CALGARY—Three years ago, Alberta farmers blocked highways with their tractors to protest Bill 6 — the first of the new NDP government’s efforts to bring farms and ranches under the same workplace protections as other industries.

Now, after several years of development, the final phase of these changes will take effect Saturday, and add specific occupational health and safety rules for the agricultural sector. While not all farmers have changed their tune, some say the rules will improve safety without really changing how their farms operate.

“It’s pretty common sense, for the most part,” said Stuart Somerville, a farmer based in Endiang, Alta., about 150 kilometres southeast of Red Deer. “If anything, the recommendations just codify what we knew we ought to be doing.”

Before Bill 6, the province’s farms and ranches were completely exempt from workplace health and safety laws. The first wave of regulations in January 2016 brought farmers and ranchers under the same basic occupational health and safety (OHS) rules as other workers in Alberta and required them to purchase Workers’ Compensation Board coverage. In January 2018, the government made employment standards changes to farmers and ranchers that set holiday pay rates and mandatory rest periods. Exemptions still exist for family members working on their own farms.

Alberta was one of the last provinces in the country to bring these sort of workplace regulations. The industry has traditionally held that it could regulate itself. When Bill 6 was passed in the fall of 2015, farmers pushed back, saying they hadn’t been fully consulted before the bill’s contents were put forward for debate. Some worried the bill would prevent neighbours or children from helping out on family farms, especially during harvest or calving season.

Under the new regulations, employers need to ensure safe access to and from work sites, provide written instructions for how to use tools or equipment to their workers, and perform a hazard assessment for certain kinds of vehicles, such as tractors or bulldozers, to assess whether they could roll over. Rollovers are among the more frequent types of serious accidents that can happen with farm equipment. A particularly horrific case happened in August, when a trailer pulled by a tractor in southwest Alberta flipped and killed a 9-year-old and an 11-year-old boy, according to a report from The Canadian Press.

Somerville and his father manage a farm spanning 4,000 acres and boasting about 300 head of cattle. His family sometimes pitches in, but they occasionally hire seasonal workers. Before the new OHS regulations even took effect, Somerville and his family had already been implementing many of the changes, such as adding safety guards to equipment and ensuring everyone on the farm knew how to handle tools and machinery.

“To be honest, they’re not going to change how we run our farm, for the most part,” he said. “And I don’t know anyone who’ll change much of how they operate day-to-day for it.”

Awareness of potential safety risks is a huge part of the new regulations. But they also contain several loopholes and exceptions that allow farmers to continue using machines or farm equipment in ways they weren’t necessarily designed for, so long as a “person who is competent” in their use provides their own specifications. Others allow farmers to not wear seatbelts while driving vehicles at lower speeds and to use a front-end loader to raise a worker if necessary. The regulations suggest these are compromises between farmers pursuing “innovative ways to use and modify equipment to improve productivity on the farm and ranch” and the safety of a farmer’s workers.

This is a concern for Eric Musekamp, president of the Farmworkers Union of Alberta, a farm worker advocacy group. He considers the new regulations a general improvement to Alberta farm safety, but is worried about several major points in the new legislation — especially the part about inspection by a competent worker. He believes responsibility for injuries or deaths caused by a machine or a vehicle will simply be downloaded onto whoever inspected it.

“That person is going to be on the hook,” Musekamp said.

He also believes there hasn’t been enough support for workers — rather than farm or ranch owners — to adjust to the changes. A grant program has launched to cover up to half of all expenses incurred by owners for training and safety equipment related to the new OHS regulations. And while the new OHS rules are listed on a government website, Musekamp said it may not be accessible enough for farm workers, especially those with poor internet connections or who don’t speak English as a first language.

“A real big part of it is they don’t even know what’s going on,” Musekamp said.

Understanding how farm workers themselves fit into the new regulations could be a challenge for some farm owners, according to Humphrey Banack, a board member with the Alberta Federation of Agriculture. But some are already on board.

“It’s going to be a difficult time for some producers to get around it, but some people — as with anything new — they’ll buy right into it,” Banack said.

He was part of working groups and consultations with the provincial government for the OHS changes starting in 2016 and also runs a farm in Camrose, Alta. Many farmers only employ seasonally for a couple of weeks at a time during harvest or calving season. Getting these workers on board with the new regulations could be tricky.

“That’s going to be one of our bigger challenges — just understanding how they fit in to this new era,” Banack said.

But the new OHS regulations, challenging as they may be, may end up doing more than just keeping workers safe. Canadian farmers — particularly in Alberta — are currently experiencing an acute labour shortage. According to data from the Canadian Agricultural Human Resource Council, an estimated 113,800 positions could be left unfilled on farms by 2025.

A perceived lack of worker protections is part of the reason certain sections of the agricultural industry — such as feedlots and hog farms — have such difficulty attracting enough workers, Banack said, adding the new regulations could change that impression.

“None of us likes regulation as to what we need to do,” Banack said. “But we have to recognize that if we want our industry to grow, we have to be able to attract good people as employees. And I think that this will go a long way to making us look like an industry that cares about our workers and be able to attract those higher-quality people.”

United Conservative Party Leader Jason Kenney has promised to repeal Bill 6 if his party forms the government in next spring’s provincial election. But Somerville doesn’t believe farmers would simply stop following the new workplace and occupational safety regulations if this happened.

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“Everyone recognizes that it’s a dangerous job and the accidents are still happening here and there, unfortunately,” he said. “And everybody wants those to stop.”

He said many farmers would rather not be regulated by the government at all. And he suspects much of the anger around Bill 6 and other changes to farm regulations revolves around political affiliation rather than how they will affect day-to-day life on Alberta farms.

“I haven’t found too many farmers who love the legislation. It’s a cultural thing — we would prefer to not be regulated at all,” Somerville said. “But, the reality is it’s not the end of the world. And if anything, we can maybe make some good out of it.”

Correction — November 30, 2018: The photo caption was edited from a previous version that mistakenly said the photos were photographed by Twitchy Finger Photography for the Alberta Federation of Agriculture. In fact, it was for the Alberta Wheat Commission.

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