‘THIS IS NOT A COMPENSATION SYSTEM FOR WORKERS’
Jackie Moore is retired from Ventra Plastics and suffers from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD).
PETERBOROUGH— Before he passed away from the cancer that filled his body with painful tumours, Rick F Forestell had a request for his wife — please stop working at the plastics plant.
“My husband begged me to leave,” said Shelly Forestell, wiping back tears.
Ventra Plastics, a windowless, grey factory in a Peterborough industrial park, had been a central part of their lives. Back when the company was known as Pebra, it provided them both with paycheques that allowed them to build a home and raise a family. It
Occupational disease kills more Canadians every year than any other work-related injury, accident or disorder. With no national strategy to prevent or even monitor these diseases, the death toll grows higher every year, putting a substantial burden on our health-care system. This series examines six critical areas where Canada falls short when it comes to protecting workers from job-related diseases
was how they’d met. But now, in agony on his death bed, Forestell blamed the plant for stealing his life away.
He filed an occupational disease claim with Ontario’s Workplace Safety and Insurance Board (WSIB), arguing his bladder cancer was linked to exposure to carcinogens used in manufacturing plastic auto parts. Forestell, who died in 2018 at the age of 56, was denied because he smoked.
Occupational cancer kills more Canadians every year than any other work-related injury, disease or disorder. Yet while thousands die annually, many are like Forestell — overlooked by government statistics that only count accepted claims from provincial compensation boards. Their deaths are invisible to a workers’ compensation system created more than a century ago, long before regulators could conceive of work-related cancers and their toll on Canada’s workforce.
Forestell’s illness is one of 115 cancer cases documented among Pebra employees who worked at the plant between 1986 and 1996, according to a union study. Without any kind of database to monitor
suspected occupational illness cases, and with no system to give doctors access to workers’ history of exposure to harmful carcinogens when they make a diagnosis, clusters like these usually go untracked.
Although other countries such as Australia, Denmark and Finland monitor workrelated cancer and other illness at a national level, Canada relies on an ad hoc, disconnected approach that varies from province to province. The task of documenting suspected clusters of disease falls to unions, labour activists or academics, resulting in research that doesn’t look beyond a specific local focus. In many non-unionized plants, disease cases remain completely overlooked.
Tracking work-related disease is left entirely up to each provincial or territorial compensation board. No other system or organization collects data related to the number of disease cases caused by exposure to occupational carcinogens, or their economic impact.
According to the Association of Workers’ Compensation Board of Canada,10,467 Canadians were killed by their jobs between 2007 and 2017 — 6,150 of them from cancers and other systemic diseases. But that’s just the official count. Thousands more victims who either never filed for compensation, couldn’t produce the documentation needed or were otherwise denied, such as Forestell, remain uncounted.
Most experts agree the official numbers dramatically understate the size of the problem. That poses significant problems for prevention efforts, because it hides troubling trends and allows the real cost of occupational disease to disappear into the larger health-care system.
“When we see statistics, we tend to think they have an official feel. We think, ‘That’s the truth.’ But they don’t give us the complete picture,” said Steven Bittle, a University of Ottawa professor who studies work-related disease and death in Canada.
“This isn’t just about a death databank. This is about finding out where the problems are and coming up with some solutions accordingly … We can’t talk about adequate prevention without having a true sense of the problem.”
Bittle’s research suggests occupational disease deaths are so greatly under-reported because the burden of proof demanded by provincial compensation boards is so high. Until recently, half of all occupational disease claims for cancer, lung disease and other long-term illnesses filed in Ontario were denied.
There are also many other Canadians, such as farmers, who aren’t covered by workplace compensation legislation and whose deaths aren’t included in occupational disease statistics.
Canadians need to demand better protection on the job, and better compensation systems when they do become sick, Bittle said. And that starts by reducing barriers to getting claims accepted.
“I’d hope as we work to get more information out about these kind of things, people will start to recognize this is more of a systemic problem, than just these one-offs,” Bittle said.
“I hope that can lead to governments actually doing more to hold employers accountable rather than taking risks with workers’ lives. In many cases, these risks are massive, well-known, and are still being taken.”
Filing occupational disease claims isn’t just about compensating workers, he said. It’s also important because it puts the cost of work-related disease where it belongs — on the employers responsible for it, instead of the larger health-care system.
“There’s a lot of power in numbers, and we need to have accurate statistics,” said Paul Demers, one of the country’s leading experts in occupational disease.
“If a workplace is responsible for a disease, you want it to be properly compensated. That takes it off the health-care system, and puts it back in the compensation system where it belongs.”
“I hope that can lead to governments actually doing more to hold employers accountable rather than taking risks with workers’ lives.”
STEVEN BITTLE UNIVERSITY OF OTTAWA PROFESSOR
The costs are significant. While socalled ‘long latency’ diseases such as mesothelioma, lung cancer, asbestosis and prostate cancer — which typically don’t appear until years after exposure — make up only three per cent of all accepted occupational disease claims, they account for 60 per cent of the costs to the WSIB.
According to national statistics, there have been 41 deaths related to the plastics industry in Canada in the past 10 years. But many former Pebra employees, chronically exposed to toxic chemicals such as benzene, toluene, xylene, vinyl chloride and formaldehyde, believe the death toll is much higher.
“For years, people were afraid to say anything because they were worried the plant would close down,” said Rose Wickman, the plant’s former union president. “Then we started noticing our co-workers were dying.”
A union committee organized to look back at toxic exposures over 10 years, when the plant was owned by Germany’s Pebra, found 115 cases of cancer in a workforce that numbered in the 400s. At least 59 were terminal, according to an investigation by Bob DeMatteo, a former occupational health director for the Ontario Public Service Employees Union, and research partner Dale DeMatteo.
In addition to cancer, they documented dozens of cases of reproductive abnormalities, neurological disorders and respiratory problems. They focused on Ministry of Labour inspection reports that show employees at the plastics plant complained frequently of trouble breathing, and were often sent to hospital for observation. DeMatteo says those red flags went ignored for years.
Most of Rick Forestell’s co-workers who also worried their cancers and lung diseases were related to their jobs are also excluded from official statistics. Thirty five of his co-workers filed for compensation, union representatives say they believe fewer than five have been accepted.
The committee behind the Pebra report is calling on the Ministry of Labour and the WSIB to fund an independent study into what they believe are occupational diseases associated with exposure conditions in the plant. Since it can take years before occupational exposures reveal themselves through disease, they’re worried more former workers could be getting sick and don’t know it yet.
“I look at these numbers and I get pissed off,” Bob DeMatteo said. “The numbers we found were all abnormal. You would not expect that in a normal population.”
The former Pebra employees say the system intended to protect the plant’s workers failed. They blame the company for suppressing claims and denying health concerns, and the WSIB for failing to see what they believe is a clear-cut occupational disease cluster.
The company, now owned by U.S.based auto parts giant Flex-N-Gate, did not respond to requests for comment for this story.
“They’re just going to wait until they’re all dead and then the problem will be gone,” Dale DeMatteo said. “There’s no sense of justice to these claims.”
The DeMatteos say it’s proof of a broken worker compensation system. They say the WSIB and its other provincial counterparts put too much emphasis on lifestyle factors, such as smoking, that put the blame on the worker and demand too high of a standard for evidence proving connections to on-the-job exposure. They want more transparency and accountability from the compensation boards, and more independent oversight.
“This is not a compensation system for workers,” Bob DeMatteo said. “This is not a just and fair system.”
In Peterborough, former Pebra employees say Ministry of Labour inspectors were in the plant frequently. But while ventilation was improved over time, former union reps say personal protective equipment was inadequate, training was limited and followup from inspectors didn’t always bring changes. Many described breathing in fumes from glue, paint and plastic solvents that gave them chronic headaches and made them dizzy. They worked with potent isocyanate sprays that burned their eyes and fibreglass dust that hurt their lungs.
“I lost a lot of friends out of that place. More people died of cancer than retired from the plant,” said Cecil Firlotte, who found out he had colon cancer after 25 years at the plant. “They knew some of the chemicals in there were dangerous but didn’t want to tell anybody.”
Like many of his co-workers, he filed an occupational disease claim with the WSIB but was denied. He’s appealing that decision.
His son, Brian Firlotte, was at the plant for 15 years. His job was to grind the paint off plastic parts. At the end of his shift, he’d blow his nose and expel a rainbow of chemicals.
More than eight years ago, Firlotte started getting chronic pain in his face. Doctors found permanent nerve damage. Now at 49, he’s diagnosed with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and is often trapped at home by his limited lung capacity.
“The doctor told me I basically have the lungs of an 80 year old,” he said. “When it flares up, I can’t get out of bed. I can be in bed for a week. My whole body is breaking down.”
He has applied to the WSIB, but his claim has not been processed yet.
Other families say they’re angered by the WSIB’s bureaucratic response to their claims. Kathy Byrd, who died in 2014 from kidney cancer, was 56. The board blamed her death on “lifestyle” factors — she smoked when she was younger, and had a little excess weight.
Her daughters Laryssa and Victoria Byrd are convinced Byrd’s 25 years at the plant played a role.
“All the facts are there, plain as day. How can you not see this? Doctors who do this for a living see this. There’s so many cases,” said Laryssa Byrd, who was 21 when her mother died. “I want them to correct what’s going on.”
Some of the worst incidents of exposure occurred when the plant went through three bankruptcies in the1990s, according to former union chairperson Dave Gooley. There wasn’t a lot of extra money to update the factory’s ventilation, and workers were too worried about their jobs to press the issue too far.
“I think at that point there wasn’t a lot of attention paid to that stuff,” he said.
Shelly Forestell, meanwhile, is still grieving the loss of her husband she watched die at home, his final months a blur of staggering doses of painkillers. Tired of chronic headaches she’d get while working in the assembly department, she finally took his advice and quit the plastics plant. She wishes she had left sooner.
Forestell knows there are other factories, in other Canadian towns, where people are sick and dying and looking for answers. But with no real monitoring of occupational disease at a national level, no sharing of statistics between provinces and no tracking of workplace exposure levels in a way that’s assessable to doctors, it’s hard to identify patterns related to the chemicals.
And it’s hard to prevent more cases. Canadians should be able to come to work knowing they’re not putting their health at risk, she said.
“We had pictured our life together. To have someone so precious to me taken away, it was devastating,” she said. “This has affected so many people. It’s not just one or two, it’s their families. And it’s not just this factory. It needs to stop.”
“For years, people were afraid to say anything because they were worried the plant would close down. Then we started noticing our co-workers were dying.”
ROSE WICKMAN FORMER UNION PRESIDENT