COVID-19 creates continued challenges for farmers

We are all familiar with the term “postmortem,” literally after death. It refers to an investigation into a person’s cause of death, but has transformed into an enquiry of an event, usually when the outcome was bad.

Author Annie Duke in her book “Thinking in Bets” promotes “pre-mortems” as a planning tool. The idea is to focus on an event in the future and determine all the possible actions which could lead up to that event.

Since most decisions are a consequence of a previous ones, by eliminating or changing one decision in a series could stop a bad outcome.

British Columbia has avoided the poor outcomes caused by the COVID19 pandemic, unlike Central Canada. With re-opening starting in our province, a pre-mortem on a second wave” in the Okanagan Valley is in order.

The federal government Canadian Emergency Response Benefit offers students $1,250 a month over the summer. The employment situation in Ontario and Quebec will be poor as the re-opening in those provinces will hopefully be slower as the pandemic is much worse there.

A labour shortage for farms in the

Okanagan looms, as foreign workers are mandated to self-isolate for 14 days upon arrival. Many farmers are unable to safely accommodate self-isolating workers as their worker housing is not designed for social distancing or sharing of common facilities such as kitchens or washrooms.

There is little incentive for unemployed local students or workers to do farm work when they receive $1,250 a month for students or $2,000 a month for laidoff workers.

Where is the agricultural industry in the valley going to find hired help this summer?

A pre-mortem would conclude, young people in Ontario and Quebec who do not qualify for CERB would look to B.C. for employment. There is no restriction on any Canadian wanting to enter B.C.. A likely scenario would be for a group from either Ontario or Quebec to jump in a van and drive several thousands of kilometers across the country to B.C.. If any one of the group was infected upon leaving, we would receive a ticking time-bomb of virus here in B.C..

Many temporary workers would normally camp in public parks or just in orchards, neither of which could possibly be considered safe during a pandemic.

There is precedent for restricting our borders. New Brunswick banned non-essential travel with Quebec. B.C. mandated workers from Kern Lake Mine in Alberta to self-isolate when returning.

Restricting travel from Central Canada would solve the infection problem but would be disastrous for agriculture.

We cannot expect individual farmers to shoulder either the expense or responsibility of quarantining Canadian temporary workers.

The higher levels of government are spending billions of dollars on pandemic relief. They could get a “twofer” by helping both Canadian temporary workers and B.C. farmers by funding the quarantining of incoming farm help.

An idea might be to house incoming workers in willing empty motels suffering from zero tourism. The cost could be shared by worker, government and maybe farmers could contribute if it was for one of their returning workers.

Most importantly, dealing with the issue would mitigate the chances of a second-wave hit to both our health and economy here in the Okanagan.

John Dorn is a retired tech entrepreneur living in Summerland.