WSIB OKs GE claim after long wait
After nearly 24 years of waiting, Sandy LeBeau learned last week she will receive compensation from the Workplace Safety and Insurance Board (WSIB) over the 1995 cancer death of her husband Ron, who’d worked with carcinogens for two decades at General Electric in Peterborough.
“It all came together — finally,” she said in a phone interview from her home in Lakefield on Monday.
Ron LeBeau worked in the armature department at General Electric. He died in February 1995.
His widow Sandy said he would come home from work with his clothes “destroyed” after a single shift of dipping armatures into tanks full of toxic liquid.
She said he wasn’t squeamish at all — he’d roll up his sleeves and get the job done when other workers were “clean freaks” who didn’t want chemicals touching their skin.
“Ron didn’t care if his hands got dirty… but that didn’t pay off,” Sandy said.
LeBeau, 60, met her husband when the two of them were teenagers (she was 14, he was 16).
They married a few years later and were together until he died of stomach cancer at age 39; the couple’s two daughters were teenagers at the time.
LeBeau said her husband had worked for 20 years at GE and always said the chemicals would kill him before he could retire.
She applied for compensation from WSIB after he died, she said, and over the years was rejected twice for lack of a direct correlation between the toxins he handled and the cancer.
But Ron’s case was reopened in September 2017 as part of a review of more than 230 claims that had been previously rejected by WSIB.
The review took nearly a year. The idea was to re-examine the cases in light of new scientific evidence.
WSIB reported on Aug. 1 that of 233 cases that were reopened, 71 were accepted (most of them cancer cases).
Although that review was ostensibly done by then, LeBeau said her husband’s case took a little more time to conclude.
One of the new pieces of evidence used by WSIB in its review was a new, locally produced report that states workers were exposed to more than 3,000 chemicals — 40 of them carcinogens, or suspected carcinogens — at GE between 1945 and 2000 (when the plant was cleaned up).
The report was written by two retired occupational health researchers, Bob and Dale DeMatteo, with help from 10 retirees from the GE plant, and sponsored by Unifor (the plant workers’ union).
The report describes how workers handled toxins: like LeBeau, many immersed their bare hands in vats of chemicals.
In addition to losing her husband, Sandy LeBeau also lost her father and three uncles to cancer after they worked long-term at GE.
She said the compensation will allow her to consider retiring now: at 60, she’s worked for 44 years as a hairstylist and raised her daughters alone for years.
“It’s been a long, long road,” she said.