Deregulation hurt B.C. farm safety: expert

The safety of farm workers has been compromised by deregulation, says one of the authors of B.C.'s Employment Standards Act, which was passed in 1995 by the previous NDP government.

The Liberals amended the act after taking power in 2001 andalso scrapped joint federal-provincial teams thatconducted inspection blitzes of B.C. farms.

University of B.C. business professor Mark Thompson is speaking out against those decisions, in the wake of this week's crash that claimed the lives of three farm workers in a van accident in the Fraser Valley.

"I mean, they just stopped enforcing employment standards, basically.They made the complaint mechanism so cumbersome that workers are discouraged from using it."

The provincial government said it's too early to draw conclusions about the causes of the horrific crash, and that the changes to labour laws have not reduced farm worker safety.

Labour Minister Olga Ilich said the random inspection program wasnot focused on workers' safety.

"That was focused on rates of pay, terms of pay, whether or not workers were being exploited in so far as what they were being paid and the hours that they were working."

But Thompson said those teams spotted hundreds of violations, and in doing so, put pressure on employers.

"Those enforcement mechanisms put the contractors on notice that they were apt to be inspected, and I think that when the Campbell government stopped,that, I think, was a signal to farm labour contractors that they could go ahead as they wished."