Ostrich farm rallies support as court says it will decide next week if it hears case

Canada’s highest court says it will rule next Thursday whether to tackle a bitter dispute between the Canadian Food Inspection Agency and a British Columbia ostrich farm over the ordered destruction of its flock due to an avian flu outbreak.

Both sides staked out their positions Friday after the Supreme Court of Canada’s announcement, with Universal Ostrich Farms’ spokeswoman calling on supporters to converge on the property, and the CFIA rebutting online suggestions it had already started secretly killing the birds.

A list of leave applications to be ruled upon on Nov. 6 includes the challenge by the farm to the Canadian Food Inspection Agency’s Dec. 31, 2024, cull order.

If the court decides not to hear the case and lifts a stay on the cull, there would be no legal impediment to the killing of hundreds of birds. If leave to appeal is granted, a final decision on the fate of the flock would come after a hearing.

Katie Pasitney, the farm’s spokeswoman and daughter of one of the owners, said in a Facebook post that her “stomach sank a little bit” on Friday. She said the world needs to pray for them.

“I walk in faith as my feet hit the ground each day. This story has already been written. The ending has been decided, we just need to believe,” she said.

Pasitney later posted a video alleging the farm had evidence of the birds’ “deteriorating health, weight loss, lack of their bedding, birds drinking from mud puddles.”

The birds have been in the care of the CFIA at the farm since September.

“This is all contradicting Canadian Food Inspection Agency’s new statement,” she said. “These animals are suffering under the care of Canadian Food Inspection Agency.”

Pasitney said the agency is “rogue” and had no compassion as she called for people to gather on the property outside the tiny community of Edgewood in southeastern B.C. when the decision is handed down in Ottawa.

“Please come stand with us while we get that decision,” she said. “Come stand with us. Stand hand-in-hand. Come for prayer. Come for meditation, come for love and come for healing. Let’s change Canada together and make it a better place for generations to come.”

The owners of the farm have been fighting the cull for 10 months, arguing the surviving ostriches show no signs of illness and should be spared, while the CFIA says ostriches that appear healthy may still spread the disease.

The agency said in a statement Friday that it continues to care for the animals and is giving the birds “the same amount of feed daily that the owners reported using prior to the CFIA taking custody.”

The statement said it was preparing for the ostriches’ care for the winter, but there are constraints due to “the poor condition of the few facilities on the farm and the need for operational security to prevent obstruction by individuals visiting or staying at the farm.”

Supporters of the farm have suggested online that the CFIA could already be secretly culling the birds and removing their remains from the property.

But the CFIA says the count of the flock remains between 300 and 330 birds, and there have been no deaths reported since a single bird died on Oct. 4.

“Additionally, no ostrich body parts, or liquefied or mechanically ground up ostrich remains, have been removed from the farm or disposed of on the property,” the agency said.

“The farm owners still have not responded to the agency’s requests for flock records or inventory information.”

Legal experts have said the high court is unlikely to take up the case, expressing doubt about any lingering legal controversies it could clear up after both the Federal Court and Federal Court of Appeal sided with the CFIA.

Emmett Macfarlane, a political-science professor at the University of Waterloo, said last month that the odds of the high court hearing the farm’s appeal are “very low.”

He said if there had been disagreement among lower courts over the power of the federal agency, that would make it “a much more natural case for the Supreme Court of Canada to clarify the law itself.”

Paul Daly, a law professor at the University of Ottawa, said he’d be surprised if the court decides to hear the case because the legal issues involved are “not particularly novel or complicated.”

Daly said in an interview in September that the social media uproar around the ostrich farm won’t influence the Supreme Court “one way or the other.”

“I think it’s more likely that the Supreme Court ignores the public outcry and just takes a dispassionate view of the merits of the application.”

The farm’s lawyer, Umar Sheikh, has acknowledged the Supreme Court of Canada has an “extremely high threshold” to meet for cases it will hear.

The farm’s submissions to the court said the lower courts left the door open for it to clarify whether there should be a right for administrative decisions to be reconsidered in the face of fresh evidence or a change of circumstances.

“National guidance is needed to close this systemic gap so that temporary emergency orders do not persist despite fundamentally changed facts,” the farm’s leave application said.

The CFIA said in its response documents that the case doesn’t raise any issues of “public importance” for the court to hear.

The agency said the farm’s disagreement with the cull decision, its disbelief of “judicial findings of fact about risks to public health, animal health, and trade,” or its preference for a different outcome “does not provide a basis for this court’s intervention on appeal.”

“The Federal Court and Court of Appeal both emphatically upheld the reasonableness of CFIA’s decisions. (Universal Ostrich Farms’) application for leave to appeal largely repeats or reformulates arguments the Court of Appeal found raise no serious issue,” the inspection agency’s response said.

The cull had appeared imminent in September, but the Supreme Court issued a temporary stay until it decided whether to hear the farm’s case.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 31, 2025.

Darryl Greer, The Canadian Press