The Canada Agricultural Review Tribunal has upheld a $10,000 fine against Universal Ostrich Farms in Edgewood, B.C., for violating the Health of Animals Act by failing to report sick and dying birds in December 2024. The tribunal found the farm negligent: all it had to do was phone the CFIA’s Sick Bird Line.
The call that was never made
The Canadian Food Inspection Agency issued the penalty after an anonymous caller — not the farm — alerted it on Dec. 28, 2024, that the ostriches were believed sick with avian flu. The farm’s owners, Karen Espersen and Dave Bilinski, asked the tribunal to review the fine, arguing they “did their best”: they believed the birds had a non-reportable disease they had seen before, and they had tried to reach at least two veterinarians who were unavailable.
Tribunal chair Emily Crocco was not persuaded. In a decision dated Dec. 11, 2025, posted online this month, she found the farm negligent in its legal duty. The owners present themselves as experts in ostrich health, and knew their birds were sick, she wrote, “yet they failed to exercise the same level of adherence to the (law) that a reasonably prudent person would have done in a similar situation.”
The CFIA runs a Sick Bird Line that anyone can call to reach a veterinary inspector, Crocco noted. “All the (farm) had to do was immediately make a call to that phone number and inform them of any of the facts indicating the potential presence of a reportable disease.” She also noted there was no evidence the veterinarians the farmers tried to reach were veterinary inspectors under the Act. She disagreed with the CFIA that the failure was intentional — but found it “nevertheless, certainly negligent,” in a violation that “could have led to serious or widespread harm to human or animal health.”
What the decision reconstructs
According to the tribunal, Bilinski told a CFIA veterinarian on Dec. 28 that the weather had turned bad about three weeks earlier and birds had begun falling ill; roughly 5% of the flock of more than 400 had died over three weeks. In an affidavit, he said the farmers believed the illness was pseudomonas, an infection the flock had in 2020, pointing to watery eyes, white nodules in the mouths, coughing and lethargy, with higher deaths among younger birds.
The tribunal observed that watery eyes, depression and high mortality among young ostriches are, as a matter of fact, symptoms of avian influenza. CFIA swabs taken Dec. 30, 2024, from two dead birds tested positive the next day — and the cull order followed 41 minutes later.
The last chapter of a long fight
The reporting failure was the first link in a chain that made the Edgewood farm internationally famous. The cull order triggered an 11-month legal and political battle, fought in court and on social media, as the owners and their supporters tried to save the flock of more than 300 birds. Marksmen carried out the cull in drenching rain on Nov. 6, 2025, after the Supreme Court of Canada declined to hear the case.
The fine decision closes the loop on how the saga began: not with a report from the farm, but with a stranger’s phone call, three weeks into an outbreak the owners had watched spread through their flock.
A separate fine went the other way
In February 2026, the same tribunal set aside a different $10,000 CFIA fine against the farm — that one over alleged breaches of quarantine orders — because the agency had not properly delivered the amended quarantine notice in person, as the regulations require. “Improper service cannot be cured retroactively,” the tribunal wrote. The two outcomes are not contradictory: the quarantine fine fell on the agency’s paperwork, while the reporting fine upheld here turned on the farm’s own duty — a duty the tribunal found could have been discharged with a single phone call.
