Comprehensive review of WCB long overdue
Employers worry that NDP wants to make board employee-friendly
When asked this week why she was launching a major review of the Workers’ Compensation Board, Alberta Labour Minister Christina Gray said it was simply “long overdue.”
“The last comprehensive review of the WCB was done more than 15 years ago,” she said, as if after 15 years without an inspection the WCB would turn into a pumpkin.
Which, come to think of it, would be an improvement in the eyes of some workers lost in what for them has become a labyrinthine world of bureaucracy and red tape.
The WCB is a huge multibillion-dollar organization with a staff of 1,600 that is funded entirely by 160,000 employers and covers two million Albertans.
The board is often criticized for being judge and jury when it comes to denying claims to injured workers — which is why there is probably no other governmental agency that is viewed with as much cynicism and mistrust.
The NDP is launching this comprehensive review not because of an arbitrary 15-year time frame. It’s because the NDP is now in power — and it has a loud and vocal history of criticizing the WCB. In 2006, to offer just one example, the NDP labour critic of the day, Ray Martin, attacked the WCB for treating injured workers callously, rejecting claims unfairly and bungling payments to claimants.
“The WCB is operating like a rogue state within the Alberta government,” said Martin. “Its behaviour is just unconscionable.”
Ask an MLA for the one issue that drives most complainants to their office and odds are they’ll point to a filing cabinet in the corner crammed with grievances about the board.
If you’ve ever walked by the board’s headquarters near the legislature you’ll notice huge boulders and shrubs on the strip of grass outside the front doors. The excessive landscaping was added to prevent injured workers from ever again setting up tents in a protest against the board as they did in August 1999.
Anger at the board hit a dangerous low in October 2009 when injured worker Patrick Clayton brought a rifle to the board’s headquarters in Edmonton and took nine people hostage for 10 hours before surrendering to police.
As Gray says, a comprehensive review is “long overdue.”
The extensive investigation that won’t wrap up until next year will be conducted by a three-member panel with one representing employers, one speaking for employees and one acting as a “neutral” chair.
When asked what she wants reviewed in particular, Gray was vague, saying the study “will look at all parts of the system, including governance, administration and legislation.” When pressed, she pointed to a couple of items: speeding up the time to process claims; and possibly expanding “presumptive coverage” of employees with post-traumatic stress disorder to include not just first responders but others with dangerous jobs such as prison guards.
Union leaders are welcoming the review.
Employers are a little more circumspect. Paul Heyens with the Alberta Construction Association says he’s not against a review that tweaks, but doesn’t transform, the board.
“It’s been a successful system,” he says. “I wouldn’t want to see wholesale changes.”
Employers are being diplomatic but it would be understandable if they’re worried that, after years of criticizing the WCB for being too employer-friendly, the NDP wants to make it employeefriendly.
Some employers might be a bit spooked as well by the fact that one of eight staff members advising the review panel was plucked from the senior ranks of the Alberta Union of Provincial Employees last October.
Employers say at the very least they want to be consulted extensively.
That’s presumably why Gray made a point of publicly announcing the review rather than simply dropping a news release. After the fiasco of the farm-safety Bill 6 last year, where farmers complained they weren’t consulted, Gray wants her process to be seen as collaborative and transparent. If nothing else, it’s a promising start.