The Rural Municipalities of Alberta’s (RMA) spring convention gets underway next week and multiple communities, including Barrhead County, are putting resolutions forward.
Running March 16-18 at the Edmonton Convention Centre, the annual event features workshops, a ministerial forum and a resolutions session.
The County of Barrhead will propose a resolution requesting that the Government of Alberta explore ways to make liability insurance accessible to agritourism operators.
According to the resolution, Travel Alberta aims to double the province’s agritourism economy to $25 billion by 2035, including by developing new agritourism experiences.
The county says agritourism providers would benefit from liability insurance to cover the risks associated with bringing visitors onto a working farm, but this kind of insurance is currently unavailable, highly restrictive or inaccessible due to cost.
Ultimately, the resolution asks the provincial government to review Ontario’s Growing Agritourism Act, which provides liability protections for agritourism operators, and assess whether a similar policy could be beneficial here. It also states that the RMA would support the government in developing an action plan to address these barriers to adequate liability insurance.
In 2023, an RMA resolution asked the Government of Alberta to review agribusiness and agritourism operations, including considerations of regulatory alignments, incentivization, taxation options and other factors that could help grow the sector responsibly.
The RMA says the intentions of that resolution still have not been met. As such, the organization recently created an Agritourism Working Group with a mandate to guide the development of a provincial strategy that responsibly grows, promotes and regulates agritourism.
The group is currently focused on financial and regulatory hurdles.
