At the beginning of December, workers at the Cargill meatpacking plant in High River, Alberta, reached a last-minute deal with the Minnesota-based company. The deal narrowly averted a planned strike and retaliatory lockout. The plant is infamous for being the site of one of North America’s largest workplace COVID-19 outbreaks.

Almost half of the two-thousand-strong workforce at the High River plant, which processes 40 percent of Canada’s beef, tested positive for COVID in April 2020. The outbreak led to the deaths of workers Benito Quesada and Hiep Bui. The casualties extended beyond the walls of Cargill’s meatpacking plant. Armando Sallegue, who had flown in from the Philippines to visit his son who worked at the plant, also died from the infection.

Quesada’s death is under criminal investigation for alleged negligence. Cargill kept the plant running, in spite of pleas from the union and the local Filipino community, from which Cargill disproportionately draws its ranks, ignoring their calls to close the plant for two weeks to avoid a massive outbreak. The inquiry is the first instance of a criminal probe related to a COVID outbreak in Canada.