A parade float encourages residents to stay strong in High River, Alta., March 27, 2020, amid the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic. Health officials said that as of Friday, 358 cases in High River and elsewhere in the region were linked to the nearby Cargill facility.
Jeff McIntosh/The Canadian Press
High River has become a hot spot for COVID-19 in Alberta, with hundreds of infections, including staff at a long-term care home, tied to one of Canada’s largest slaughterhouses.
Health officials said that as of Friday, 358 cases in High River and elsewhere in the region were linked to the Cargill facility. Many of the workers at the Cargill Ltd. plant are new immigrants or temporary foreign workers, whose jobs and shared living spaces make them especially vulnerable to infection. At least one worker is on a ventilator, the union for the plant says, and others are struggling with serious illnesses.
Cargill is a major employer in High River, a bedroom community of roughly 13,000 people located a half-hour drive south of the Calgary city limits. About 2,000 people work there and the facility supplies about 40 per cent of the beef processed in Western Canada.
Story continues below advertisement
Foothills County now has more cases than Edmonton, a city with more than 10 times the population. The province’s Chief Medical Officer of Health has said that infections quickly spread among large households, and a local settlement agency said that temporary foreign workers often live together in large groups.
The Seasons High River retirement home, which includes nursing care, said five staff members tested positive but no residents have been infected. Four of the infected staff live with Cargill workers.
Thomas Hesse, president of United Food and Commercial Workers Local 401, said many of the plant’s employees are either temporary foreign workers or new Canadians, for whom English is a second language, though he didn’t know how many would fit into those categories. He said some workers who have contracted COVID-19 are in serious condition, including one who is in an induced coma and on a ventilator in a Calgary hospital.
Mr. Hesse said North American meat-packing facilities “are designed around efficiency and social proximity, not social distancing.”
“The lines are arranged in highly efficient ways and workers stand shoulder to shoulder, wielding knives. It’s loud, it’s slippery, it’s wet and there’s blood everywhere, especially on the slaughter side [of the operation],” he said, adding, “The plant hallways and lunch rooms and bathrooms are a certain size and they’re not rebuilding the plants to confront COVID.”
The union and Alberta’s Opposition New Democrats have called for the plant to be temporarily shut down to get a handle on the outbreak, but so far that hasn’t happened.
A Cargill worker, who has been recovering at home since he and his spouse became sick and tested positive for COVID-19, said he is afraid to return without assurances from the company that the plant is safe. The Globe and Mail agreed not to identify the worker, who is worried that speaking publicly would jeopardize his job.
Story continues below advertisement
Employees at the plant work in close quarters as they slaughter 4,500 head of cattle a day.
“How can they change the process? For us, we are doing sometimes 330 [heads of cattle] an hour – you can imagine that,” he said.
“There are some work stations that [are] too close.”
Jon Nash, president of Cargill Protein, a division of Cargill Inc., said in a statement that the company has scaled back operations and put in several measures to curb the outbreak, including staggering shifts, increasing distance between workers, checking employees’ temperature, providing face masks, prohibiting visitors and increasing cleaning. The company said some workers have taken unpaid leave.
Minneapolis-based Cargill Inc. – which also makes and trades grain, processes other types of meat and operates other agriculture-related businesses – is one of the largest privately held companies in the world and employs 160,000 people in 70 countries, according to its website. It has 8,000 workers in Canada, where it has operations in six provinces.
The High River facility is one of several suppliers of ground beef for McDonald’s Canada.
Story continues below advertisement
“At this time, Cargill has assured us that they are confident in the resilience of their supply chain and will continue to meet our current demand for beef,” McDonald’s Canada said in an e-mailed statement Sunday.
Fariborz Birjandian, chief executive officer of the Calgary Catholic Immigration Society, which operates Foothills Immigrant Community Services in High River, said his agency is working with Cargill staff who have become infected or are required to self-isolate. He said it’s common for temporary foreign workers to live with half a dozen or more people in a single unit.
“Temporary foreign workers come here to make money and send it back home, so they are trying to minimize their costs by sharing rooms,” he said.
“That makes them very vulnerable. … If one of them is infected, then the rest will be infected.”
Mr. Birjandian said he hopes the Cargill outbreak serves as a wake-up call to other such facilities in an industry that relies heavily on temporary foreign workers or new immigrants, including resettled refugees.
Ontario-based Seasons Retirement Communities, which operates long-term care homes across the country, including in High River, said of the five staff members who have tested positive for COVID-19, four live with someone who works at the plant. CEO Mike Lavallée said in a statement that no residents have tested positive.
Story continues below advertisement
Mr. Lavallée’s statement said the High River facility has implemented a series of measures including daily health screenings for all residents, staff and visitors.
Alberta recorded 2,803 cases of COVID-19 as of Sunday and 55 deaths. One of those deaths was in High River: a man in his 70s at a long-term care home attached to the local hospital.
Sign up for the Coronavirus Update newsletter to read the day’s essential coronavirus news, features and explainers written by Globe reporters and editors.
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.
