Labour, province at odds over work safety fix

With a spate of fatal injuries in Saskatchewan workplaces in mere weeks, it’s clear the existing safety system isn’t working, the president of the provincial federation of labour says.

Larry Hubich put the blame squarely on provincial government cuts to safety inspections.

But the province’s labour minister, Don Morgan, says there have been no such cuts and his ministry’s team of inspectors, at 55, is larger than at any point since the Saskatchewan Party came to power.

Morgan and Hubich also duelled over what’s the best way to do workplace safety inspections: Through unannounced random inspections of all employers or by focusing on those with the worst records. The latter is an approach Morgan’s ministry partially adopted several years ago after studying “best practices” in other provinces, Morgan said. As a result, his ministry does about 25 per cent of its inspections randomly and 75 per cent are “targeted.”

“There’s value in targeted inspections to the worst offenders, but you shouldn’t do that by reducing broadly based, random inspections,” Hubich said.

Morgan added the government has also increased the OHS budget, tripled fines for offending workplaces and hired a police officer to give safety inspectors courses in collecting evidence to secure more convictions. He said he’s also asked labour ministry officials to look into the recent spike in workplace deaths to see if there’s a pattern or “a specific problem.”

Morgan said the province’s injury rate has fallen to 6.19 per cent in 2015 from 9.87 per cent in 2007 and moved from being the secondworst in the country ( behind Manitoba) to fourth-worst — “which is cold comfort” for injured workers and families of the deceased.

In the past three weeks, workplace accidents have taken the lives of:

Eric Ndayishimiye, 21, at the construction site of the new Children’s Hospital in Saskatoon;

Chad Wiklun, 29, at Agrium’s Vanscoy potash mine, and;

Dustin Barry Pratt, 27, at an oilfield site near Alameda.