Forgotten tragedy

Edmonton, Alberta – In 2020, Cargill's beef processing plant in High River, Alberta, was the site of the largest industrial COVID-19 outbreak in North America. Six years on, the first independent investigation into the crisis delivers a scathing analysis of Alberta’s failure to manage and contain the outbreak.

Drawing on hundreds of pages of records obtained through freedom-of-information requests, Essential and Expendable: How Alberta’s COVID-19 Response Failed Cargill Workers uncovers how inaction, incompetence, overconfidence, racist cultural stereotypes, and a political environment that prioritized economic interests over worker safety converged to produce a preventable tragedy in which two workers and four close contacts died, dozens were hospitalized, and more than 950 workers tested positive.  

“There was nothing inevitable about the scale of the outbreak,” says Sean Tucker, lead author of the new report from Parkland Institute at the University of Alberta. As infections mounted, so did the failures across the departments and agencies involved in the response. Alberta’s OHS regulator all but abdicated its mandate and deferred to Alberta Health Services (AHS). AHS made recommendations to Cargill without ensuring they were followed. Neither OHS nor AHS used enforcement measures to secure Cargill’s compliance.

Meanwhile, the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry, which had no mandate to oversee worker health and safety at Cargill, played a central role in shaping the government’s response around one goal: keeping the plant running. Minister Devin Dreeshen promised agri-food businesses that their industry would be declared an “essential service.” A formal designation — with no legal basis — followed, effectively exempting meat-packing plants from regulatory-ordered temporary closure due to outbreaks. During an April 18 telephone town hall, Dreeshen assured worried workers the plant was safe, even as hundreds had tested positive. The next day, Bui Thi Hiep became the first Cargill worker to die of COVID-19.

Systemic discrimination played a role in AHS’s mistaken understanding of where the virus was spreading. Relying on cultural assumptions about how immigrant workers lived, Dr. Deena Hinshaw and senior medical officers of health were quick to blame the spread on crowded households and carpooling. Yet a record obtained through a freedom-of-information request shows that no epidemiological analysis had been conducted by AHS at that point.

Internal documents also show that AHS officials were aware that sick workers were being enticed to come to work during the outbreak through Cargill’s incentive pay initiative. “They understood the impact this had on transmission of the virus in the plant,” said Tucker, “but still didn’t issue a directive to Cargill to stop the incentives.”

Six years after the outbreak, Alberta has yet to publicly account for its response. No public inquiry was held. No charges were laid under occupational health and safety law or as a result of an RCMP investigation. The panel appointed by the government to review the province’s overall handling of the pandemic made no mention of the Cargill outbreak, and neither did AHS’s 244-page internal review of its pandemic response.

Report co-author Jason Foster says the findings and recommendations in Essential and Expendable have implications far beyond Cargill. “The shortcomings we identified in our report are built into Alberta’s regulatory enforcement system,” Foster says. “They potentially impact hundreds of thousands of workers across the province. We need to see the Cargill outbreak as the moment that laid bare these failures—and we need to learn from it.”

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Full report available at https://www.parklandinstitute.ca/cargill 

For more information or to arrange an interview, contact:

Rita Espeschit
Research Communications Specialist, Parkland Institute
[email protected]