Groups agitating for extension of the province’s occupational health and safety laws to protect farm workers are again attempting to push the contentious issue to the fore in Alberta.
Earlier this month, the Alberta Federation of Labour (AFL) called on Employment Minister Thomas Lukaszuk to yield to pressure to include paid agricultural employees under the Occupational Health and Safety Act and the Workers’ Compensation Act. Currently in Alberta, agricultural employers are exempt from labour laws that require other industry sectors to provide employees health and safety coverage.

The Canadian Wheat Board (CWB) has increased its 2010-11 export targets by almost two million tonnes over mid-summer projections, but is still challenged by a lower-grade crop resulting from poor weather conditions during the 2010 growing season.
The CWB has announced an export target of 17.4 million tonnes, down a million tonnes from the last two crop years. CWB District 3 director Stewart Wells still views this as a good thing.
“It’s been a challenging year, with all the differences in grades and lower quality. What the CWB had to do in a lot of cases, was try to figure out which customers could be moved — the customers that used to be mainly relying in number one grades of wheat and durum, which of those customers could be convinced to work with grades two and three.”