They say those who forget history are doomed to repeat it and what we’re watching in Edgewood, B.C., at the Universal Ostrich Farm is giving me déjà vu.
I don’t believe Universal Ostrich Farm started out with the intent to become an extremist outpost for dismantling federal regulations. It began as a niche exotic-bird venture in Edgewood, British Columbia.
Co-owners Karen Espersen and Dave Bilinski have, by the farm’s own account, devoted over 30 years to raising up to 500 ostriches, which used to sell their birds for meat but say they have recently started to raise them for use in scientific research.
Over time, however, patterns of lax biosecurity appear to have crept in.
The farm has routinely allowed wild waterfowl (ducks and geese that are known for spreading pathogens) to access the same enclosures, feed, and water as the ostriches.
In December 2024, at least 69 birds died, and their deaths were not reported to the authorities, as required. An anonymous complaint triggered an inspection by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA), which resulted in the first issue a cull order for the ostriches after testing confirmed H5N1 avian influenza.
But the UOF has done everything in it’s power to prevent the cull, and notorious bad-actors, like “Freedom Convoy” organizers, have taken the opportunity to spread misinformation and erode public trust in government.
The question is, why did this farm choose not to follow basic protocol for disease control in avian populations if they cared about animal welfare? Their failure to uphold them is what laid the groundwork for this disaster.
Now, we arrived at the brink: a federal cull order, a public battle, and a crisis of trust.
The threat is the spreading of H5N1 avian influenza, an RNA virus known for its ability to mutate rapidly.
Such viruses are slippery. They can recombine, shift, and adapt, especially when given repeated opportunities and hosts.
Once unleashed, RNA viruses can cross species barriers, for example, a teenager in B.C. was hospitalized in 2024 with what is believed to be Canada’s first presumptive human case of H5N1. Remember COVID? Yeah, it has the potential to be a lot like that.
Though the current risk of sustained human-to-human transmission remains assessed as low, that can change. The virus could mutate in a way that allows easier spread. And when a virus is given a chance inside a population (especially one kept in substandard containment) it’s playing with fire.
And beyond humans, there’s risk to our food supply, especially to the poultry industry, which brings in $6.8 billion annually in Canada. If a novel strain spreads, then trade bans, shortages, and economic chaos are all possible, like in 2022 with Alberta beef.
The containment of deadly pathogens for the protection of human health and our economy is the very reason we have disease-control protocols, regulatory oversight, and stamping-out policies to begin with.
They’re needed to keep us all safe.
This Government showdown is drawing in Libertarians like moths to a flame.
Figures from the 2022 Trucker Convoy in Ottawa like Tamara Lynch and others have seized on this case as a talking point.
RFK Jr. has intervened publicly, lobbying to spare the birds or relocate them, casting the CFIA as a villain.
Dr. Oz has offered them sanctuary in the US. Rebel News and others echo the same tone: “You can’t touch my birds!” “Stop the cull!”
They frame it as government overreach, a farmer victimized by a clawing bureaucracy, animals imprisoned by the state, and many well-meaning people are falling for it hook, line and sinker.
Meanwhile, the broader Libertarian ideological narrative is built in the minds of Canadians not paying close enough attention to the details of the issue:
regulatory bodies = enemies
government = oppressor
individual ‘freedoms’ = supreme
Even when they conflict with lives, safety, or collective welfare.
200 million birds die every day for meat. So, why do people suddenly care about 400 Ostriches?
Consider the scale: in industrial meat systems, over 200 million birds die every single day to serve the human demand for meat.
The cycle of death for birds on this planet is real, systematic, relentless.
Yet, it’s hardly ever framed as a system that fails animals and endangers public health.
If we casually tolerate mass death behind barn walls on a daily basis, why are people suddenly screaming about this now?
The "freedom convoy" protesters are protesting the existence of oversight altogether.
In this authors opinion, it’s about using this single case, one with serious public health implications, as a wedge issue.
They see this farm and its long documented willingness to disregard public health and safety measures as a means to an end.
Because to them, the fight is about dismantling the systems that protect all of us: the safety nets, the regulatory bodies, the public science institutions, etc.
Once the narrative is set, that governments can’t be trusted to manage disease, that all regulation is oppressive, then oversight of food, environment, animal health, biosecurity becomes the next target, which is part of the Project 2025 Playbook.
In that mindframe, every regulation becomes suspect, every health measure becomes tyranny, and the idea of “rights and freedoms” becomes weaponized.
The ostrich farm has become a Libertarian symbol, an anti-government rallying cry, and not necessarily because the movement cares deeply about ostriches (or science...)... it’s purely tactical.
The pattern is clear: take money and power away from public systems that serve everyone, and hand it to privately owned ones.
That means less accountability, weaker protections, and a system where a few people get “choice” while the rest of us are left with less.
This isn’t the first time libertarian movements have latched onto a crisis or controversy and turned it into a weapon against public institutions. In Canada, there’s a clear pattern: seize on moments of tension, redefine them as government “overreach,” and then use them to weaken the very systems that hold us together.
We’ve seen it in our public schools, where “parents’ rights” campaigns (many with roots in convoy networks) are pushing book bans and policies that sideline teachers and professional educators. They reframe education as indoctrination, public schools as “government schools,” and then sell “school choice” as the solution. The real outcome? Public dollars funneled into private and charter schools, public transparency and accountability stripped from elected boards, and the slow dismantling of an institution meant to serve all children.
We’ve seen it in our health system, too. In Alberta, the government is breaking apart Alberta Health Services, spinning off pieces that critics warn will open the door to privatization and weaken province-wide public planning. The pitch is always the same: government is bloated, centralized systems don’t work, and “choice” will save us. The reality is chaos, fragmentation, and a slow bleed of resources into private hands for worstened service delivery leading to increased death.
And we’ve seen it in regulation itself, dressed up as “red tape reduction.” Governments and elected leaders boast about slashing one-third of regulations, but what that really means is fewer inspectors, faster approvals, and weaker safeguards for food safety, workplaces, and the environment. It’s deregulation by another name, and industry loves it because it shifts costs and risks back onto the public.
The ostrich farm fight fits perfectly into this lineage. It isn’t about 400 birds, it’s about the playbook. Take an incident where government acts to protect public health, recast it as tyranny, whip up anger with talk of “freedom,” and then use that anger to erode public trust in institutions.
It’s convoy logic, redux: the specific issue doesn’t matter as much as the opportunity to rally people around dismantling systems that are supposed to protect us.
Let's not pretend the CFIA is the hero, either.
The agency’s is committed to culling rather than investing in rescue, rehabilitation, biosecurity, or containment. They won’t retest to see whether the surviving ostriches pose an actual threat, or whether they have developed immunity. They are more willing to destroy than to innovate.
But, they claim, it’s for good reason.
Under international guidelines from the World Organisation for Animal Health, Canada follows a “stamping-out” approach whenever highly pathogenic avian influenza is confirmed. The logic is simple containment: kill quickly, kill broadly, and hope the virus stops moving.
That often means destroying entire flocks, sometimes millions of birds in a region, regardless of whether every individual animal is sick. But what gets lost in that calculation is the moral weight of so many lives extinguished in the name of efficiency.
Every time a flock is stamped out, the government pays out compensation to the farm. Money for carcasses, not for keeping animals alive. Layer that on top of the staggering reality that multi-billions of animals are slaughtered every year day for food, and the picture becomes clear: in Canada, animals’ lives are measured in dollars.
Mass killing becomes normalized as the only response, reinforcing a view that animals are expendable assets rather than living beings worthy of protection.
And the lack of transparency and willingness to invest in new paths forward, combined with intentional misinformation sowed by bad-actors, enflames public mistrust in our institutions and safeguards.
How long did we expect the public to not care about the mass death of innocent animals?
When killing is compensated and protection is not, it’s no wonder we see the cycle repeat frequently: disease hits, birds die, government pays, industry moves on, and the public is clueless, all while the deeper question of how to honour and protect animal life, while ensuring public trust and safety, is ignored, leaving opportunities for bad-actors to seize on.
While the “Freedom” fighter folks might not truly care about the welfare of animals, I can’t help but think that this crisis of trust in Canadian instutitions could have been averted if Canada had invested in the welfare of farmed animals a long time ago.
When a government falls out-of-touch with what it’s people value, trust naturally erodes, and there are are always going to be people ready to leap at any opportunity to bring our nation to it’s knees.
Canada could have created a new model for humane disease control.
Instead, we are now forced into a showdown: regulation or chaos; life or death.
A call to pause, to reflect, and to protect the systems that protect us while also demanding better.
This is about so much more than ostriches.
When we see a government agency issuing a cull order, demanding compliance, and using force, we are often trained to react, instinctively, to support “the little guy.”
But what if the little guy is endangering us all?
And what if the systems designed to protect public health are under assault?
If we allow the fall of CFIA’s authority over this case, we aren’t just letting one farm off scot-free.
We are opening the door to a systemic unraveling: no oversight over industrial agriculture, no protection for wild animals, no capacity to prevent zoonoses.
We need regulatory bodies. Without them we are adrift in a sea of contagion risk, misinformation, self-interest, and ideological bombs.
But we also can’t just trust them blindly.
It may be the CFIA’s job to protect the public, our food system, and the animals in its care, but that responsibility must extend beyond short-term eradication to long-term, humane solutions.
Anything less continues to treat lives as expendable, leaving Canadians vulnerable to future crises, and our safeguards vulnerable to erosion.
We do not live in isolation.
We breathe the same air.
We share ecosystems.
While the ideals of Libertarian absolutism, like no governments and unrestricted individual “freedoms”, can have its appeal in speeches, in billboards, in soundbites, the reality is, when a virus is involved, and when human health, food security, public welfare are in jeopardy, the theory completely falls apart.
Our individual freedoms end when we put other lives in danger. If your choices harm your neighbours, your animals, or the public, they’re not rights. It’s just recklessness.
This debate of ostrich vs. bureaucracy is a frontline in the war over what kind of society we want to live in.
Do we want to create a culture where life, science, interdependence, collective responsibility and accountability matter?
Or, do we want to create one where every actor claims “freedom” for themselves by undermining our shared institutions, rights, and safety?
We must not let this case be co-opted by bad-actors who seek to dismantle our systems of safety and protection.
