LAWS HAVE LITTLE IMPACT IF COMPANIES AREN’T AFRAID OF THE CONSEQUENCES
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 every year
ELLIOT LAKE, ONT.— When the mines closed in Elliot Lake, they knocked down the shafts and put up fences to keep people out. But for Ed Mack, the job never really left.
The retired miner is reminded every day of all those years underground when he drags around the oxygen tank he’s attached to. It connects to a tube in his chest that helps keep him alive.
Mack, 70, has chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, or COPD. The disease, which nearly killed him in 2014, has stolen his freedom, and given him crippling anxiety that his lungs will give out during everyday tasks like climbing the steps or chasing after his cat.
“I’m afraid to go anywhere,” said Mack, who worked in mines around northern Ontario, Manitoba and Nunavut for more than 30 years. “Some days, I’m afraid to even take a shower.”
Mining remains one of the most dangerous jobs in Canada. Officially, it has
claimed 504 lives in the past 10 years, according to the Association of Workers’ Compensation Boards in Canada. Many h hundreds more are like Mack — former miners battling life- threatening diseases, yet because they’re denied workers’ compensation, they’re uncounted in official statistics.
Canada has lots of regulations intended to protect miners and workers across many other dangerous industries. But those laws have little impact if companies aren’t afraid of the consequences. Corporations are rarely penalized, and government inspectors are often under pressure to avoid documenting infractions when they find them.
“Employers are economically incentivized not to comply with regulation,” said Bob Barnetson, a professor of labour relations at Athabasca University in Edmonton. “If we create speeding laws, but never give out speeding tickets, we’d ww expect people to not comply with the tt law. In health and safety, we have laws, but there’s little consequence for violating them.”
Fines alone are often inconsequential, he said. Vale Canada, a subsidiary of an $ 8.3- billion ( U. S.) mining giant, was fined $ 120,000 when a worker was partially blinded after a pressurized hose ruptured rr and sprayed two workers in the tt face with liquid grout at their mine in Thompson, Man., in 2016. Vale was fined for failing to ensure emergency eyewash equipment was available.
The bottom line, Barnetson said, is it remains cheaper for companies to expose workers to health risks than it is to make workplaces safer. And it’s not in the provinces’ economic interests to increase enforcement against employers, he said.
“They would create the veneer of workplace ww rights and enforcement, but in reality, employers knew there was very vv little chance of being caught,” he said. “And if you did get caught, there was very little consequence.”
Across the country, prosecutions under laws intended to protect workers’ health and safety remain rare. In 2018, Ontario only recorded seven successful court actions under the Occupational Health and Safety Act. Provinces instead rely on a system of fines, warning letters and inspections to protect workers— but that doesn’t go far enough.
In Ontario, statistics suggest regulations intended to prevent workplace exposures are being enforced less often. The amount of fines handed out under the province’s Occupational Health and Safety Act have steadily fallen in the past decade, from $ 330,000 in 2009 to $ 45,000 in 2018, according to figures provided by the Ministry of Labour. Prosecutions also dropped in that time, from 21 a year to six.
“What you don’t see is CEOs of these companies being taken to jail,” said Len Elliot, an Ontario Public Service Employees Union regional vice- president who’s ww also a Ministry of Labour inspec- tor. “That’s what you need to see when it comes to killing workers in our province because of occupational illness. You need to see CEOs in handcuffs.”
Elliot argues companies will continue to expose workers to potentially lifethreatening chemicals because they so often get away with it. The penalties for breaking provincial health and safety legislation isn’t a strong enough deterrent, he said.
Part of the problem is that the latency period between exposure and diagnosis can be so long, often decades, that the statute of limitations on prosecuting companies expires. Enforcement is even more complicated when the company responsible for exposing the worker to carcinogens that caused their cancer no longer exists.
“You can’t, 20 years later, say, ‘ I developed asbestosis,’ then go back and charge cc for occupational exposure,” El- liot said. “It’s very challenging. Often nothing can be done to prosecute an employer to ensure no other employer wants to go down this path.”
Many provinces, including Ontario and B. C., also leave it up to companies to measure harmful exposure levels within their tt own mines, plants and factories — information that is made available to government inspectors but not shared publicly. That can make it difficult to track important exposure data and hurts disease- prevention efforts.
In Mack’s case, Ontario’s Workplace Safety and Insurance Board ( WSIB) blamed him, not the mines, for his lung disease because of his history of smoking. Occupational disease experts say that tt ignores a mountain of evidence linking chronic exposure to radon, silica dust dd and heavy- machinery diesel fumes to lung disease in miners. It’s estimated as many as 40 per cent of all lung cancers attributed to occupational diesel- engine exhaust ee come from the mining sector, according to the Toronto- based Occupational Cancer Research Centre.
Uranium mining once made northern Ontario towns like Elliot Lake rich, carving bustling, modern communities out of the Canadian wilderness. But as more miners age and become sick, some are questioning the legacy of that work.
“The only thing those mines left behind is sick people,” said Mack’s wife, Annie. AA “It used to be such a glorious t thing to have one of those jobs. Little did we ww realize it was going to cause all that havoc. Now my husband is just sitting here, waiting to die.”
Maxine Salo is one of many widows in Elliot Lake who blame the mines for ruining lives. In January 2016, her husband Moe Salo died — just five weeks after aa he was diagnosed with bladder cancer. It all happened so quickly she never left the hospital before he passed away. Salo was cremated and his ashes were ww placed in his old aluminum lunch- box, where they still sit on her kitchen table.
Salo spent 39 years in the industry, working in mining towns from Timmins, Ont., to Mattagami, Que. When Salo died, his lungs were so black he looked like he’d nursed a pack- a- day habit for decades, Maxine Salo said. But he was a non- smoker.
After his death, Maxine filed a claim with the province’s compensation board, arguing his cancer was work related. It was denied. The board blamed his bladder cancer on brachytherapy — a common prostate cancer treatment procedure that places radioactive material inside the body — instead of the years he spent underground, working in uranium mines, breathing in diesel fumes on a daily basis.
She says her late husband often worried the mine work was affecting his health. But he’d spent so many years underground, he didn’t know how to do anything else.
“There comes a time in your life where you can’t quit and go somewhere else. That’s what happens to people, it’s almost like a trap. You’ve just got to keep going,” she said. “You’ve got a family to feed, and you need to make money.”
In April 2020, after waiting through a long and frustrating appeal process, Salo’s claim was finally accepted. Now that the WSIB acknowledges Moe’s death was ww linked to an occupational disease, his name can be added to a monument in Elliot Lake that records the almost local 300 lives lost in the mining sector — only four years too late, his widow says.
Janice Martell, a Sudbury- based advocate for miners’ rights, says she has heard dozens of stories like these, of miners who weren’t protected when they worked underground and are now neglected by the system once they become sick. Since she began documenting the health problems and work histories of 522 miners as part of her McIntyre tt Powder Project four years ago, at least 48 have died.
“They’re hidden, out of sight,” Martell said. “As I’m counting up the ones who have died, I feel gutted that their stories aren’t aa being documented. Every time we lose another one, I carry that with me.”
Martell’s interest in their cases began when ww she started tracking the use of toxic McIntyre Powder, which was once common in underground mining operations across Canada. Miners were forced to inhale the substance — used widely ww from the 1940s until 1979 — be- fore ff their shifts to help protect them from f silicosis, an incurable lung disease. She believes mining companies knew the powder was harmful, but used it anyway.
Studies have since linked the use of McIntyre Powder to respiratory conditions, neurological disorders such as Alzheimer’s and other health problems. Martell’s father, Jim Hobbs, died in May 2017 after developing Parkinson’s disease.
Until Martell began advocating for changes, Ontario’s WSIB had a policy to automatically deny disease claims related to aluminum exposure, because the board didn’t see enough evidence of a link. That was finally overturned in 2017, and the board began to accept there are potential links between neurological disease and McIntyre Powder.
In May, the WSIB went even further, releasing a study from Paul Demers at the tt Occupational Cancer Research Cen- tre that shows a “statistically significant increased risk” between McIntyre Powder and Parkinson’s disease. That massive study, which analyzed historical information on thousands of former Ontario miners exposed to the powder, is causing the WSIB to re- examine hundreds of previously- denied claims.
Martell’s advocacy has convinced her Canada’s system for assessing and compensating miners is broken and needs to be fixed. Compensation boards need to be reformed and modernized, shedding outdated polices that are used as the basis to deny claims, she said.
Canada needs a national registry for people who work in industries where they are exposed to toxic substances, so that if they get sick in the future, they’re not scrambling to track down medical records from a doctor who has died or an office that long ago closed, she said.
There should be an ombudsman, or independent panel, that can review decisions made by compensation boards such as the WSIB, Martell said.
Finally, workers should be allowed to take their cases into the civil courts, so they can get a second opinion if their provincial compensation boards and the restrictive workplace tribunal appeal system rejects them, she said.
“You need an appealable, in a court of law, avenue,” Martell said. “Because you can hit them with as much logic as you want, but it doesn’t matter.”
Given the role mining has played in Canada’s industrial development, these miners deserve better, she said.
Ed Mack, meanwhile, says companies that ran the mines he and so many others worked in should have been fined more heavily for exposures that he believes put their health at risk. Too many of his coworkers died in their 40s and 50s, he said, and they should have been protected.
“I hold them accountable for the sicknesses that were caused,” he said. “Once somebody is hit in the pocketbook the right way, then things may start to change.”
Reporting for this series was produced through financial support from the Michener- Deacon Fellowship for Investigative Journalism.