Last month, the Mediation Services department of Alberta Jobs, Economy, Trade, and Immigration published their February 2026 Bargaining Update.
This monthly report provides information about the unionized workforce, primarily in Alberta.
In February 2026, Mediation Services received settlement information regarding 43 bargaining relationships encompassing 37,540 employees. There were 19 private sector and 24 public sector settlements, covering 5,895 and 31,645 employees respectively.
One of those collective agreements was between about 60 workers and Nortera Foods.
Based out of Québec, Nortera specializes in producing canned and frozen vegetables. They have processing plants in Ontario and Québec, as well as one in Lethbridge (including a field shop in Taber), where these workers are employed.
The Lethbridge plant was previously owned by Bonduelle Canada and prior to that, Lucerne Foods.
These workers are represented by Local 987 of the Teamsters.
Or at least they will be for the next two months.
Last month, Nortera announced in a media release that they will “consolidate its production footprint” to “streamline operations and ensure the company’s continued viability”. As a result, they will close their Lethbridge plant in June, forcing these workers onto the unempoloyment line.
Their media release claims it will affect about 70 workers, although the Bargaining Update listed only 60.
The closure announcement comes only 4 months after the company reached a new collective agreement with these workers, which would have included a 9.5% wage increase over 3 years.
Their previous collective agreement, which was for 3 years, expired in March 2025. The new agreement was ratified in November 2025, 8 months after the last one expired. It was supposed to last until March 2028.
I guess shutting down the entire plant is one way to force the contract to end sooner.
Under the new contract, workers were supposed to receive a 3.5% wage increase retroactive to March 2025, followed by a 3% increase this past March, and a 3% increase next March.
At least they will get two of them.
As well, the workers had negotiated a dual ticket premium of $2 an hour for workers in the maintenance and engineering departments who possess 2 or more company-recognized trades tickets.
According to the new collective agreement, Nortera had recently dissolved their Taber field shop, so maybe that should have been a heads up, looking back with the benefit of hindsight.
Luckily, the collective agreement has a clause that somewhat protects workers in the event of a permanent closure.
Nortera is thus obligated to pay each regular full-time worker a week’s worth of pay for every year of continuous, full-time labour that workers has performed for the company.
Severance pay, however, maxes out at 15 weeks.
So two raises (one of the retroactive) and severance pay. It is better than nothing, but it really sucks that these 60 workers are about to be out of a job.
Plus, the closure will impact workers in related industries as well.
In its media release, Nortera said the following:
This decision also impacts the company’s long-standing relationships with local partners in Alberta. Nortera is deeply grateful for the high-quality produce and the strong partnerships they have shared with the Lethbridge agricultural community over the years.
In other words, “Not only are we abandoning the workers who have been in this plant for 75 years, we are screwing over local farm workers, too”.
In a news article from last week, Ose Irete of the CBC’s Lethbridge bureau interviewed a Taber farmer who dedicates a fifth of his farmland to growing peas for Nortera.
Now that is all up in the air, especially as planting season is about to get underway, and farmers had been planning for months already what to grow this season.
Plus, because peas have a lower impact on growing soil, they are a higer value crop, compared to other commodities.
According to an article written by Greg Price in the Alberta Farmer Express, Nortera had about 6,000 contracted acres producing 40 million pounds of vegetables for them.
It takes a lot of farm workers to harvest 6,000 acres of vegetables.
