Political pressure, negligence, incompetence all contributed to pandemic tragedy at High River plant, new report says

One of the most disgraceful episodes of the COVID-19 pandemic in Alberta took place on April 18, 2020, when Devin Dreeshen, Jason Copping and Deena Hinshaw assured employees of Cargill Inc.’s meat packing plant in High River during a telephone town hall that their workplace was safe.

At the time, Mr. Dreeshen was the minister of agriculture and Mr. Copping was the minister of labour in the United Conservative Party Government of then-premier Jason Kenney. Dr. Hinshaw was Alberta’s supposedly independent chief medical officer of health, although as would later become clear she was under heavy pressure to be team player with the UCP government, which from the get-go had been ambivalent about how to respond to the worldwide pandemic as it swept into Alberta. Many of the workers in the plant were recent immigrants to Canada or temporary foreign workers. Some didn’t speak English.

Don’t be “distracted by misleading noise or inflammatory rhetoric,” Mr. Dreeshen told the workers. A government talking point at the time said, “the Cargill plant is completely safe” as far as Alberta Health Services and the government’s Occupational Health and Safety regulators were concerned.

The previous April Fool’s Day, appropriately enough, he had informed the Alberta Legislature that “under the advice of our chief medical officer, food processing facilities have implemented additional sanitation procedures to ensure that the safety of their workers and their inspectors is paramount.”

As if to add it was actually OK if the workers got sick, as long as the meat could pass inspection, Mr. Dreeshen responded to a friendly question from the UCP backbenches by adding, “COVID-19 is not a food borne illness.”

The first positive COVID case among the Cargill workforce was recorded on April 3. On April 6 there were several more. The same day the workers’ union, United Food and Commercial Workers Local 401, wrote the plant manager demanding more information and additional protections for workers.

By April 9 the virus was spreading rapidly with approximately 300 known cases at the large meatpacking plant about 60 kilometres south of Calgary. 

On April 12, UFCW Local 401 President Tom Hesse demanded the company suspend operations until effective safety measures were put in place at the plant. Nothing happened. 

Then came the April 18 telephone town hall with its dangerously reassuring messaging. Hours later, though, Dr. Hinshaw asked her officials to try to find out how many cases actually originated in the plant.

Within weeks, the infections had turned into what would become the largest outbreak in North America of the then-new respiratory illness. Nearly 1,000 Cargill employees at the plant would test positive for COVID, almost half the workforce. 

Many became seriously ill. Two line workers from the plant would die – Bui Thi Hiep, 67, a 23-year Cargill veteran, and Benito Quesada, 51, a UFCW shop steward. 

Many more among the workers’ families, friends and communities were infected – at least four more of whom died. About 25 had to be hospitalized. Epidemiologists would later link at least 22 other outbreaks — some in care homes where contacts of Cargill employees worked – to the outbreak.

A new report released this morning by the Edmonton-based Parkland Institute concludes that Alberta’s OHS regulator abdicated its mandate and deferred to AHS while AHS made recommendations without trying to ensure Cargill followed them, and that neither OHS nor AHS tried to enforce the company’s compliance.

“The response to the crisis was defined by a lack of preparedness, inaction, overconfidence, cultural stereotypes and racism, incompetence, and deliberate aversion to using available enforcement measures,” said the report, which is based on the first independent investigation of the situation.

The 199-page study by researchers Sean Tucker and Jason Foster – Essential and Expendable, How Alberta’s COVID-19 Response Failed Cargill Workers – shows how the outbreak spread thanks to “a political environment that openly and enthusiastically prioritized economic growth over the health and safety of a largely invisible and vulnerable group of workers, most of whom were immigrants and temporary foreign workers.”

Drawing on hundreds of pages of records obtained through freedom of information requests, the evidence shows there was nothing inevitable about the massive scale of the outbreak of the disease, concluded Dr. Tucker, a human management resource professor at the University of Regina, and Dr. Foster, a labour relations professor at Athabasca University and director of the Parkland Institute. 

Even before the outbreak, it was obvious both the industry and the UCP government were determined to keep the plant operating, they said. “On March 17, Alberta’s minister of agriculture and forestry, Devin Dreeshen, gave assurances that the entire industry would be declared an ‘essential service,’” the researchers wrote. This designation had no basis in law
and Mr. Dreeshen’s department had no mandate to be involved in worker health and safety, yet it was so declared, “making these ‘essential industries’ exempt from any public health measures related to gathering sizes, physical distancing and, importantly, temporary closure orders.”

Meanwhile, resolved to keep the plant operating, Cargill offered $500 attendance bonuses and a temporary $2-per-hour pay increase. The report suggests this may have encouraged some employees who were sick to work anyway. It notes that many of the workers lacked alternative income sources, and that, as essential workers, they were ineligible for Ottawa’s Emergency Response Benefit.

Assuming that most transmission was taking place outside the plant, AHS and Alberta Government OHS staff “stood back waiting for positive cases or formal complaints from workers or the workers’ union before inspecting facilities,” the report said.

“Despite their inexperience and lack of expertise, and in absence of an epidemiological analysis, Hinshaw and other health leaders made public comments that projected confidence in their knowledge of where the virus was (and was not) spreading among Cargill workers,” it also said. 

“At Cargill’s invitation, on April 7, AHS inspected the plant and made non-binding recommendations related to carpooling, masking, use of barriers, and other items.”

When Mr. Hesse made his April 12 call, the report recounted, “Cargill said that it was complying with all public health guidance, and closure was unnecessary. The next day, though, the company cut one of the plant’s two shifts due to staffing shortages.”

On April 15, the notorious 30-minute “virtual inspection” of the plant by a provincial OHS officer took place in response to a UFCW demand. “The officer did not evaluate all areas of the plant or assess compliance in terms of OHS regulations relevant to biological hazards, nor did they speak directly with front-line workers,” says a summary document published this morning along with the full report. “Even though several hundred workers were ill, the inspection resulted in no compliance orders.”

The report’s authors concluded: “OHS performed reactive, substandard inspections, failing to enforce sections of the Act and Code that were obviously relevant to preventing worker exposure to an infectious disease.”

On April 19, the union held its own town hall with 600 worried Cargill workers. “At this meeting, the union reiterated its concerns about the plant’s safety and informed workers of their rights under the Occupational Health and Safety Act, including the right to refuse dangerous work,” the summary said. The same day, Bui Thi Hiep passed away in hospital.

Finally, on April 20, Cargill temporarily shut down the plant. It would reopen on May 3. 

“We cannot fully explain why Alberta OHS abdicated its important responsibilities in response to the largest outbreak of COVID-19 in Canada,” Dr. Tucker and Dr. Foster wrote. “We can say that political pressure, deference to public health (authorities), negligence, and incompetence all contributed to the tragedy. Further evidence suggests that government officials prioritized the interests of the meat-processing industry over the health and safety of meat-packing workers. Whatever the causes, their inaction represents a clear case of industry capture and regulatory failure.”

Of the report’s 36 recommendations, five are highlighted by the authors, abbreviated below by me:

1. AHS, OHS, and the government should all acknowledge and publicly apologize to Cargill’s workers and their families for the grave shortcomings of their response
2. Alberta’s health agencies and OHS must adopt the precautionary principle when responding to new respiratory illnesses
3. The government should amend the Public Health Act and the Occupational Health and Safety Act to make it clear that during a public health emergency OHS is responsible for leading the response in workplaces
4. The Auditor General should undertake a comprehensive review of the internal processes, policies, and practices of OHS to determine what contributed to the regulatory failure before and during the outbreak
5. The government should instruct the Alberta Labour Relations Board to create a standing list of essential services to clarify the rights of essential workers in future public health emergencies.