Alberta investigations into uninspected meat spark food safety concerns

EDITOR'S NOTE: This story has been revised from its original version to include changes and additional context related to halal meat, food prices and the inspection of an Edmonton garage by animal control officers and police.

Provincial agriculture inspectors and RCMP say the slaughter and sale of uninspected meat is on the rise in Alberta, raising concerns about the safety of food consumed across the province.  

There are several investigations and court cases ongoing in the province. 

In mid-April, health inspectors in Calgary ordered the closure of six grocers, a catering company and a wholesaler and distribution warehouse that all handled halal meat as a result of an ongoing investigation into the sale of uninspected meat that began last fall.

Alberta Health Services (AHS) issued a news release warning of a significant health risk associated with meat products purchased from the eight businesses. It advised anyone who purchased meat or meat products from the establishments to dispose of it and watch for any symptoms of gastrointestinal bacterial infection.

(Halal refers to food that conforms to the dietary rules of Islam. For meat to be considered halal, the animal must be slaughtered manually in a specific manner.)

AHS said in the statement that it is collaborating with the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, RCMP, Alberta Health and Alberta Agriculture and Irrigation in the Calgary investigation, which is not limited to halal businesses or the slaughter and sale of goats and sheep.

Several court cases underway

Police have uncovered several illegal meat operations in the past year and a half. 

Two men from central Alberta, near the town of Didsbury, Alta., were charged with illegal slaughter and selling, transporting and delivering uninspected meat. One of the men pleaded guilty on April 29 to selling, transporting or delivering uninspected meat and two other charges. He was fined $15,000.

In March of last year, RCMP said they investigated the sale of meat coming from sick and injured cattle at a facility in Wheatland County in southern Alberta. Officers found 36 dead calves, more than 100 tags from slaughtered cows and discarded livestock carcasses. RCMP photos show the carcasses piled in a snow-covered heap. Peter Wiebe is charged with causing unnecessary suffering to animals and selling uninspected meat.

Ron Wiebe, an Alberta Agriculture inspection and investigations manager for southern Alberta, said the slaughter and sale of uninspected meat is a growing problem.

"The uninspected-meat sales investigations are becoming increasingly more complex," he said in an email to CBC News.

Wiebe and RCMP both told CBC that sales of uninspected meat have increased in recent years but could not give specific figures. 

Rising cost of meat could be part of the reason for the increase. The average price of ground beef, per kilogram has gone up 15 per cent between February 2023 and 2024 and 26 per cent over a five year period, according to Statistics Canada. 

Similarly, the average price of pork shoulder cuts, per kilogram, rose 61 per cent increase between February 2019 and 2024. 

Statistics Canada does not track the prices of goat and lamb meat.

Police remove goats from Edmonton garage

Wiebe said cuts of beef from uninspected facilities can be purchased for less than half the cost of meat from federally or provincially inspected slaughterhouses.

In February 2023, Edmonton police and animal control officers, acting on a tip from a neighbouring property, entered a rented garage in the city's Kensington neighbourhood, rounding up several live goats. They found evidence that animals were being slaughtered on the premises. 

When CBC contacted the person who was renting the garage, he said he was slaughtering the animals for friends who had purchased them from farms and were seeking alternatives to the current high meat prices at commercial butchers and grocery stores. 

In Edmonton, it is against the animal licensing and control bylaw to have farm animals, including goats, staying on a residential property. It is also against the provincial Meat Inspection Act to slaughter an animal in a residential garage and illegal to distribute that meat.

Police said no charges were laid with respect to the Kensington property but did not say why.

Images of the garage shared with CBC News by a neighbour showed piles of goat carcasses, tubs of blood and the remains of a skinned goat on a tarp-covered table.

"There was goat parts everywhere. Blood on the wall," the neighbour, Jon Bos, said. "I've worked on a pig farm, and it never looked like that."

A Facebook post with the phone number and address of the Kensington garage posted around the time that animal control officers visited the property offered "young fresh goats" and beef for $6 per kilogram. The post was taken down soon after. 

When asked several times whether he was offering meat for purchase on social media, the renter said he was helping to serve his community and did not think he was doing anything illegal.

He said between 10 and 12 goats were slaughtered in the garage, which he rented for two months in early 2023. 

Hunters can butcher at home but only for personal use

In Alberta, licensed hunters can butcher at home the animals they kill and share the meat with family and friends but can't sell it. Farmers who successfully apply for a on-farm slaughter licence can kill animals, but the meat cannot be sold or gifted outside of the farmer's immediate family. 

Omar Subedar, a Toronto area imam who works with the Mississauga-based Halal Monitoring Authority, which issues volunteer certifications to businesses that want to brand their products halal, told CBC News that responsibly produced halal meat complies with the same food safety regulations as any other meat. 

"Running your own shop without any government inspectors — whether it's a CFIA on the federal level or whoever the provincial inspectors will be in Alberta — it's completely inappropriate," he said in a phone interview.

"It's only going to jeopardize the halal business … and as a result, it's going to be a huge disservice to the Muslim community."

Subedar said he was speaking to CBC as an individual, not on behalf of his organization. 

Inspections can't catch everything

In Canada, all meat entering the consumer system must be inspected either federally or provincially.

Lynn McMullen, a retired professor of food microbiology and food safety at the University of Alberta, says meat produced at uninspected abattoirs poses a serious risk to human health. 

Even within Canada's inspection system, meat tainted with E.coli, listeria or other bacteria that have health implications can make it to market. In the absence of inspections, the risk rises even more, she said. And once a pathogen enters the consumer food chain, it is difficult to detect and nearly impossible to trace back to the source, she said.

"When they inspect restaurants, for example, they inspect once or twice a year. That's a snapshot," McMullen said.

"How do we know that the rest of the time they're doing things accordingly and doing things safely? We don't."

Similarly, if an establishment — for example, a butcher, restaurant, caterer or wholesaler — is supplementing inspected meat with other sources, inspectors can have a hard time detecting it.

"If there's meat in a cooler, how does the inspector know where it came from? Unless they can show them their receipts and purchase requisitions, that sort of thing. But that's today. What happens tomorrow could be very different."

According to the Public Health Agency of Canada, food-borne bacteria, parasites and viruses cause about four million illnesses, 11,600 hospitalizations and 238 deaths per year. In 60 per cent of cases, the source of the food poisoning is never traced.

In the case of meat that comes from an uninspected source, there is no information tracking where it has been sold. This makes it difficult for health officials to prove whether uninspected meat is the source of an outbreak, she said.

"A lot of these cases are sporadic, so they don't get linked to something. It's very, very difficult to say that this organism came from this food source, from this person, unless we have that food source."

Theft could play a part in illegal supply chain

Risk management consultant Neil LeMay, a former RCMP officer and deputy chief of Alberta Sheriffs, said he thinks stolen animals are part of the underground illicit meat supply chain.

LeMay recently conducted an investigation for a client into Alberta's red meat industry, which did not include the cases in this story. He described the conclusions of that investigation as "troubling."

LeMay began looking into criminal activity in the meat industry following a CBC News report last year into cattle thefts in Alberta. He says the co-ordination it takes to steal, transport, slaughter and then sell stolen livestock has all the hallmarks of organized crime, in that it requires a sophisticated network to make it happen.

"I think it's a very serious, big deal," LeMay said. 

In 2023, the Alberta RCMP's livestock division investigated about 50 cattle thefts, including one case where 85 cattle were taken from a remote field.

The RCMP in Saskatchewan investigated 34 cattle thefts last year, for a total of 148 cases since 2020. Cattle thefts are not specifically tracked by RCMP in British Columbia.

The Alberta RCMP employs two livestock investigators. B.C. and Saskatchewan have one each. 

"We have all the laws we need on the books," LeMay said.  "We need investment in enforcement. We need boots on the ground … on the cattle rustling side and on the meat processing side, to enforce those laws."