Alberta farmers warming to new workplace rules

But Bill 6 could still hurt NDP in rural ridings

EDMONTON •When Alberta elected Rachel Notley’s New Democrats in 2015, the new government moved quickly to change provincial farm safety regulations that some believed were, in the words of former provincial Liberal leader David Swann, enough to make “Charles Dickens blush.” But the introduction of Bill 6 provoked a firestorm, leading then-Alberta Progressive Conservative leader Ric McIver to fume that the reforms were part of a plan to turn Alberta into a “socialist Disneyland” — and, at the margins, to social media posts in which people mused openly about assassinating Notley and other New Democrats.

At the time, Alberta was the only province that exempted farms and ranches from workplace health and safety rules. Bill 6 sought to change that, bringing workers under workers’ compensation rules and setting out workplace safety regulations. Since January 2016, farm employees have been under workers’ compensation; after two years of consultations, the NDP announced specific workplace safety regulations in June 2018 — they come into effect this December.

The bill flat-out scared Alberta’s farmers, said Andre Harpe. “The farming community in the rural areas were talked at, we were told what we were, what was wrong with us,” said Harpe, who grows grain and oilseed near the hamlet of Valhalla Centre, about 500 kilometres northwest of Edmonton.

The legislation was seen as a symbol of the distance between Notley’s government and rural Alberta, a policy designed by city slickers with no understanding of life outside the city. And yet, after two years of consultations, major industry players represented by AgCoalition — which includes everyone from Alberta Barley to the Egg Farmers of Alberta — ended up backing the regulations. “We landed in a good place,” said AgCoalition chairman Albert Kamps. “No law is perfect, but a major step was needed to enhance a culture of safety in agriculture,” read a July 12 editorial in The Western Producer.

It seems a remarkably peaceful outcome, considering how controversial farm safety was just three years ago. But the drama isn’t quite over, nor is it likely to be when the regulations come into effect on Dec. 1 — or even after what promises to be a raucous provincial election in 2019.

Farms and ranches are, by any standard, dangerous places. An average of 17 people died on Alberta farms annually, between 1985 and 2014; about 100 die annually countrywide. Since 2016, when employees came under workers’ compensation, more than 800 claims have been accepted per year; in 2015, there were 339. “In terms of absolute numbers of fatalities, there is no more dangerous occupation,” said Canadian Agricultural Injury Reporting’s 2016 report.

So it made sense to the New Democrats to strive to protect those injured by bringing waged, non-family farm workers under workers’ compensation and putting in place regulations that make farm work safer for employees (exempting, for example, neighbours who volunteer to help each other out). “Out of listening and discussing these issues, we were able to create a number of provisions that really allow for that unique agricultural sector work environment to be accommodated for,” Alberta labour minister Christina Gray said in an interview with the National Post.

After the government’s consultations, those exceptions to the standard health and safety regulations now cover everything from driving a piece of equipment without a seatbelt (it’s OK if you’re going slowly) to urinating among the crops (no, farmers won’t need to install washrooms in their fields).

“That (washroom) exemption has been a bit of a joke in agriculture circles, but to be honest, if it hadn’t been for a lot of these consultations, that’s the kind of stupidity that would be in those regulations now,” said Kevin Serfas, who farms near Lethbridge in southern Alberta. “You’ve got bureaucrats and politicians carving out rules and regulations and trying to use the construction industry or the oil and gas industry (as examples) ... and they don’t (make sense) in ag, necessarily.”

Harpe said he’s still trying to figure out what the changes will mean for him, and for his farm. “Everybody thinks that they’re on the whole fairly safe, and it’s just added work to an already busy day,” said Harpe. (He and Serfas are both directors with the Alberta Canola Producers Commission.)

Serfas said he’s not as concerned about the rules as many other farmers, though they do lead to “more paperwork, more red tape, more like, actual regulations, which costs money at the end of the day.

“I’ve always been very in favour of safety, we’ve seen accidents happen, we’ve seen what the financial costs are to both the employer and the employee, so we’ve worked hard to mitigate a lot of that stuff over the past five or six years,” he said.

However, the political hangover from the farm safety reforms continues.

In tandem with the carbon tax — seen by many rural Albertans as a subsidy given to urban dwellers — Bill 6 could still help sink the NDP’s chances to hold on to the few seats they have outside Alberta’s cities. “The NDP will not hold a single seat in rural Alberta after the next election,” predicts independent MLA Richard Starke. “Once you’ve damaged a sense of trust with government, it is a very, very difficult process in rebuilding it.”

If there are now bigger issues on farmers’ minds, like a dry hot summer that has crops in southern Alberta struggling, there’s still hard work ahead for the NDP to regain the trust of anybody who supported them for the first time in 2015 but whose confidence waned during the contentious debate over the bill.

“They’re going to have their work cut out for them for sure,” Serfas said. But: “I’m not saying that anything is a slam dunk in this day and age. Four years ago nobody ever would’ve thought we’d have an NDP government right now.”