87% CALL FOR BETTER ACCESS TO WORKER FATALITY REPORTS
Poll shows majority believe it’s important incident details are readily available to public
Celina Danis doesn’t think she’ll ever be ready to read about the last moments of her partner’s life.
But she requested the documents anyway.
“It wasn’t really for me, it was for my daughters,” Danis said. “They’re going to ask questions when they’re older, saying ‘What exactly happened to Daddy? Why was he in that position?’ … And I wanted to be able to tell them or give them the paperwork.”
Danis’s partner, Chad Wiklun, was a drum cutter operator at Agrium’s Vanscoy mine outside of Saskatoon. He died in August 2016 after he was crushed between two pieces of equipment while working underground. He was 29 years old.
The Saskatchewan Ministry of Labour Relations and Workplace Safety investigated the incident. Two years after Wiklun’s death, it decided not to press charges against the company.
Danis asked for and received a copy of the investigation report, but was frustrated by how long the process took.
She said she wishes the report was readily available so both her family and the wider public could access it.
“If more people knew what happened, then maybe it might change,” she said.
When someone in Saskatchewan dies at work, their death is investigated by Labour Relations and Workplace Safety’s Occupational Health and Safety (OHS) Division. The ministry has two years to complete an investigation and make a decision about whether to lay charges under the Occupational Health and Safety Act.
Once complete, reports into worker deaths are shared with the family of the deceased and can be accessed under provincial freedom of information law by people who request the documents and pay the $20 application fee. They are not posted online, despite a public appetite for this.
In a telephone survey conducted by the University of Saskatchewan’s Social Sciences Research Laboratories (SSRL) this month, nearly nine in 10 surveyed Saskatchewan residents said they thought it was very or somewhat important for incident reports into workplace fatalities to be made readily accessible to the public.
The data was collected as part of the Taking the Pulse initiative, which involves SSRL researchers calling a representative sample of Saskatchewan residents four times a year and asking for their views on hot-button topics in the province. The results are published by Postmedia News.
Researchers randomly called 411 Saskatchewan residents and asked how important or unimportant it was to them that all incident reports related to workplace fatalities in the province be made public.
The overwhelming majority — 87 per cent — said it was very or somewhat important. Ten per cent said it was very or somewhat unimportant and three per cent said it was neither important nor unimportant.
Erica Carleton is an assistant professor at the University of Saskatchewan’s Edwards School of Business who specializes in employee health and well-being.
Carleton spent several years studying and working in Ontario before returning home to Saskatchewan, and said she was surprised to learn that the province does not post its OHS incident reports online.
“I can’t think of a reason why it wouldn’t be. It just doesn’t make any sense,” she said.
“If you want better safety, then it’s something that definitely should be available.”
Darrin Kruger, former president of United Steel Workers Local 7552, was at the helm of the union during a decade in which three of the union’s members — including Wiklun — died on the job.
He said it was “extremely frustrating” to get information about Wiklun’s death. After months of asking, he received a redacted copy of the OHS report through a freedom of information request more than two years after Wiklun died.
“Two years is too long to wait, and by that time, it’s too late for anything to come of it,” he said.
“It’s closure. They are like family. People working together, you spend more time with your co-workers than your families often, so people need to know what happened and how to prevent things from occurring again. And so that’s really difficult when you can’t get the information that’s needed.”
According to a 2018 report on workplace fatalities and injuries in Canada prepared by University of Regina professor Sean Tucker, Saskatchewan’s five-year average injury fatality rate ranks highest among provinces with more than 100,000 workers, at 6.3 deaths per 100,000 workers, followed by Alberta (3.8 per 100,000) and Newfoundland and Labrador (3.2 per 100,000). It also had the second-highest five-year average injury rate: 2.4 injuries per 100 workers, behind Manitoba at 3.10 per 100. Last year, Saskatchewan documented 48 workplace fatalities, well above the 15-year average of 37.
“Most folks who work in the occupational health and safety world in Saskatchewan believe we have a cultural problem where there’s a lack of awareness or a tolerance of risk,” Tucker said.
“There’s lack of awareness of the suffering and loss of life due to workplace incidents and there’s just a real lack of awareness of the problem in Saskatchewan.”
He has been calling for public reporting of fatalities since 2016. At the very least, he would like Saskatchewan to publish monthly or quarterly summaries of workplace serious injuries and deaths, as many other provinces do. Currently, the public is aware of the number of workplace deaths only through semi-regular press releases issued by the Saskatchewan Workers’ Compensation Board.
“There’s absolutely no reason to wait. The data exists. We can work out the details later about other information that we would disclose about serious injuries, more information about fatalities or investigative reports, but the time for action is now and there needs to be a sense of urgency to move forward with this immediately,” Tucker said.
“Reporting fatalities would lead to greater public awareness of the crisis we’re facing and hopefully would lead to sustained action by all stakeholders to address the problem, and we really owe those who’ve lost family members in workplace incidents nothing less.”
Lori Johb, president of the Saskatchewan Federation of Labour (SFL), has similarly been calling on the province to publish information about workplace deaths.
Specifically, she would like Saskatchewan to adopt a system similar to Alberta’s where the province’s Occupational Health and Safety Division publishes fatality investigation reports online. The name of the deceased worker is withheld, but other information, including the name of their employer and details of events leading up to their death, are shared.
“The public needs to know and they need to have access to the reporting,” Johb said.
“Especially if there’s a workplace that’s doing a really poor job with safety, I think that everybody needs to know about that because if it’s your kid that’s going to go to work there, you want to know what kind of a safety record they have, and those kinds of things are just not available right now.”
Don Morgan, minister of labour relations and workplace safety, said he has tasked his staff with looking at how other jurisdictions publish incident reports.
“I think there’s a broad desire on the part of the public to know and to have more information and I think we’re supportive of that. We think it could increase safety just by having the general knowledge that there’s been an incident,” he said.
“If eventually it’s made available through an FOI, why wouldn’t we just put it out and say ‘This is information we think the public should know, we think it can make you safe?’ ”
Morgan said the government hasn’t moved on the idea before because “the public just didn’t seem to have an interest and nobody asked.”
However, he said the government now recognizes the public support for an online database of incident reports.
He said he would like to start publishing reports online “earlier rather than later,” and that it shouldn’t take long to do because it would not involve legislative changes.
He said discussions with his staff about this will happen later this year.
Morgan said he is also looking at the possibility of putting some information online before the end of the two-year investigations.
Danis said she’d be happy with such a system. She would have liked to have received information about Wiklun’s death earlier, and having that information available publicly would allow members of his family who want to read it to do so and find closure. It could also help prevent a similar accident, she said.
“I think it’s very important that anybody that wants the information — after the family knows — can access it. If the information is available, why can’t people know?”