Avian influenza continues to spread across Western Canada

Sep 20, 2022

There has been an increasing number of cases of avian influenza across Western Canada.

According to the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA), as of September 14th, there are 19 infected premises in Alberta, 9 in BC, 8 in Saskatchewan, and 3 in Manitoba. Nearly 1.5 million birds have been impacted in those four provinces over the course of the outbreak.

Ontario currently has 8 infected premises.

Lisa Bishop-Spencer is director of brand and communications for Chicken Farmers of Canada.

"As we anticipated might happen, we've seen an increase in cases, this time starting from west to east, versus east to west as the birds begin their migrations south. We've seen some additional cases in BC, Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba," she said.

Bishop-Spencer is expecting to see more cases pop up in the coming weeks.

She talked about the impact on producers.

"It's a tremendous impact. It's something that we've had in the past but we've never had it in multiple provinces. So we're now dealing with a situation this year where we have a highly pathogenic virus. The virus is coming into the farm in it's highly pathogenic form, whereas it used to come in a low pathogenic form and then it will mutate to high pathogenic...This is the first time that we've dealt with this issue. It's highly pathogenic among wild birds themselves. Usually those migratory birds, the geese and the fowl, that migrate, usually carry that virus in its low pathogenic form but it's actually killing those birds as well. We're dealing with something entirely new. It's a new experience for everyone and it's very stressful for farmers."

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Video: From Students to Solutions | On The Brink: Season 2, Episode 14

Ask Canada’s most decorated soybean breeder his favourite part of the job and he doesn’t name a single variety. He names the students.

Istvan Rajcan is a professor of soybean breeding and genetics in the Department of Plant Agriculture at the University of Guelph, where he has run the soybean breeding program for 28 and a half years. In that time he has developed 87 soybean cultivars, published 140 refereed papers and trained 51 graduate students. In 2025 he received the Public Sector Impact Award from the National Association for Plant Breeding.

He is also worried. In this episode he says Canada is at a crossroads, pointing to recent government cuts to plant breeding programs and to the facilities that support them. His prescription is structural. "Plant breeding funding formula has to be a long-term one," he says.

The formula he is defending is the public-private matching arrangement his program runs on. Private seed companies fund the work, provincial or federal money matches it, and the combined pool stretches each dollar further than either source could alone. At the National Association for Plant Breeding annual meeting in June, he says American public breeders were often surprised at how well that collaboration works in Canada.

He also describes how the people entering plant breeding have changed. His early graduate students came mostly from farms. More recently they include, in his words, "city kids who just became excited about genetics."

Topics covered:

Why public-private plant breeding funding in Canada needs a long-term

commitment rather than a larger one

How matching private seed company investment with provincial and federal

dollars multiplies research capacity

How the graduate student pipeline into plant breeding has shifted from

farm kids to city kids