A disturbing video is going viral this week showing a funeral home employee in Alberta, Canada dragging a corpse wrapped in a body bag from a refrigerated truck that was rented due to overcapacity at the morgue.

The horrifying footage shows the employee and another medical attendant moving a dead body onto a gurney from a truck in south Edmonton last Sunday. The truck had been rented and parked in the lot of Alberta’s Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, and it had been rented in order to address a critical shortage of space for bodies due to a sudden influx.

Seventeen bodies wrapped in white bags had been placed on the floor of the truck. In the video, a man wearing a dark suit can be seen dragging one of the corpses by the feet with both hands. He continued dragging the body on its back for a number of feet, where he and the other official tried to place it on a gurney. The man is then seen climbing down a ladder and repeatedly tugging on the body in order to get it on top of the gurney. The sheet even falls off at one point, but the body is not visible to the camera.

After the video went viral, the provincial government’s Ministry of Justice and Solicitor General announced it was investigating.

“Like all Albertans, I was very disturbed by what I saw in the video,” said Alberta Justice Minister Doug Schweitzer. “All Albertans, living or deceased, have the right to be treated with dignity, and any disrespect for the deceased or their loved ones is not reflective of our values. I have directed my department to investigate the matter and have been assured by the Chief Medical Examiner that additional steps are being taken to ensure that the deceased are treated with the respect they deserve.”

Even before the video came out, staffers at the OCME privately expressed concern about the practice of storing bodies in a trailer.

“I feel that this might not be something that families will find acceptable,” a staffer wrote in a September 5 email to chief medical examiner Dr. Elizabeth Brooks-Lim. “How do I approach this when speaking to families?”

She replied by saying that the families of the dead did not need to be told of where their loved ones’ corpses were being held.

“The floor is clean, the bodies will be in body bags and the families do not need to be informed of the storage procedures,” said Brooks-Lim, who added that her office could not buy more morgue tables and that renting a trailer was the most cost effective way to deal with lack of storage space.

“We cannot turn bodies away,” Brooks-Lim wrote to staffers.

The OCME released a statement saying that it “expects the removal of the deceased by funeral homes chosen by the next of kin to be conducted professionally and compassionately.”

Watch the video for yourself here.