Manure handlers may keep dying on prairie farms until farmers and other people involved in agriculture start taking safety and safety regulations seriously.
But not all governments are interested in protecting farm workers and many farmers don’t want to have to follow the rules that protect workers in other industries, say some politicians, worker representatives and safety officials.
In the last four years Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta have all had multiple deaths of manure handlers. These tragedies could have been avoided if the workers had been properly trained, say farm safety experts.
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The province of Alberta, the site of a double manure-handling death this summer, exempts farms and anyone working on farms from the minimum occupational health and safety regulations that govern other industries.
“I think it’s abominable,” said Jason Foster of the Alberta Federation of Labor. “There’s no reasonable or logical excuse, except politics.”
Hugh MacDonald, the labor critic for Alberta’s Liberal party, said farm workers need to be protected so preventable deaths stop happening.
“Every wage earner needs to be protected,” said MacDonald.
“It just astonishes me that these two workers were not trained and lost their lives as a result.”
Neither Ty Lund, Alberta’s minister of agriculture, nor Alberta Agriculture farm safety officials returned calls.
Rod Scarlett, the executive director of Wild Rose Agricultural Producers, a general farm lobby group, said safety is a big issue for his members, but they don’t want health and safety regulations imposed on them.
“I don’t think we need more regulations and government involvement,” said Scarlett.
“If there was a good, solid public education system in place that would address these types of situations, I’m certain it would alleviate the number of these types of incidents.”
Scarlett said farmers need to take the time to train themselves and their workers.
Farmer resistance to safety regulations is also obvious in Saskatchewan, said the head of Saskatchewan Labor’s occupational health and safety division.
At a farm safety summit last year, Jeff Parr found his officials under attack for inspecting farm workplaces to make sure workers were adequately protected.
In Saskatchewan and Manitoba, farmers who employ workers have to follow the same occupational health and safety rules that apply to other industries.
“There still remained, among the people in the industry, resistance to the idea of being regulated,” said Parr.
“They didn’t like the fact that they were governed by occupational health and safety rules.
“Our officers are met with a lot more resistance and perhaps hostility in agriculture than we are in other industries.”
Parr said his officials generally restrict their inspections to farms that hire workers.
Don Anderson, of the Saskatchewan Federation of Labor, said he thinks the labor department is applying its regulations too narrowly, leaving workers exposed to deadly dangers.
A 1998 case in which three manure handlers died together in a tank proves that workers are vulnerable because they are unprepared.
“Clearly, if three people died at work, there was a problem there,” said Anderson.
“Obviously they weren’t educated in what they were dealing with.”
After the triple death in 1998, Saskatchewan occupational health and safety inspectors visited all manure companies in the province to make sure they were following safe procedures, Parr said.
But with only 50 officials to police 30,000 non-farm workplaces and thousands of farms, enforcement may be less than what many people want, said Parr.
His staff have to ensure their work encourages farm employers to do a better job, not create a backlash.
“If there was just outright resistance and refusal to comply we would have an even worse problem,” Parr said. “We’re not going to turn the corner tomorrow.”
