4 A new start


The long-awaited report on the piece rate system in BC, which some have denounced as “racist and abusive,” was published last month, 11 months to the day after it was received. Publication brought months of speculation regarding its contents, if not its impact, to an end. The report puts paid to many of the concerns government and the Fair Wages


Commission had voiced about piece rates. Berry growers’ use of the payment method will be subject to further study, but report author Karen Taylor shows that piece rates, for the most part, are working for both growers and hand harvesters.


But this is January, and the report is a good example of the need for making a


new start. There’s no need to fix something that isn’t broken, but most people are likely to sign on for a more efficient model of the tried-and-true. Dial-up wasn’t built for smart phones, after all. It’s a wireless world now. Taylor wisely notes that farming has changed since the current piece rate


system was established in 1981, but the system hasn’t. Sure, piece rates for the 15 crops covered have increased, but the rates themselves assume that crops are still being grown and picked the way they were in 1981. Think about that: the rates effectively assume that workers are picking apples


from full-size trees, not high-density plantings with dwarf and semi-dwarf trees; the advent of machines, and the kinds of fruit workers are now being asked to pick, isn’t taken into account; and finicky consumer expectations of BC fruit mean quality is a top concern, especially in a world where the southern hemisphere often fills seasonal gaps in the produce department (we didn’t have free trade with Chile in 1981), also mean pickers get paid to handle fruit gently, not quickly. The last point is one reason why the lead recommendation from Taylor’s report


is a reset of piece rates that reflects current practices. These changes shouldn’t be made quickly. They’ll need to be backed up with data beyond statistics on worker productivity and income. This may mean phasing out piece rates for some crops; it may mean pain for some sectors. But a system of remuneration that reflects and rewards the care and skills


growers and harvesters alike put into delivering high-quality fruit to markets in BC and internationally is in everyone’s favour. And if those rates attract more domestic workers to the sector, it will also address the dire labour shortage facing the horticulture sector. And that, too, is good news.


The service economy steps away from the land Back in the 1950s and 60s, every school kid was familiar with the biblical


phrase, “Hewers of wood and drawers of water” (Joshua 9:21). It was an analogy for the economy of Canada. We were a nation of farmers and fishers, loggers and miners, trappers and cowboys. Or so we thought. It might have been an accurate assessment of the first 300 years of Eurocentric economics, but by the 1950s the scales had tipped. Manufacturing accounted for a third of Canadian jobs and proportion was in decline. Today the service economy accounts for 80% of all


The Back Forty BOB COLLINS


jobs in the country. We have become a cyber economy of apps and taps (the latter not to be confused with faucets, fellow boomers). All of the traditional resource-dependent sectors have fallen on hard times. The absence of Liberal MPs between the west end of Winnipeg and the east end of Greater Vancouver coincides with where the hurt is deepest. Commodity prices are in a decade- long slump, the export landscape is constantly shifting and, in some quarters, there is the nagging suspicion that maybe the party is over. BC’s forest industry is a case in point. It was the economic engine of the


province for nearly 50 years. The industry got off to a slow start in the late 1800s, nibbling the edges of the world’s largest tract of coastal temperate rainforest. Steam technology arrived about 1910 and the boom was soon underway. But within 45 years, the steam era was over and truck logging pushed up the hillsides into remote valleys. It took another 15 years for the glory to begin fading. By the late 1960s, the supply of old-growth timber started to shrink. Sawmills designed 50 years earlier to cut huge logs found themselves scrambling to re-tool for much smaller second-growth timber. There was a massive investment in new high-efficiency small-log mills. Some would be capable of cutting a million board feet of dimension lumber on a


three-shift day, and plane it all in two shifts with a total work force of 80. In the 1980s, amid corporate restructuring, big logging divisions began to


close. There were widespread job losses and displacement. Those left in the woods became independent contractors or worked for one. The logging crews of the past have been largely replaced by machines and raw logs are being exported by the shipload. Nearly all the old sawmills have disappeared, and some of the second wave are gone now, too. Throw in the aftermath of the pine beetle infestation and years of wildfires and we have an industry in province-wide contraction. Mill closures are a weekly occurrence and it is estimated that it will take at least 40 years before there can be any increased harvest in the Interior. Given the size of the resource and the regenerative nature of the forest, the party probably isn’t over in the woods but there is no doubt the guest list will be much shorter from here on in. Forestry is still a major economic driver but considering the depletion of the


resource you must wonder how much muscle it will have to flex in the future. The science says a coastal temperate rainforest matures when it is 250 years old. Given that trees are now considered fibre, and some are being harvested at 60 years and less, it is unlikely the old-growth trees or that eco-system will ever return. What will ultimately take its place is yet to be seen. Back when the forest industry was finding its legs, half of all Canadians were farming or ranching. Woe betide the government that ignored them. That party is long over, too, gone like the old-growth forest. The 1.95% of Canadians who still farm and ranch are politically irrelevant. BC’s former agriculture minister Corky Evans once mused about the possibility of a service economy wherein a third of the people walked dogs, a third sold lattés, and the rest taught yoga, all to each other. It would probably work just fine, he said, until someone got hungry, at which point the real relevance of agriculture would become swiftly obvious: you can’t eat what nobody grows. Far-fetched? Maybe, but according to Stephen Poloz, governor of the Bank of Canada, we’re 80% of the way there, and closing fast. Bob Collins raises beef cattle and grows produce on his farm in the Alberni Valley.


Publisher Cathy Glover


The agricultural news source in British Columbia since 1915 Vol.106 No.1 . JANUARY 2020


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COUNTRY LIFE IN BC • JANUARY 2020


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