Jews have filed a discrimination lawsuit against federal meat inspectors over new guidelines they say threaten the entire production of kosher meats in Canada. Kosher processing has already fallen 89 percent under new Guidelines, petitioners told the Federal Court.

“Since the Agency has begun to actively enforce the Guidelines it has progressively shut down and is well underway to effectively prohibit the performance of shechita” – the ritual slaughter of cattle – “and the access to kosher meat produced in Canada,” lawyers wrote the Court. Jewish groups had spent a year pleading with the Department of Justice to acknowledge the new policy was discriminatory, they said.