THE UNCOUNTED

Canadians deserve to believe our workers’ compensation system works to protect them — but the reality falls far short. Part 1 of a six-part series.

Occupational disease affects thousands of Canadians every year, and yet it’s often treated on a case-bycase basis as if the exposures that caused those diseases exist in isolation.

Once in a while, if enough workers from one particular employer or industry start dying or suffering from disease in a cluster, they can get some political attention and a response from their provincial workers’ compensation board.

It’s hard to grasp the true size of the problem, because official statistics count just a fraction of suspected occupational disease cases ever year.

They are inherently flawed because they only include accepted disease claims from provincial compensation boards. According to the Association of Workers’ Compensation Board of Canada, which collects stats from those boards, occupational disease kills between 500 and 600 Canadians a year.

Many epidemiologists say that’s less than ten per cent of the actual death toll.

While other countries monitor work-related cancer and other illness at a national level, Canada relies on an ad hoc, disconnected approach that varies from province to province. The work to document suspected clusters of disease is typically done by unions, academics and advocacy groups — not government. Without mandatory reporting when someone develops an occupational disease, no national registries to track those cases or monitor dangerous exposures in the workplace, and little sharing of information between provinces, officials are often left responding to clusters of disease after it’s too late.

Canadians may feel the system that’s supposed to protect them is broken — but in reality, it’s not really a system at all.

Regulations that are supposed to protect Canadians from chemicals that are known to cause cancer aren’t always enforced in the same way across all provinces. And while other countries such as Australia, Finland and Austria have lowered their acceptable levels of workplace exposure to carcinogens such as diesel fumes, Canada’s regulations remain dangerously outdated.

Corporations are rarely penalized

when workers are exposed to cancer-causing chemicals, and government inspectors are often under pressure to avoid using the full strength of their enforcement tools.

Family doctors and health-care providers can’t access a worker’s exposure history and don’t have all the information they need to help them diagnose.

If they become sick, Canadians can’t sue their employer for negligence. They gave up that right more than a century ago, in exchange for a workers’ compensation system that was supposed to protect them.

But that system, which puts the onus on workers to prove their disease was work-related, was not designed for today’s complicated epidemic of cancers. If your job gives you cancer in Canada, you often have to fight, kick and scream to be believed.

Many Canadians work their entire adult lives assuming if they become sick because of their job, they and their families will be taken care of. For the thousands of people who do develop an occupational disease each year, the reality is very different.

MATHEW MCCARTHY WATERLOO REGION RECORD Shelly Forestell holds a picture of her late husband John ‘Rick’ Forestell. He died of cancer and she believes it was because of his work. Many occupational-related deaths are like Forestell’s — invisible to a workers’ compensation system created more than a century ago, long before regulators could conceive of work-related cancers and their toll on Canada’s workforce.