In North Bay, roughly a dozen people attended an annual ceremony recognizing April 28th as the National Day of Mourning to honour lives lost or forever changed due to workplace related injuries or illness.
As is always the case in North Bay, members of various unions, workers and friends gathered outside City Hall, near a monument dedicated to those who experienced workplace tragedies.
This year’s theme Safe Work Now! was a call for decision-makers to take “immediate and concrete” action to ensure working conditions are safe for all.
Andreane Chenier, National Health and Safety Representative with CUPE, attended the event speaking on the need for accountability.
Chenier says statistics show on an annual basis, an estimated one thousand lives are lost across the country.
“And we also know that there is over 300-thousand who are injured or get sick from work and some of them never fully recover,” added Chenier.
“So, despite all these things that apparently is being done to make our workplaces safer, fatalities, injuries, and occupational illnesses are on the rise. That is what we know. So, things are not getting better. Things are getting worse and we need things to get better. The message that we’re trying to drive home is that workers deserve to go home in the same condition that they went to work in, if not better,” Chenier stated.
“Workers need proper protection and adequate information to keep them safe, while decision-makers have a responsibility to strongly enforce the Westray law to ensure that employers aren’t cutting corners at the expense of workers’ health and safety.”
Westray Law was created as the result of a massive explosion at the Westray mine in Nova Scotia in 1992, killing 26 miners.
“We are coming up to 20 years of Westray and there hasn’t been a significant amount of changes in the mortality levels that we’re seeing from workers not making it back home,” Chenier explained.
“The research is pretty clear, the number one thing that directly sees a reduction in injuries, illnesses and fatalities is direct enforcement with specific deterrents.”
A frustrated Chenier assists injured workers and has been dealing with multiple fatalities, which she identifies as having been preventable.
“So, these are things that didn’t need to happen, and we have legislation that should have made that impossible and yet it wasn’t. So, the only thing I can point to is the fact that we’re not enforcing the legislation as much as we could be.”
The National Health and Safety Representative with CUPE believes creating a safe workplace environment requires “actual” enforcement of the Occupational Health and Safety Act.
“We need people to actually show up and do what is in the Act as opposed to right now there is a lot of paper exercises. So, we need enforcement. When there are regulatory requirements, that they are in fact requirements, that they’re not optional,” stated Chenier.
“From our perspective, we need to get back to a system where we’re prioritizing the needs of workers so that they can come back home safely. There needs to be actual repercussions as opposed to paper exercises. Right now, part of the problem is that it is actually cheaper for employers to pay fines, than it is for them to make permanent improvements for safe work.”
The North Bay ceremony was organized by the North Bay and District Labour Council.
