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Compensation Board insurance, and allow OHS investigation in the event of
serious injury or fatality." A year after Bill 6’s passing and implementation,
the Calgary Herald reported that “many producers... remain unhappy about
being forced" to follow such rules, as a farm was a family business, and
therefore should not involve the government.? This focus on rural farming
as the business of families independent of government influence extends back
to the first influx of Eastern European immigrants. During this time, many
of these immigrants were promised farming land, free of any such intrusions
they may have experienced in the pre- and post-revolutionary Russian state.
In the hundred years since that first wave of refugees, rural Albertan farmers
have frequently resisted what they see as the imposition of unnecessary
regulations; many of the initial Eastern European refugees could clearly recall
government grain seizures and the resulting famines, and therefore remained
wary of any interference. Such understandings about the role of farmers in
relation to the government has clearly continued to the present day.
The Russian Revolution and the ensuing Russian Civil War were times of
mass upheaval for peasants in the former Russian Empire. While hundreds of
scholarly works have been written on the Revolution and its aftermath within
the confines of Russian territory, far fewer have been written on its impact
outside of Eastern Europe. Of these, all but a handful discuss the foreign
ramifications of the Revolution in terms of the impact on Western politics as a
result of the rise of a nominally successful communist state. The subtler global
implications of the Revolution — and indeed, of revolutions generally — has
not been examined in any kind of meaningful way. However, by examining
the twentieth century history of Alberta, we can see that such inattention by
historians is an oversight, as the Revolution subtly but profoundly affected the
cultural and political direction of that province. Refugees fleeing the Russian
Revolution settled in large numbers in rural Alberta, creating groups around
shared languages and shared cultural values and practices. These cultural
values and practices often marked them as “others” in the Anglo-Canadian
community, and they largely remained in homogenous language and culture
groups for some time. There were very real differences in behaviour between
Eastern European and Western European/American immigrants, but in many
cases, these differences were over-exaggerated in support of racist perspectives,
further contributing to isolation of these groups. However, despite this initial
isolation, refugees from the former Russian Empire were able to succeed in
61 Government of Alberta, Farm and Ranch Workplace Legislation, Government of Alberta,
Last Modified 12 May 2017, https://www.alberta.ca/farm-and-ranch.aspx (accessed 16
August 2020).
James Wood, “A year after Bill 6, farm workers WCB claims more than double,” 5 January
2017, Calgary Herald. Last Modified 5 January 2017, http://calgaryherald.com/news/politics/
a-year-after-bill-6-farmworkers-wcb-claims-more-than-double (accessed 16 August 2020).
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