FARM POWER
How Notley miscalculated the power of ranchers.
First the Alberta NDP came for the rich. Yes: I am oversimplifying for the sake of a pithy lead sentence. The new Alberta government’s increase in personal income taxes, introduced over the summer, kicks in at a taxable annual i ncome of $ 125,000. In some neighbourhoods, they would say you were barely getting by.
Still, Alberta went from having one 10 per cent tax bracket to having a top marginal rate, when the full increase comes through at year’s end, of 15 per cent. The New Democrats also changed the rules for income splitting and increased the corporate tax rate from 10 per cent to 12 per cent.
This turn of the thumbscrew l ed to no uprising, no ugly demonstrations or displays of ill temper. It’s the nice thing about going after high- income people. They do not f avour traditional brickbat- based folkways of street protest, and Canada does not give them much room to organize politically in other ways. It would be wrong for me to speak for higher- earning brethren, but the general feeling, I think, is that a modest sacrifice of tax- flatitude is bearable in the face of extreme fiscal horror.
Then came the move on carbon, plotted by a blue- ribbon climate change panel led by the University of Alberta’s Andrew Leach. This, of course, hits all Albertans where they live — literally, if you factor in home heating and pickup trucks. In their election campaigning, the New Democrats had spoken of a “revenue- neutral” carbon tax. The report turned out to implement what might be called a “creative” definition of revenue neutrality. Or, more accurately, an “insane” one.
But the economic merits of the Leach carbon attack were recognized; the support of big Alberta oilpatch players had been solicited carefully in advance; and the release of the plan was timed to precede a major global climate- change summit. Albertans have been harangued for a decade about how market access for our oil depends on bona- fide action on greenhouse- gas emissions. They seem prepared, by and large, to accept the bargain. Nothing else has quite worked.
These wide- ranging changes, on their own, might have seemed sufficient for the first year of a new provincial government full of inexperienced personnel — one that had been the beneficiary of a protest vote, and was understood to be on a short leash ideologically. The agenda for its first assembly sitting also included campaign finance reform, a “sunshine list” approach to government salaries and contracts, and new human rights protections for Albertans of nontraditional gender. Yawn.
If only they had stopped there. But no. They had to mess with the farmers.
Alberta’s Bill 6 has left the local New Democrats’ reputation for competence and political intuition in ruinous shape. In the May election Albertans were explicitly offered a no- nonsense, Western- style, simpatico NDP in the mould of Roy Romanow or Gary Doer. Premier Rachel Notley’s government wanted to update Alberta law to give farm workers collective- bargaining rights and mandatory workers’ comp, place farms under occupational health and safety regulations and impose mainstream employment standards. If they could make Alberta swallow a carbon tax, surely something like this would be easy?
Anyone who knows t he West might have warned that the people who still live and work on farms form a proud and highly conscious counterculture. Making law for farms is not like making law for some ordinary demographic segment or business sector. It is, politically, more like regulating a religion. The potential for outrage and resistance is unlimited. Farmers see themselves as the sacred essence of a nation, as its economic and spiritual “backbone.” This self- regard, frankly, does not get challenged much. And Alberta farmers, like others in the West, are accustomed to wielding disproportionate political power.
All of which suggests a natural approach to amending laws covering farm labour. Be cautious and incremental. Consult widely. Offer farmers clear, specific goals. Get at least a handful onside before anything is announced.
The Alberta NDP braintrust — so full of the national party’s best and brightest! — came up with a different plan: draw up an omnibus bill taking away the statutory exemptions that have kept farms out of ordinary Alberta labour law. Announce, without consulting much of anybody, that you intend to pass the bill immediately, promising that details of new farm regulations will be worked out later, and to everyone’s advantage.
Invoke closure in the assembly. Backtrack awkwardly on your legislation and apologize for it, even as you ram it through. Claim your intentions were misunderstood. Insist you mean well.
The electoral strength of the Alberta NDP is, of course, in the cities. But as farmers go berserk, the cities cannot fail to notice how badly the Notley government has bungled this task. The government’s statute-first, details- later approach to Bill 6 left family farmers asking, with perfect justification, whether their kids would still be able to raise animals for 4- H and whether they would have to fill out a dozen workers’ comp forms when neighbours come over to help with calving.
The government is scrambling to reassure everyone that the answer to such questions is “no.” Its MLAs were in Committee of the Whole past midnight on Wednesday, amending the bill on the fly to reflect that. You don’t have to be a horny-handed son of rural toil to ask why these basics were not communicated to the fabled “stakeholders” before legislation was attempted. This is exactly the sort of dopey, heedless failure that sometimes follows spasms of NDP success at the provincial level, leaving a stench behind for decades. Anyone making enemies this quickly is bound to end up with an awful lot of them.
If they could make the province swallow a carbon tax, the thinking went, surely they could pass a farm safety bill. Boy were they wrong