Cargill Incorporated is the largest privately held company in the United States, and that means it is essentially a family business. 

You cannot buy Cargill shares on the Toronto, New York or any other stock exchange. The descendants of William Cargill, who founded the company in 1865 as a grain storage operation, own 90 per cent of the company.

But if it is a family business, Cargill is no mom-and-pop operation. 

The company has grown over the past century and a half into a multi-tentacled corporate behemoth, involved in everything from grain to livestock to potash to steel to transport to financial services. In 2018, Cargill and its various subsidiaries reported revenues of over $110 billion. 

Cargill has operations on five continents, in more than 70 countries, including Canada, and the company's meat-packing plant in High River, Alberta is a tiny piece of that worldwide empire. 

In this country, however, the High River plant has an extremely high profile. It is one of the epicentres of COVID-19 in Canada -- in all of North America, in fact -- with over 900 reported cases out of 2,000 employees. That's almost half the workforce.  

Two people have died in connection with the Cargill outbreak -- one, a plant worker originally from Vietnam; the other, an infected plant worker's father, who had been visiting from the Philippines.

Cargill initially resisted pleas from workers and their union to close the plant, but finally relented, in late April. After only two weeks, it hastily reopened, on Monday, May 4, giving the largely immigrant workforce the Hobson's choice of either going back to a potentially fatal workplace or losing their jobs. 

Neither the workers, nor their union think the plant has become safe. 

The union, the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW), has gone to court to force a shutdown, until Cargill can absolutely guarantee safe and healthy conditions for all employees. 

The UFCW does not think the notoriously low-paid plant workers should have to risk their lives to fatten the balance sheet of a U.S.-based transnational corporation that ranks number 15 on the Fortune 500. 

Kenney and Trump on the same wavelength

Alberta Premier Jason Kenney has a different view from that of the union and the workers it represents. 

The premier, and former Harper Conservative government cabinet minister, appropriates a concept meant to describe access to necessary basic foodstuffs we all need for sustenance – food security – and applies it to the much different situation of the High River plant. The Cargill workers have to do their part, the Alberta premier argues, to ensure food security for Canadians. 

The truth is that Canada's food security does not depend on meat from Cargill or any other commercial operation. 

If our local butcher runs out of hamburger for the barbecue, we all have other nutritious options. There are, for instance, the protein-packed pulses -- chickpeas, lentils and the like -- that farmers in Saskatchewan grow in great quantity. 

In the U.S., as in Canada, COVID-19 has been particularly hard on the meat-packing industry, forcing more than 20 plant closures, and causing meat shortages on grocery shelves. Some fast food chains have even had to take hamburgers off the menu. 

Corporate executives in the meat industry told U.S. President Trump that they were reluctant to reopen their U.S.-based plants for fear of lawsuits. The U.S. is a far more litigious country than Canada. 

The president's response was to give the corporations cover, by invoking the U.S. Defense Protection Act (DPA). In effect, the president is forcing the corporations to reopen their plants. 

The purpose of the DPA is to allow a president to harness the resources of private industry to serve public needs in time of war or national emergency. Many have urged Trump to invoke the act to assure production of personal protective equipment for front-line workers during the pandemic, but he has refused. 

Now, Trump is using the extraordinary powers of the DPA to force workers back to dangerous plants, while shielding their bosses from responsibility.

As for the High River Cargill plant workers, they fall under provincial labour jurisdiction. And the Alberta premier has already indicated he will not lift a finger to protect them. But there might be a way that federal authorities could step in.

Jagmeet Singh urges Trudeau government to act

In Canada, it is the federal government that has authority over food safety, and NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh believes the Trudeau team should assertively use that power to protect the Cargill workers.

Singh put the question to Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland during the House of Commons' weekly face-to-face session on Wednesday, May 6.

"Food safety and worker safety cannot be divorced," Singh told the House. "Will the government ensure that the Cargill workers are in safe work conditions?"

Freeland, in a manner all-too-typical of Liberal politicians, dissimulated, offering sympathy but no action.

"The member opposite is quite right that where the federal government has particular authority in food processing is to guarantee the safety of the foods processed there for Canadians to eat," she said, and then expressed some vague sentiments of concern. "When it comes to Cargill and food processing, I agree with the member opposite that it's something we all need to be particularly concerned about, and we have been."

The NDP leader was not satisfied. 

"Will the government commit to using the authority that it has under food safety to ensure that workers are also safe, because there's no way that food can truly be safe if workers are in dangerous conditions and if workers are contracting COVID-19?" Singh asked, adding: "If workers are dying, the food can't be safe."

Freeland would not budge. The Trudeau government wants to get credit for caring, without pushing the envelope in dealing with the most prickly and confrontational provincial government in the country, Alberta's. 

"I think we all understand there is a very clear difference between the duty to inspect food which is produced and to ensure that that food is safe for Canadians, and even more sacred duty to ensure that workers are working in safe conditions," Freeland answered. "We take both of those extremely seriously and we are aware what falls specifically in our jurisdictions. Having said that, we care very much about all Canadian workers." 

Freeland's assertion that responsibility for the safety of a product that consumers eat does not include making sure a processing plant is not an active breeder of a deadly virus reflects a narrow and limited understanding of the federal role. 

There is no evidence of food borne transmission of COVID-19, or of food packaging carrying the virus, according to authorities in both the U.S. and Canada.

But experts have not always got it right about COVID-19 since the outbreak at the beginning of this year. At this stage, all we know for sure is that there remain many unanswered questions about it.

'The worst company in the world'

What is not in doubt is the kind of company we're dealing with. 

Not too long ago the U.S. environmental organization Mighty Earth undertook a study of the social and environmental impact of Cargill's operations and issued a report they called "The Worst Company in the World."

The report opens by stating "when it comes to addressing the most important problems facing our world, including the destruction of the natural environment, the pollution of our air and water, the warming of the globe, the displacement of Indigenous peoples, child labor, and global poverty, Cargill is not only consistently in last place, but is driving these problems at a scale that dwarfs their closest competitors."

The report details how Cargill has become more powerful than governments and has betrayed repeated promises to adhere to high environmental standards. 

"Nowhere is Cargill's pattern of deception and destruction more apparent than in its participation in the destruction of the lungs of the planet, the world's forests. Despite repeated and highly publicized promises to the contrary, Cargill has continued to bulldoze ancient ecosystems, sometimes within the bounds of lax laws -- and, too often, outside those bounds as well."

With the advent to power of virulently anti-environmental Trump in the U.S. and Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, there is now virtually no limit, Mighty Earth says, to Cargill's capacity to ravage rainforests, savannahs and other vital habitats. 

Mighty Earth cites many examples. 

One of those is that of "the Gran Chaco, a 110-million-hectare ecosystem spanning Argentina, Bolivia, and Paraguay." 

This ecosystem "is one of the largest remaining continuous tracts of native vegetation in South America, second in size only to the Amazon rainforest. These forests are home to vibrant communities of Indigenous Peoples … who have depended on and coexisted with the Chaco forest for millennia."

Cargill, the report tells us, is now actively endangering both the people and other inhabitants of the Gran Chaco to produce a cash crop -- soy -- that feeds the animals which become Big Macs and Whoppers.

"Once the impenetrable stronghold of creatures like the screaming hairy armadillo, the jaguar, and the giant anteater, Cargill has infiltrated the Gran Chaco, bulldozing and burning to make way for vast fields of genetically modified soy."

Mighty Earth also documents Cargill's use of violence to subdue Indigenous peoples, its exploitative labour practices, including child labour, and its predatory practices that have driven competitors out of certain businesses. 

This is the company that Jason Kenney says must be allowed to operate, uninhibited by health concerns, to assure our food security. 

If you believe that, you might also believe that injecting bleach into your veins can cure COVID-19, or that, as many opinion leaders in the U.S. say, it is necessary to accept that thousands must die in the interests of what they call the economy. 

The owners of Cargill are not personally offering to sacrifice their lives. They are offering their employees' lives instead.

Karl Nerenberg has been a journalist and filmmaker for more than 25 years. He is rabble's politics reporter.

Image: Alberta Newsroom/Flickr

Now that Premier Jason Kenney has declared it "un-Canadian" to say oil is dead, I wonder if it's OK to admit Alberta's fossil fuel industry is on the ropes?

Probably. Kenney said as much himself in a remarkable rant yesterday directed at the parliamentary leader of the Bloc Québécois and the former leader of the Green Party of Canada.

But if you don't want to be accused of un-Canadian activities, you'd better make it clear none of these troubles are the fault of anything that's ever been done by any Alberta government, except perhaps the NDP's, and especially not by the United Conservative Party Kenney leads.

There is acceptable speech in Alberta, you see, and it doesn't include saying that oil is done like dinner, which is probably not true just yet, but is nevertheless a position that can be argued in respectable company almost anywhere else in the world, including a number of countries known for producing what Kenney rather sophomorically calls "dictator oil."

As has become his practice lately, Kenney took over Chief Medical Officer of Health Deena Hinshaw's daily COVID-19 briefing in Edmonton yesterday afternoon for the sustained blast of gaslighting he directed at Yves-François Blanchet and Elizabeth May.

Blanchet had dared to suggest at a news conference Wednesday that oil "is never coming back" (uttered en francais, bien sûr) and that Ottawa's bailout package should really be directed at "something which is more green." May, for her part, opined at the same event that "oil is dead."

Specifically, the MP for Saanich-Gulf Islands told the media: "My heart bleeds for people who believe the sector is going to come back. It's not. Oil is dead and for people in the sector, it's very important there be just transition funds." This may be wrong, but outside Alberta I doubt it sounds like a stab in the back or a curb-stomping.

Nevertheless, that is what sent Kenney over the edge, in a calculated sort of way, responding to a set-up question provided by Calgary Sun political columnist Rick Bell, who can be counted on to get the first question at one of Hinshaw's frequently hijacked news conferences.

"I just think it's deeply regrettable that we would see national political leaders piling on Albertans and energy workers at a time of great trial for us," Kenney said piously, opening what appeared to be a carefully rehearsed answer. "This is the opposite of leadership. Leaders should be seeking to bring us together, not to divide us."

This is a bit of an irony, of course, coming from a premier who has been ginning up an Alberta separatist threat for months while denying the oil industry had anywhere to go but up, but let's just take it as a lesson in gaslighting 101.

In his remarks, Kenney trotted out benefits he said have been conferred on Quebec by Alberta's oil industry, noted the province's equalization complaints, blamed "predatory actions" by OPEC countries that "want to dominate the world with dictator oil," reminded Quebeckers they like to drive cars and go on airplane trips, and totted up the medical equipment recently sent by Alberta to other provinces.

Having said it in English, he said it over again in French.

Tsk-tsking and shaking his head, Kenney declared, "I would say to Mr. Blanchet and Madam May: Please stop kickin' us while we're down!"

"These attacks on our natural resource industries are unwarranted, they are divisive, they're, I believe, in a way, un-Canadian at a time like this. It's like blaming the victim!" (Italics added for emphasis. And, yes, Kenney really said that.)

Premier Kenney also took particular umbrage at Blanchet's remark that Quebec receives a string of insults from Alberta -- although anyone who has paid attention to political discourse in this province for the last half century would have trouble refuting the claim.

After the news conference, backup was provided in columns filed by Bell and his Postmedia colleague Don Braid.

Bell pronounced Blanchet and May to be "the Bobbsey Twins of B.S." and the "deluded duo," and accused them of choosing "to kick Alberta when we're down" and indulging "in a little curb-stomping."

Braid, the Dinger's bookend of acceptable oilpatch opinion, charged them with "the foulest kind of cheap shot," to wit, saying "Alberta's oil and gas industry should be left prostrate in the dust with no help from the federal government."

Well, there you have it: the debased state of political discourse in Alberta in the plague year 2020. It's not reassuring.

David Climenhaga, author of the Alberta Diary blog, is a journalist, author, journalism teacher, poet and trade union communicator who has worked in senior writing and editing positions at The Globe and Mail and the Calgary Herald. This post also appears on his blog, AlbertaPolitics.ca.

Image: Screenshot of Government of Alberta video/YouTube