When it comes to safety on farms, Alberta hasn’t necessarily been an outlier. It is only in the sense of safety regulations and laws that the province has been the black sheep of Canada.

The Alberta provincial legislature put the end to that recently with Bill 6.

Bill 6 closes the worker-safety loophole in Alberta, the one which exempted farms and other agricultural facilities from occupational safety laws and regulations. Alberta was the only territory and province in the country that had such an exemption, but Bill 6 closed that loophole and now subjects farms to the same regulations as other industries.

[Image courtesy of Flickr user Syuzo Tsushima via a Creative Commons license]

[Image courtesy of Flickr user Syuzo Tsushima via a Creative Commons license]

Bill 6, known as the Enhanced Protection for Farm and Ranch Workers Act, was written to protect non-family, paid employees on various farms and ranches in Alberta by providing them basic occupational heath and safety reglations and protections and make workers compensation coverage mandatory for these laborers.

But let me be clear – the bill only covers those workers who are paid to work on a  farm or ranch and are not members of the owning family.  Anyone who volunteers on a farm or are family members are not required to have the same protections.

All farms and ranches in the province have until April 30 to register with the workers compensation board (WCB) to ensure thesse workers are covered and the famrs and raches that employ them are registered.

Of course there was a lot of pushback in the fall as the bill was being deliberated. Farmers were none too happy about tthe prospect of having to deal with regulations, which ultimately would mean higher expenses for running their farms and affecting prices for their crops in the market. The bottom line, though, in this law was that it really only affects those larger farms that require paid non-family employees to run them. While injuries and incidents are at a lower rate in agriculture than virtually any other industry, there was a fear that the costs associated with protecting these payroll workers would exceed the cost of incidents.

Farmers and ranchers in Alberta are going through an educational process now with government officials and the WCB to get information on the details of this law and how it will affect their farms or ranches directly. The big obstacle right now, according to the Alberta Federation of Agriculture (AFA), is that the law is being implemented on an expedited timetable and communication about the legislation has been inadequate so far, leading to a lot of confusion and uncertainty about the law and its actual effects.

If you get out of the weeds of this and focus more on the broader picture, as a safety professional any basic guidelines for safety that protects human life is a positive development. I am all about having basic safety measures in place for all workers, regardless if they are family members or not. If that means a law needs to be put on the books, so be it. While agricultural work can be low-risk compared to other industries, there are still incidents that can and do happen, and workers should at least understand their rights as workers and employers should take due diligence to ensure that all workers are working safely.

But this isn’t just about the workers – farmers and ranchers will be protected in their own ways too. Sometimes with the need to gain as much profit from the harvest as possible, it can be easy to take some shortcuts and risk costly incidents for the sake of making more money in the short term. Farms may now be guided into having more long-term sustainbility with these employer protections in place. So this can be a win-win for everybody from a certain perspective that takes profits out of the equation and looks at the prospect of long-term employment and farm yields.