About 250 citizens came out to a Town Hall meeting to discuss the concerns and implications of Bill 6.
MLA Rick Strankman hosted the evening last Friday, December 11 in Hanna, just a day after the third and final reading of Bill 6, the contentious Farm Safety Bill.
“Everybody was quietly respectful,” said Strankman. “They were there to be informed and to listen.”
He adds this was surprising after witnessing the energetic demonstrations on the steps of the legislature over the last couple of weeks.
Strankman said he spoke for about two hours, and then stuck around for a while afterwards to talk to attendees. This caps off one of the most active sessions of the legislature in recent memory.
“I can’t encapsulate it in just a few words,” he said.
He feels the biggest barrier to progress was communications.
"I spoke in the Legislature on Thursday and I said, ‘why can’t we communicate?’ We're not speaking a foreign language here,” he said. “There are thousands of people and stacks of petitions but we were still not able to communicate.”
The Wildrose was on message throughout the debate and while the bill still passed, the opposition was strong.
"We effectively represented our constituents to the best of our ability,” said Strankman. “We were getting hundreds of calls from outside our constituency. 11-15 NDP constituencies have farmers there and they felt marginalized.
Strankman said they also held a “Tele Town Hall meeting” and they received calls from areas all over the province, and from this he says it may not be a simple rural/urban split.
“It is starting to resonate” he said.
At times, he too felt the debate was not respectful.
“I commented on that. The house leader on the government side, and people on our side had to make public apologies, it is an embarrassment to the quality of the characters involved,” he said. "We are supposed to be the representatives of the citizenry and we are expected to set a higher and better standard than that.”
The uproar about Bill 6 has been manifested in demonstrations across the province, and Strankman says people are still concerned.
“People are still going about trying to petition the Lieutenant Governor not to sign the bill when presented,’ said Strankman.
While this is not a party endeavour, he does say it demonstrates a level of concern. On Saturday the two petitions; one on Bill 6 and one repealing the carbon tax, which were at the Drumheller Co-op and both filled up quickly.
