Bill 6: a lesson in the art of what's possible

My grandfather died in a farming accident. A great aunt lost an arm in an auger. A boy I rode the school bus with stopped a country church service one autumn to cry that his brother had just been crushed to death in a combine.

In the last few months, four children have died in farming mishaps in the region around Red Deer alone.

In no other industry would such a poor safety record be allowed to stand unchallenged.

But in Alberta, it's just statistics — and poorly reported at that.

Alberta's non-profit Farm Safety Centre lists agriculture as Canada's third most dangerous industry. Other stats-gathering groups like FinancesOnline rank agriculture at nine in the top 10 most dangerous ways to earn a living, behind logging, fishing, flying, roofing, steel work, garbage collecting, power line work and truck driving. Police and firefighting didn't even make the list.

The difference between all these other dangerous careers and farming is that only in farming do we think it's normal to make our children do it. In Alberta, the farming community and the opposition in our legislature don't think labour laws regarding safety or mandatory insurance should apply to farm work. And that's unique in all of Canada — farms everywhere else operate just fine with those laws.

Extending occupational health and safety laws to the farming industry has been part of the Alberta NDP platform for years. Actually, it's been part of the Progressive Conservative platform for some time as well — former premiers Jim Prentice and Alison Redford both said they would consider such laws, according to Farmworkers Union of Alberta president Eric Musekamp.

And the NDP advocated this for so long that nobody thought bringing Alberta up to speed on farm safety should be so difficult.

But that's the problem: nobody thought.

So the introduction of Bill 6 became the first lesson to a rookie provincial government about the art of the possible. It had to happen sooner or later to this government, and sooner is probably better.

It's not that Prentice, Redford and other premiers before them didn't care about the safety of farmers or their children (not quite one in five farm deaths in Canada involve children 14 and younger). It's that a veteran government with a complex agenda didn't want to face the wrath of people who don't want change, even if their families would benefit most from change.

So the Conservatives let things slide, ignored the deaths and injuries, and allowed reporting of incidents to be incomplete.

Alberta's Office of the Chief Medical Examiner reported that there were 25 farm deaths in Alberta in 2014. The report and breakdown of all the grisly ways there are to die young on the farm included a note that due to poor reporting, the numbers are likely low.

On Monday, labour activists plan to gather in Edmonton to lay down 112 pairs of work gloves representing the lives lost on Alberta farms since 2009. Those gloves only represent the deaths we know of.

Will they lay down fingers of gloves for all those who have lost limbs or been otherwise seriously injured? It's unlikely, since those stats aren't kept.

How many of those lives could have been saved if safety regulations were in place? If farm workers with few rights had not worked overlong hours, had been properly trained regarding heavy equipment and dangerous chemicals, or been allowed to refuse work that just isn't safe?

After learning a hard lesson in the art of governance, the NDP introduced amendments to Bill 6, exempting family members from these safety regulations. Jobs Minister Lori Sigurdson said this was the plan all along, that farms kids were always to be allowed to drive without a licence, operate heavy equipment, handle large animals and work whatever hours would be required to keep the farm going – without labour protection.

I wish she hadn't said that but I'm not the one taking all the angry calls, standing in front of enraged crowds and being called all sorts of unmentionable names.

I also wish the Opposition Wildrose didn't see fit to make such political hay over the broken bodies and shattered families on Alberta farms. There are better ways to oppose and present alternatives.

But in our province, the government and the opposition are both very new to their roles. One side is still learning how far ahead of the crowd you can be and still lead – the other is discovering how far behind you can be of what would be the right thing to do, if one had the courage.

Charity vs taxes: Which side will the Alberta and federal governments choose?

There was a time in my life when I felt I was rich. My wife and I had paid off the mortgage, we had no car or credit card debt, our children had graduated and left home, and we were both still working full-time.

Good years. One can feel rich without actually being rich ― and it's a whole lot easier to achieve.

Along the way, there was always one tax break that in relative terms advantaged us more in our modest income bracket than ever advantaged the truly rich: the non-refundable tax credits for charitable donations over $200 a year.

Philanthropic foundation Imagine Canada sent out a warning recently that unless the federal government tweaks the tables for calculating that non-refundable credit, it may cost rich people more to give generously. In fact, they ran numbers saying top-level income earners will be taxed more harshly if they give significantly to charity, than if they simply keep the money.

As for the rest of us? Generosity will always pay. Here's how.

The feds set up the tax system to encourage charitable giving. Money given to charities would not be taxed as income. But instead of simply allowing you to deduct your donations off your income, they created a system of non-refundable tax points (“non-refundable” means they never disappear; they're yours until you claim them.)

The tax points count against your taxes, not your income ― and for almost all of us, that's a bonus. A subsidy, really.

The points count thus: On the first $200 of charitable receipts you enclose with your tax return, claim 15 per cent (that happens to be the lowest income tax rate, and the rate the vast majority of us pay on the majority of our income). On receipts above $200, claim 29 per cent (also the highest current income tax rate, which only the top income-earners in Canada pay).

Prime minister Justin Trudeau promised in his election campaign to add a new tax bracket: 33 per cent for taxable income over $200,000.

Until I read the warning from Imagine Canada, I felt I could pretty well ignore that promise; it will never, ever affect me. But I'm paying attention now.

Could it be possible that my donations over $200 might get me 33 percent in points off my taxes, even though my income is only taxed at 15 per cent? That's not a refund, that's a subsidy, and I'll gladly take it. Especially considering that the Alberta government tops that refund to half of my donations.

So, $1,000 in charitable donation receipts gets me $210 off my provincial taxes (refund at 21 per cent). That's the equivalent of what I would have paid on $2,100 of taxable income at my low rate of 10 per cent in Alberta.

That's on top of the $264 I get back from the feds, which represents just over $1,700 of federally-taxable income at my low tax bracket of 15 per cent.

But for rich guys, like our prime minister, it's a different story. If the top refund rate does not match the top income tax rate, the wealthy get “double-taxed” on the difference. They pay income tax on money they never got to keep.

That's a problem for Imagine Canada, and the big, industrial-scale charities that raise big bucks from wealthy donors.

In Alberta (as with all of Canada), the rich really do the heavy lifting when it comes to charitable giving. According to Imagine Canada, half of Alberta donors give less than $160 a year― not enough to trigger the big tax savings. But our average donation rate is high for the nation: $812. That means we have a good population of high rollers who happen to be generous.

What happens if they begin to find their generosity is not recognized the way it used to be?

Remember, Alberta is also adding new income tax brackets. Without going into detail, the rate is slated to slide up from the current 10 per cent everyone pays, to 15 per cent on taxable incomes over $300,000.

The higher the tax rate, the greater the disincentive for the rich to make big donations ― if the tax credits for being generous are not also recalculated.

December is “harvest time” for charities. About 60 per cent of Canadians will give a total of $5 billion to charity this month, which is about 40 per cent of the entire year's total.

But our charities' need is higher during this fiscal slowdown as well. Charities report higher traffic at food banks, soup kitchens, shelters, Christmas Bureaus, mental health supports and more. Canada can hardly afford to de-incentivize the rich from making large donations right now.

But the incentives are still there for the vast majority of us who should merely feel rich. If you look at the plight of refugees and the poor around the world, and consider a cold winter ahead for the newly-unemployed here at home, it's not hard to feel rich.

Find a charitable cause that inspires you, and see what it feels like to be a high roller.