Impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the meat industry in Canada

These outbreaks affected multiple plants, leading to closures of some factories and disruption of others, and posing a threat to the food supply in Canada.

It was distributed, along with a cover letter signed by seven association leaders, to meat professionals in Canada, Mexico, China, Hong Kong, Macau, Philippines, Singapore, Vietnam, Indonesia, South Korea, and Japan.

[1] Sometime in early April, a two-page fact sheet entitled "Food Safety and COVID-19" detailed the measures consumers should take to protect themselves and their families.

Experts noted as early as 8 April that the Alberta economy needs to diversify, and perhaps the government needs introduce a Provincial Sales Tax.

[4][5] As of April 23, the province of Alberta had launched an occupational health and safety investigation into conditions at the Cargill meat-packing plant in High River.

Human cases of COVID-19 disease in April "at American pork-processing plants, including in South Dakota and Iowa, have temporarily closed facilities and slashed the number of hogs being processed every day by an estimated 60,000."

[13] UFCW Local 401, which represents various beef production plants in Alberta, called for a stop work order in early May.

"[15] On 11 May, a CBC journalist wrote that "The Cargill plant in Alberta, where there have been about 1,000 reported cases [of human COVID-19], is now considered the largest single-site outbreak in North America.

[19] United Food and Commercial Workers Canada Union Local 401 lobbied unsuccessfully for the plant's closure since the point at which health authorities were aware of 38 cases linked to the facility.

[25] According to the executive director of Workers Action Centre, the conditions of employment and the poor quality of the jobs at Conestoga Meats "led to a high rate of infection".

[32] Since the pandemic began, Maple Leaf Foods deployed a plan to tackle COVID-19, the company said: "We deployed our pandemic plan early, conducting daily health and temperature screening, requiring masks and social distancing, installing plexiglass separators between workstations where possible, and adding trailers at some locations to decrease density in employee welfare areas.

There was evidence at the plant that employees did have access to gloves and some plastic face coverings, but they identified that the plans that were in place were inadequate or were not appropriately executed.