The man who helped design the Calgary Police Service protocol for workplace fatality investigations says a criminal probe should be considered in the case of a widespread COVID-19 outbreak at the Cargill meat-packing plant in High River.

“It certainly warrants an investigation,” Robert Stewart said of the outbreak, which has resulted in one death and 480 confirmed cases of the novel coronavirus among employees at the plant. “Ideally, to have this work properly, the RCMP should be doing this.”

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Occupational Health and Safety is currently investigating the circumstances at the Cargill plant — including any possible non-compliance with provincial health and safety legislation — that may have led to so many workers being infected, said Adrienne South, press secretary for Alberta Labour Minister Jason Copping.

An OHS investigation is also underway at the JBS meat-packing plant in Brooks. Alberta’s chief medical officer of health Dr. Deena Hinshaw confirmed the COVID-19 death of one worker at that plant Thursday, and said confirmed cases there have reached 124.

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OHS has the power to levy fines for non-compliance with health and safety rules. But unions and labour groups, who complained about workers getting sick at the Cargill plant two-and-a-half weeks before the Minnesota-based company temporarily shuttered the facility and encouraged all employees to get tested, have been calling for stronger measures. They want to see a full criminal investigation under the terms of the 2004 Westray Act, which allows employers to be prosecuted under the Criminal Code for workplace incidents that result in injury or death.

Stewart — a workplace safety expert who helped design the Calgary Police Service’s Krsek Protocol, named after a three-year-old girl who was killed when a piece of metal fell from a downtown Calgary construction site in 2009 — said CPS was the first among Canadian police forces to develop procedures and best practices to help officers determine whether a supervisor, employer or someone else on the job site should face criminal charges in the wake of a workplace incident.

He said that, historically, police forces have tended to defer to OHS when it comes to workplace fatalities. However, in 2017, following the CPS’ work on the Krsek Protocol, a memorandum of understanding was signed by the Government of Alberta and 10 police services establishing proper procedures in the event of a serious workplace incident.

That document states that if someone is seriously injured or killed on a worksite, it is incumbent on law enforcement to rule out criminal negligence as a possible cause.

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The agreement also states that a police service, Occupational Health and Safety officers and the Ministry of Labour will notify each other of workplace incidents as soon as possible, and the first authority to arrive will secure the scene to help preserve evidence.

“The thing with OHS is nobody’s trained them on criminality, nobody’s trained them on what to look for,” Stewart said. “That’s the kind of stuff that needs to be investigated by police.”

On Wednesday, an RCMP spokesperson for Alberta’s K Division said there was no active investigation into the Cargill COVID-19 outbreak.

Eric Adams, a law professor at the University of Alberta, said employers are certainly not automatically liable for cases of COVID-19 that are contracted at their worksites.

However, he said neither are employers immune simply because we are in the unprecedented territory of a pandemic.

“The same framework continues to apply to the law of workplace safety as would in other kinds of dangerous work conditions,” Adams said.

He added that any OHS or criminal investigation into COVID-19 in a workplace setting will come down to the steps the employer took to protect workers, when they took them, and whether worker health and safety was consistently placed at the forefront of the decision-making process.

“It becomes a case of what’s reasonable in this particular case, and how far does an employer need to go to mitigate risks and protect as far as possible,” Adams said. “And those are difficult questions.”

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Cargill did not respond to a request for comment Thursday. Both Cargill and JBS have consistently said they have followed all public health recommendations to protect workers — including temperature checks, enhanced cleaning and sanitizing, face coverings, screening between employee stations, prohibiting visitors, adopting distancing practices where possible and offering staggered breaks and shift flexibility.

However, Alberta Federation of Labour president Gil McGowan has alleged the death of a female Cargill employee in her 60s could have been avoided had the company and the government suspended operations at the plant when workers and their union called for it.

On Thursday, Alberta’s NDP official Opposition called on Premier Jason Kenney to commit to launching a public inquiry into the handling of the COVID-19 outbreaks at the two meat plants.