Report Card for the BC Ministry of Agriculture

New Regulation	Accomplished or Failed	Comments
Category A Devices
Firing Frequency of once per 5 min's. for single shot cannons	Failed	Langley, Abbotsford, Mission, Surrey, and many more locations report too frequent firings of single shot cannons.
Firing Frequency of 33 shots / hr. for multi-shot cannons	Failed	Surrey and Matsqui report rapid firings of triple shot cannons
Separation Distance, 150M within the ALR	Failed	Sumas Prairie & Matsqui Village report cannons positioned very near a residence. In one case, grower was unfamiliar with new reg's. but moved the cannon?
Separation Distance, 300M to non-ALR homes	No rpts. yet
Category B Devices
Separation Distance 100 M within the ALR	Failed	Screechers used randomly in a field by a Sumas Prairie grower, often closer than 100M to a nearby residence. Distance regulations ignored on Matsqui prairie.
Category A & B Devices
Hours of Operation, 6:30 AM to 8:00 PM	Failed	Sumas Prairie, Surrey, and Bradner report early startups, before 6:30 AM. Surrey reports cannons booming after 8:00 PM. Four locations report cannons booming all night long.
Cannons must be marked with operator's name & 24 hr. contact phone number	Failed	There is no evidence of this being done anywhere, and nothing communicated to the public or marked at the farm gate!
Local contacts must be established for non-resident owners	Failed	There is no evidence of this being having been done, and nothing communicated to the public or marked at the farm gate!
A cannon registry be established by the blueberry industry and local governments.	Failed	No such registry has been communicated to the public.
New Guidelines to be adopted as Standards
Are these the new standards?	Failed	They are not being followed by growers at the start of cannon season. They have not been communicated to the public via local newspapers. They are not being enforced by anyone, and there is no facility to fine violators or confiscate devices.
Regulation of cannons to be turned over to Municipal Gov't.	Failed	Not one Municipal Gov't. has stepped up to taking on this new responsibility. (Pitt Meadows has done so partially in the past.)
A complaint process with phone contact numbers will be communicated to residents via local newspapers	Failed	This has not been done in any municipality.
The available of netting funds for growers near the edge of ALR	Failed	We are well into berry season now, and no netting funding has been provided.

Conclusions	Failed	Has anything changed to help propane cannon victims? It doesn't seem like it! In this day and age in the corporate world, if an executive failed this miserably, one of two things would happen. He would either fire the staff members who let him down so completely, or he would find himself being "downsized" (or both)! Oh to be fed from the public trough!