This fall, government and industry sprung a done deal on the Manitoba public – a fast tracked proposal to build a 300,000-square-foot slaughterhouse near the St. Boniface Industrial Park, starting this spring. Approval by the province's Clean Environment Commission was deemed a foregone conclusion.

 The $200-million OlyWest plant will “process” – kill, dismember, package and render – 2.25 million pigs per year in one shift and nearly 5 million if it goes to two. Owned and operated (with generous loans and handouts from the Winnipeg and Manitoba governments) by a consortium of two of Canada's biggest pork producers and the nation's biggest pork processor, OlyWest will make great economic sense – for the owners. But for the rest of us?

 OlyWest may or may not smell up the neighbourhood, sicken people who live nearby or pollute the city's water supply with its massive daily sewage load of blood, excrement and (probably) antibiotic-resistant pathogens. 

 OlyWest will create over a thousand of the country's most mentally, physically, socially and spiritually hazardous low-end jobs. 

 OlyWest likely will increase substance abuse, domestic violence and crime among its workers and their families. A daily grind of violent animal abuse – even when it's legal and you get paid for it – has a way of doing that. 

 OlyWest will almost certainly leave the province's most humane and environmentally friendly pork producers – the vanishing breed of family or smallholder farmers – no better off than they are now, because its priority will be to process the mega hog shipments from its own mega hog barns. 

OlyWest will definitely create a profusion of these new mega hog barns in Manitoba to “finish” (intensively feed for a few months) the millions of weanling pigs currently shipped to U.S. producers. And that means the overflow of toxic industrial waste formerly known as manure will seep ever more profusely into the province's ground and surface water. 

 It also means more boil-water orders in rural Manitoba and a shorter life expectancy for Lake Winnipeg and other fresh water lakes, streams and rivers. 

 Finally, it means millions of warmblooded animals as smart, social and sensitive as your dog or your cat will have to endure billions more hours each year of cradle-to-grave incarceration inside concentration camps for animals, aka intensive livestock operations, concentrated animal feeding operations or factory farms – lives of chronic boredom, frustration of their most vital drives and instincts, social isolation or overcrowding, physical illness, pain and disability, mutilation and the most callous, violent and disrespectful of deaths. It is these animals who will pay the highest price for Manitoba's booming and soulless porkonomy.

 Citizens who value an ethical economy over the illusion of cheap meat should raise a stink with our politicians. And they should vote with their pocketbooks for food that's produced with respect for life and the environment that sustains us.