Shine a light on WSIB
Workers from the General Electric plant in Peterborough, Ont., who became sick after exposure to toxic substances in the workplace, face an uneasy future. And now uncertainty also hangs over the ability of Ontario’s Workplace Safety and Insurance Board to deliver justice.
The WSIB recently revisited hundreds of previously denied claims from GE workers and their families for a range of occupational illnesses, thanks to a challenge from a group of retirees and an investigation by the Star’s Sara Mojtehedzadeh.
The review overturned 71 of those denied claims. That’s a significant victory for those workers.
But there is a bittersweet caveat. How did the compensation board get it so wrong the first time? That’s 71 cases of people suffering from terrible and sometimes terminal illnesses, including a multitude of cancers. They turned to the board looking for accessible service and fair treatment only to have the door to compensation and support shut in their face when it clearly should not have been.
And what about the others? The WSIB upheld its initial rejection of 105 of the cases they re-examined. How can those workers and their families trust those decisions given all that has happened?
Once one of Canada’s oldest and largest industrial operations, thousands of workers spent their lives building everything from household appliances to fuel cells for nuclear reactors at the GE plant in Peterborough. And it turns out those workers were exposed to more than 3,000 toxic chemicals, including at least 40 that are known or suspected to cause cancer. Little wonder that hundreds of workers got sick.
By 2004, some 660 compensation claims had been made to the WSIB. Of those, 280 were accepted for a hearing. The rest were rejected by the board or withdrawn or abandoned by frustrated workers and their families.
The rejection of so many was what led a group of retirees to challenge those decisions. And a union report released in 2017 confirmed they were right to raise questions.
It took far too long for the WSIB to start to see that there was an epidemic of work-related illnesses at the GE plant. And even now there are flaws in the process.
According to occupational health researchers Robert and Dale DeMatteo, there are major systemic obstacles at the WSIB. This includes an over-emphasis on workers’ medical histories, a disregard of some medical assessments and an overall refusal to consider long-term exposure to chemicals without safety controls.
There is also a disturbing lack of understanding of occupational disease, a field that is under-researched and underfunded in Canada. The WSIB says their review reflects “the most updated scientific research and all the available evidence.” But, as the experts point out, that knowledge pool is far too shallow to be relied on.
And it’s most troubling that the WSIB seems to be disregarding a 2016 Supreme Court of Canada ruling that says workers’ compensation boards cannot demand definitive proof that an illness is work-related. Workers must be given the benefit of the doubt.
It’s time for an update to how the WSIB assesses these types of complex claims. In future, workers should be able to rely on the WSIB getting the decision right the first time. But, if and how that will happen remains uncertain. The province is certainly aware of the problem. The previous Liberal government announced a review of how work-related cancers are evaluated by the compensation system and funded research to learn more about occupational disease.
The local Progressive Conservative MPP Dave Smith recently met with GE retirees and that’s a good sign. But the PC government has also said that — as with most Liberal programs — it is assessing this one and has yet to make a decision on whether to continue with the review and future funding for research grants.
It should continue with both. Workers deserve no less.