Social Policy in Ontario

Everyone is talking about the Progressive Conservatives setting a new, more cooperative tone in this session of the Ontario legislature.

Workers in this province aren’t feeling it. Minimum wage workers continue to struggle on $14 an hour after the Conservatives cancelled the increase to $15 an hour. Educators and health care workers continue to be laid off thanks to government cuts. Temp agency workers face life-threatening workplaces because the government will not change the law to protect them.

The Conservatives have tabled legislation that limits compensation increases for public sector workers to 1 per cent, a rate well below inflation, while giving deputy ministers a 14-per-cent raise.

It is clear that the attacks on workers continue.

In fact, just before coming back to Queen’s Park, the Conservatives went so far as to deny a simple signature on a piece of already-passed legislation that would help protect the health, safety and rights of temporary hire agency workers. Instead, I was arrested along with seven other community labour activists who were peacefully protesting this governments inaction.

In my view, the real crime here is that Premier Doug Ford has done absolutely nothing to protect workers like Enrico Miranda, a temp worker who was killed on Sept. 25 at Fiera Foods when a machine he was cleaning was turned on while he was working on it.

Miranda was the fifth worker to die on the job at Fiera Foods or one of its affiliated companies in the past 20 years, and the second worker to die there on Doug Ford’s watch.

The Premier has done nothing to aid the plight of temp workers in Ontario. In fact, his government’s labour and employment legislation, Bill 47, has made it worse for them. Because of Ford’s inaction, employers who hire temp workers, and create the workplaces where workers are routinely maimed or killed, are rarely arrested and seldom charged for their negligence.

After the first worker was killed under Ford’s watch, the Ontario Federation of Labour (OFL) demanded that the government conduct a sweeping health and safety blitz of all Fiera foods facilities. This request was ignored.

The OFL then requested Ford’s government create the regulation that allows the Workplace Safety and Insurance Board (WSIB) to attribute the costs of claims resulting from injuries and deaths to the host employer, not the temp agency.

Doug Ford’s inaction on these requests undermines what was intended when schedule 5 of Bill 18 section 83(4) was made law by the previous government in April 2018: making companies like Fiera Foods responsible for workplace injuries and deaths involving temp agency workers.

Employers like Fiera Foods and their subsidiaries should be held responsible and accountable for the conditions of work in their facilities.

Fiera Foods must do better, as must the Premier of Ontario.

Companies must ensure the safety of their workers. The workers’ compensation premiums they pay must go up when workers in their facilities are injured or killed, to discourage companies from using temp agency workers to do high risk and dangerous work.

The WSIB has told the OFL that they cannot make the necessary changes without the regulation from the government that would allow the WSIB to develop policy that assigns the injury costs of temp agency workers to the host employer.

That’s why we occupied Doug Ford’s office recently – to demand he take immediate action. We want Ford to follow through, put the regulation into effect, and start protecting “the people” he claims to be “for.”

In 2004, the Criminal Code of Canada was amended by Bill C-45, also known as the Westray Bill. These amendments introduced special criminal negligence provisions for companies that disregard the health and safety of workers. The intent was to hold employers criminally liable for the deaths of workers. In the years since the bill became law it has seen little use. If an employer’s negligence kills a worker, they should go to jail.

The OFL believes that every worker who is killed at work deserves to have their death investigated through the lens of C-45. Their family deserves to know the police have done more than rule out foul play, that they have looked at criminal negligence by the employer as a possible cause.

The Fiera Foods group of companies uses temp agency workers for a majority of its workforce, and often to complete high risk and dangerous jobs. The police have yet to lay any charges in connection with the deaths of the five workers that have been killed on Fiera Foods’ premises.

Labour and community allies were at Queen’s Park to greet the Conservatives as they came back to the legislature this week. We reiterated our demands for strong public services, better health and safety laws and regulations, and an end to the Conservative attacks on the working people of this province.

Ford says he’s “for the people,” but his failure to act confirms, yet again, what many in Ontario have come to learn. He works for “his” people: campaign donors and corporations. He could not care less about the health and safety or the lives of workers in Ontario. That is the real crime.