Shortchanged and still paying
Kinkora man who nearly lost hand on job in 1977 reflects on a lifetime fighting for compensation
KINKORA, P.E.I. — Fred McIver looked down and saw his left hand hanging by a thread, blown off almost entirely by the impact of the cast-iron pipe.
It was 1977, and 27-yearold McIver was working as a plumbing apprentice for Inman Plumbing and Heating.
He was down in a hole, trying to connect to pipes at the new Eptek Centre in Summerside, when an eightby-six reducer blew. That’s when one of the pipes hit him.
Doctors in Halifax managed to reattach the hand, but it would never recover enough to even hold a can of beer.
When McIver lost the use of his left hand, he didn’t expect his recovery to be the start of another, life-long fight with the Worker’s Compensation Board of
P.E.I.
McIver says he was assessed improperly for workers compensation in 1979, with benefits set at 50 per cent of regular income for his injured hand (called the ‘meat chart’ approach). If he was assessed according to loss of his earning capacity, he says he should have been getting 75 per cent of his pay.
“That’s what I should have had, was $137.51 (each week), but they only paid me $130.54. A weekly shortage of $7.17,” he said during an interview at his home in Kinkora, P.E.I. on March 22, 2022.
His battle for a day in court and chance to recover that money would end up costing him years of time spent on the case and nearly $12,000 in court costs.
MISSING BENEFITS
As a young, married man recovering from a life-changing injury, McIver tried to find what work he could and didn’t notice the shortfalls in his compensation cheques for years.
But he has documents from Workers Compensation that specifically note the money he would have had if he was assessed at 75 per cent.
He said his sister caught onto the lost income in the 1980s.
“It wasn’t enough (to live on). No, no. But my wife was … a nurse’s assistant. So, she worked at the hospital,” McIver said, saying the couple had to get by on her paycheque while raising three children.
While the hand injury has been McIver’s main issue with WCB, he also had an ankle injury on another job in 1986 and had his pension from the plumbing job assessed the same as the disability benefits, he said.
As the Workers Compensation Act changed over the years, the way of assessing injuries changed with it, McIver said.
But he, along with other workers getting benefits under the old Worker's Compensation Act, were not “fixed up,” he said.
Carl Pursey, president of the P.E.I. Trade Federation, says McIver is not the only worker to have been shortchanged this way.
“There’s all kinds of stuff like this happening all the time. It’s been a long-time issue,” Pursey said in an interview March 23. “It’s always a battle. They always try to deny people, to make them appeal it and they give them all kinds of hoops to go through.”
LEGAL STRUGGLES
Difficulty resolving these issues led McIver to court in 2006, after which he would face a series of hearings that ultimately led to a decision against McIver and his colitigant, another man who was compensated under the ‘meat chart’ formula.
“(Judge) Gordon Campbell said … we’re not getting paid right. But limitation of time comes in,” McIver said.
Despite being shortchanged for years, McIver and his co-litigant had to cover their own court costs.
“My half is $6,831.67. Gordon Campbell ordered me to pay.”
During this long process, McIver never gave up belief that he had been treated wrongly from the beginning. And affirmative comments like those of Campbell gave him a reason to hold his ground.
That determination took him to court one last time, where he had a hearing with three judges, a lawyer from WCB and a lawyer from the Attorney General’s Office.
But McIver never did get the actual trial one of the previous judges had ordered, and McIver’s lawyer never got to present evidence.
The three judges in his final hearing also ordered McIver to pay court costs — another $5,000.
He would be paying off $11,831.67 in total.
McIver says he has been paying that bill $110 at a time and his final payment will be coming out of his bank account in December of 2022.
RANGE OF EMOTIONS
On March 23, SaltWire contacted the Workers Compensation Board for a response to McIver’s story and got an email from Laura Steeves, senior communications coordinator.
“Unfortunately, due to confidentiality reasons, we cannot discuss matters related to workers' claims,” she said.
When McIver first began recalling the harrowing experience of his injury, he became teary-eyed. But that emotion turned bitter by the time SaltWire asked if he had any parting thoughts at the end of the interview.
“I’m just so frustrated thinking how much money they stole off me … me, and my wife and family,” he said.
Now 72, McIver no longer expects to see any of the thousands he paid in fees, or the hundreds of thousands he says were withheld over the years.
“(I’m) just telling my story, to let everybody out there know how they ripped me off … And not only me, but everyone else,” he said.
“It’s not only the employer paying into worker’s compensation. It’s all the money they withheld from the injured workers.”