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Chad Anderson had travelled 90 minutes from his farm near Cremona, Alta., to bend the premier’s ear, but it was starting to look futile.
He’d come to a town hall with Danielle Smith and Agriculture Minister RJ Sigurdson in Okotoks, an apparent rehearsal of sorts for the Alberta Next panels that kick off next week, with Smith presiding as chair.
Last week’s Okotoks event was approaching its end, and a too-long lineup of attendees separated Anderson from the question microphone, all of them hoping to plant a seed in the premier’s mind.
Believing he’d miss his chance, Anderson told others what he wanted to ask about — changes to a farm program that would rein in his farm’s licensed but uninspected slaughtering business. They let him jump ahead in line, he recalls.
“Last year we sold 30 [head of] beef … we’ve done it safely and of the highest quality,” Anderson told the July 2 town hall south of Calgary.
“Last week I got an email from Alberta Ag effectively cancelling the program,” he added, to scattered boos in the crowd.
Anderson listened to Sigurdson defend the government’s policy change and emphasis on meat safety. But the rancher was struck by the premier sitting quietly next to her minister, glancing over with what Anderson described as a “what’s going on?” look.
Five days later, on July 7, Alberta Agriculture announced that after hearing farmers’ concerns, it would indefinitely pause the limits to on-farm slaughter licences that it had just brought in.
Anderson believes he has the premier to thank for halting the change, even if he can’t prove it.
“I think it was probably critical to it,” he told CBC News in an interview this week.
“She cares about small business. She cares about the entrepreneurial spirit.”
More than three decades after Ralph Klein won his first election as premier on the slogan “He listens. He cares,” another Alberta premier has carved out a reputation for hearing Albertans’ pleas and then acting on them.
The five-day turnaround from town hall complaint to policy bulletin may be a pronounced example of Smith’s responsiveness, but she has repeatedly demonstrated this approach to supporters, especially those in the United Conservative base.
The premier whose government has banned vote tabulating machines, restricted health care treatments for transgender youth and — just this week — banned books with sexual content in school libraries is also the leader whose party has passed convention resolutions requesting those changes.
At last year’s UCP annual gathering, Smith even held an “accountability session” to go over every policy resolution the party had made since her leadership, and excitedly shouted “done!” for each of the many requests she had enacted.
Tuned in
Many Albertans have come to understand or expect this tendency from the premier. During her bi-weekly Your Province, Your Premier radio call-in show, Smith will often ask a caller with a unique pitch to discuss it further off-air with an aide.
At a Smith-hosted town hall in Three Hills in June, one woman travelled from 150 kilometres south along with a German doctor friend in tow who’d come to offer theories about the harms of renewable energy installations. The premier urged them to arrange a meeting with her scheduler to hear more.
That woman showed up again weeks later at the Okotoks event, to raise alarm about solar and battery projects in the region. Smith recognized her, and recalled that her doctor associate had discussed safety issues.
“I’ve talked with my utilities and affordability minister on that, but I didn’t have contact information for you,” the premier said, urging the resident to connect with a premier’s aide in a white jacket.
Not everybody’s protests or questions get embraced with the same warmth.
Several attendees at the Okotoks meeting came to criticize the Smith government’s lifting of the moratorium on new coal mining. Each time, she defended the provincial policy on mining for metallurgical (steel-making) coal.
“We need steel. We need solar panels. We need all of the things that get produced from those [mines],” Smith told one questioner. “So we just have to figure out the way to do it that has the minimal impact on the environment.”
It seemed that night like Anderson’s criticism about the on-farm slaughtering policy might also amount to tilting at windmills.
Anderson is one of several dozen Alberta farmers who have held an on-farm slaughter operator (OFSO) licence since 2020. It’s a pandemic-era program that expanded the ability of small livestock producers to sell live animals to customers and process them on site for the buyers’ own consumption — instead of going through a provincially or federally inspected slaughterhouse.
There are strict limits that this meat cannot go to any store, restaurant or other business, but the government did not cap the number of cattle, farm, chickens or other livestock a farmer could kill and sell in a year.
A new licensing policy that took effect July 2 — the day of that town hall in Okotoks — capped farmers at selling 5,000 pounds of live-weight animal per year. That amounts to around three or four cattle.
Farmers slaughtering 30 to 40 bovines without inspection was pushing them toward the scale of small provincial abattoirs, Sigurdson replied to Anderson, the Cremona rancher.
“We saw a huge proliferation of offices across the province growing at a rate and processing levels that didn’t provide a lot of faith that we’re going to be able to maintain that food safety across the entire network,” the minister said.
He suggested Anderson speak to ministerial aides about getting an abattoir licence. Anderson said later he had no interest in the high costs of erecting a specialized building and getting the municipal rezoning and permits, instead of his existing outdoor slaughtering process.
He worried the rule would decimate his farm business and others like it around Alberta.
“We’ve done nothing wrong, and then the government effectively cancels the program and sterilizes and strands our investment,” Anderson said in an interview. “So I think those are all things that would deeply concern the premier.”
After his town hall appearance, Anderson worked with other OFSO licensees to arrange a letter-writing and social media campaign. Conservative activists joined in, including separatist movement leader Jeffrey Rath: “Please have everybody tell @ABDanielleSmith and [Smith’s chief of staff] what they think about the socialist bureaucrats that they refuse to rein in or fire,” he posted online.
Anderson first spoke to Smith and Sigurdson on the eve of Thursday’s kickoff of the Calgary Stampede, a calendar-busting period for a premier and agriculture minister. But by Monday, Sigurdson announced the OFSO licence changes were immediately paused for further consultation, after learning of “unintended consequences” to the viability of some 88 farm businesses.
Feedback from several farmers, not just Anderson, prompted the government to reconsider its policy, Sigurdson spokeswoman Darby Crouch said in an email. She did not directly answer when asked if the premier or her office had any input in halting the new slaughter limits.
But the premier has made it known that she’s got an open mind, especially when it comes to fellow conservatives’ concerns or protests.
Albertans will get more chances this summer to line up at microphones to offer Smith their ideas.
The Alberta Next panel hearings on federal-provincial relations kick off Tuesday in Red Deer — a series of three-hour town halls, chaired by Smith herself.
Agriculture issues may be off-topic, but Albertans will find out soon how wide-ranging the policy pitches are, and how persuaded she is by them.