of Lac-Megantic when a train carrying fuel oil derailed and exploded in July with 47 people killed.

But just days before that disaster, Ferguson's office concluded an audit of Transport Canada and found "weaknesses in all aspects" of how the federal transport ministry oversees the safety systems of rail companies, the auditor-general said Tuesday at a news conference.

His report said that Transport Canada has fully or nearly completed 14 audits of the country's 31 federally regulated railways over a three-year period -- or about 26 percent of what the government's policy requires.Endi

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