Days after dozens of cases of COVID-19 were confirmed at a meat plant in southern Alberta, provincial health and safety investigators conducted an inspection by video call and concluded the plant was safe to remain open.
Now, just under one week after that call, one person is dead and 515 people sick with COVID-19 due to the outbreak at the Cargill facility near High River, and the union representing the plant’s workers says it’s time for an independent investigation.
The facility announced Monday it will temporarily shut down as soon as it has finished processing the meat already in the plant.
“It’s very, very hard to specifically ascertain what’s going on. They aren’t allowing any visitors to the plant,” said Thomas Hesse, president of UFCW Local 401.
Prior to the temporary closure announcement, employees at the facility had accused the company of ignoring physical distancing protocols and trying to lure them back to work from self-isolation.
Hesse said that shutdown came way too late.
WATCH | COVID-19 outbreak forces Alberta meat processing plant to close:
A COVID-19 outbreak at the Cargill meat processing plant in High River, Alta., has forced the facility to temporarily close, raising concerns about beef prices and supply. 3:03
“They knew there was a problem. Why did they wait until somebody died?”
The first 38 cases of COVID-19 at the plant were brought to the attention of media by the union on April 13. Two days later, a Cargill employee recorded a video inspection of the plant to send to a provincial Occupational Health and Safety (OHS) inspector, accompanied by a union shop steward and a worker.
OHS has a mandate to ensure Alberta workplaces are operating in a way that is healthy and safe for employees.
OHS deemed the plant safe.
“When an OHS officer won’t attend the plant and instead does a plant tour by cell phone, that should tell you that there’s something wrong,” Hesse said.
UFCW Local 401 president Thomas Hesse says there needs to be an independent investigation into the situation at Cargill. (Charlotte Dumoulin/Radio-Canada)
OHS is currently working through the formal process to determine whether to open a fatality investigation, Adrienne South, a spokesperson for the provincial labour minister, said in an email.
“After the first COVID-19 case was identified at Harmony Beef, an intergovernmental business resumption protocol was immediately established for provincially and federally licensed food processing facilities in Alberta,” South said.
“While many food processing facilities have existing pandemic and emergency response plans in place, it was critical to work with all actors involved to bolster their plans and help keep workers safe and guarantee Alberta’s food security.”
Tents are set up outside the Cargill facility near High River to test workers for COVID-19. The outbreak at the plant has now lead to 515 cases, and the plant will soon temporarily shut down. (Dan McGarvey/CBC)
South said the live video call wasn’t unique to the Cargill facility, and was done to mitigate risk of exposure to all parties involved due to the pandemic.
The inspection was interactive, with an OHS officer directing the camera if needed to observe employees at their daily duties and video was recorded to be reviewed later, she said. Direction for mitigation measures at the facility have also been provided by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, Alberta Health Services and Alberta Agriculture, the spokesperson said.
200 AHS staff responding to Cargill outbreak
Dr. Deena Hinshaw, Alberta’s chief medical officer of health, said Tuesday that due to the number of people that go in and out of the plant, it’s possible that the virus was spread before mitigation efforts were put in place.
AHS now has a dedicated task force of more than 200 staff responding to the outbreak, and translation services are being used to communicate with workers and their families who speak English as a second language.
Contact tracing is also underway to determine people who may have come in contact with someone who has tested positive, AHS said.
Gil McGowan, the president of the Alberta Federation of Labour, has written a letter to the province’s labour minister requesting both an OHS investigation into the worker’s death and a criminal investigation.
“Given that the workers at the plant and their union begged both you and their employer to suspend operations at the plant more than two weeks ago, it is our contention that managers failed in their duty to ‘prevent bodily harm’ to the worker who died and to the hundreds of [her] coworkers who have become infected,” McGowan wrote.
Opposition Leader, Rachel Notley and Alberta Federation of Labour President, Gil McGowan explain what could have been done to prevent the COVID-19 outbreak at the Cargill plant. 3:40
Opposition Leader Rachel Notley described the single video inspection as a negligent approach to health and safety.
“How can you judge proper working conditions and safety protocols without having stepped on to the worksite? But somehow the minister assured workers and Albertans that he could,” Notley said, referring to a tweet from the agriculture minister on Saturday reassuring Albertans that the plant was safe.
Marichu Antonio is with Action Dignity, a community group working to support Cargill’s 2,000 employees, who come from a variety of ethnic backgrounds.
Antonio said the worker who died was a Vietnamese woman in her 60s, and her husband is now being treated in hospital.
“The fear of losing their jobs is very real to them. Plus the fear of what’s going to happen to their family members,” Antonio said.
Five employees at Seasons Retirement Communities in High River have also now tested positive for COVID-19, three of whom are married to meat-packing workers at Cargill.
Health Minister Patty Hajdu explains what the government is doing to support the entire agrifood sector. 1:00
Sylvain Charlebois, director of the Agri-Food Analytics Lab at Dalhousie University, said perhaps other meat-packing facilities can learn a lesson from what happened in High River.
“I do believe the plant should’ve idled much sooner, but again I don’t have all the details in place,” he said.
“I mean [more than] 15 per cent of all cases in Alberta are linked to that plant. That is a lot.”
As of Tuesday, JBS meat-packing facility in Brooks had 67 confirmed cases of COVID-19. The plant is staying open.
As of Tuesday, there were 3,095 COVID-19 cases in Alberta.
TOKYO (AP) — Japanese technology group SoftBank swung back to profitability in the July-September quarter, boosted by positive results in its Vision Fund investments.
Tokyo-based SoftBank Group Corp. reported Tuesday a fiscal second quarter profit of nearly 1.18 trillion yen ($7.7 billion), compared with a 931 billion yen loss in the year-earlier period.
Quarterly sales edged up about 6% to nearly 1.77 trillion yen ($11.5 billion).
SoftBank credited income from royalties and licensing related to its holdings in Arm, a computer chip-designing company, whose business spans smartphones, data centers, networking equipment, automotive, consumer electronic devices, and AI applications.
The results were also helped by the absence of losses related to SoftBank’s investment in office-space sharing venture WeWork, which hit the previous fiscal year.
WeWork, which filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in 2023, emerged from Chapter 11 in June.
SoftBank has benefitted in recent months from rising share prices in some investment, such as U.S.-based e-commerce company Coupang, Chinese mobility provider DiDi Global and Bytedance, the Chinese developer of TikTok.
SoftBank’s financial results tend to swing wildly, partly because of its sprawling investment portfolio that includes search engine Yahoo, Chinese retailer Alibaba, and artificial intelligence company Nvidia.
SoftBank makes investments in a variety of companies that it groups together in a series of Vision Funds.
The company’s founder, Masayoshi Son, is a pioneer in technology investment in Japan. SoftBank Group does not give earnings forecasts.
Shopify Inc. executives brushed off concerns that incoming U.S. President Donald Trump will be a major detriment to many of the company’s merchants.
“There’s nothing in what we’ve heard from Trump, nor would there have been anything from (Democratic candidate) Kamala (Harris), which we think impacts the overall state of new business formation and entrepreneurship,” Shopify’s chief financial officer Jeff Hoffmeister told analysts on a call Tuesday.
“We still feel really good about all the merchants out there, all the entrepreneurs that want to start new businesses and that’s obviously not going to change with the administration.”
Hoffmeister’s comments come a week after Trump, a Republican businessman, trounced Harris in an election that will soon return him to the Oval Office.
On the campaign trail, he threatened to impose tariffs of 60 per cent on imports from China and roughly 10 per cent to 20 per cent on goods from all other countries.
If the president-elect makes good on the promise, many worry the cost of operating will soar for companies, including customers of Shopify, which sells e-commerce software to small businesses but also brands as big as Kylie Cosmetics and Victoria’s Secret.
These merchants may feel they have no choice but to pass on the increases to customers, perhaps sparking more inflation.
If Trump’s tariffs do come to fruition, Shopify’s president Harley Finkelstein pointed out China is “not a huge area” for Shopify.
However, “we can’t anticipate what every presidential administration is going to do,” he cautioned.
He likened the uncertainty facing the business community to the COVID-19 pandemic where Shopify had to help companies migrate online.
“Our job is no matter what comes the way of our merchants, we provide them with tools and service and support for them to navigate it really well,” he said.
Finkelstein was questioned about the forthcoming U.S. leadership change on a call meant to delve into Shopify’s latest earnings, which sent shares soaring 27 per cent to $158.63 shortly after Tuesday’s market open.
The Ottawa-based company, which keeps its books in U.S. dollars, reported US$828 million in net income for its third quarter, up from US$718 million in the same quarter last year, as its revenue rose 26 per cent.
Revenue for the period ended Sept. 30 totalled US$2.16 billion, up from US$1.71 billion a year earlier.
Subscription solutions revenue reached US$610 million, up from US$486 million in the same quarter last year.
Merchant solutions revenue amounted to US$1.55 billion, up from US$1.23 billion.
Shopify’s net income excluding the impact of equity investments totalled US$344 million for the quarter, up from US$173 million in the same quarter last year.
Daniel Chan, a TD Cowen analyst, said the results show Shopify has a leadership position in the e-commerce world and “a continued ability to gain market share.”
In its outlook for its fourth quarter of 2024, the company said it expects revenue to grow at a mid-to-high-twenties percentage rate on a year-over-year basis.
“Q4 guidance suggests Shopify will finish the year strong, with better-than-expected revenue growth and operating margin,” Chan pointed out in a note to investors.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 12, 2024.
TORONTO – RioCan Real Estate Investment Trust says it has cut almost 10 per cent of its staff as it deals with a slowdown in the condo market and overall pushes for greater efficiency.
The company says the cuts, which amount to around 60 employees based on its last annual filing, will mean about $9 million in restructuring charges and should translate to about $8 million in annualized cash savings.
The job cuts come as RioCan and others scale back condo development plans as the market softens, but chief executive Jonathan Gitlin says the reductions were from a companywide efficiency effort.
RioCan says it doesn’t plan to start any new construction of mixed-use properties this year and well into 2025 as it adjusts to the shifting market demand.
The company reported a net income of $96.9 million in the third quarter, up from a loss of $73.5 million last year, as it saw a $159 million boost from a favourable change in the fair value of investment properties.
RioCan reported what it says is a record-breaking 97.8 per cent occupancy rate in the quarter including retail committed occupancy of 98.6 per cent.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 12, 2024.
