Union leader Jim Sinclair says laying all the blame on WorkSafeBC for a failed investigation into a fatal sawmill disaster won't fix fundamental problems with how workplace safety laws are applied in British Columbia.
"There appears to be a clear policy of the Crown not to take criminal negligence charges as it relates to workplace deaths," Sinclair, who is president of the BC Federation of Labour, said. "That's the real issue here, and until that starts to happen, there's no real consequences for the negligence we see in some of these workplace deaths."
At a press conference on February 13, Premier Christy Clark said WorkSafeBC had failed to do a proper investigation following a deadly January 2012 fire and explosion at a sawmill in Burns Lake. Two workers were killed and 20 were injured in the incident.
WorkSafeBC conducted an investigation and forwarded recommendations for charges under British Columbia's Workers Compensation Act. However, on January 10, 2013, B.C.'s Criminal Justice Branch said it would not approve any charges, in part because flaws in WorkSafeBC's investigation would likely have made some of the evidence inadmissible in court.
A review of WorkSafeBC's handling of the case is now complete. Clark said her government would immediately accept all of the recommendations in the report.
Those recommendations include developing a memorandum of understanding between WorkSafeBC and the police and improving the working relationship between WorkSafeBC and the Criminal Justice Branch. The review also recommends that Criminal Justice Branch prosecutors who specialize in occupational health and safety should be made available to WorkSafeBC earlier.
Clark said the problems with WorkSafeBC's investigations go back as far as a 2006 incident at a Langley mushroom farm that killed three workers.
There will be no public inquiry into the matter because it is unlikely an inquiry would result in the charges being laid, Clark said.
However, Sinclair said the review is ignoring "the elephant in the room," pointing to other cases, such as a van accident in 2007 that killed three farm workers, where police recommended criminal charges which the Crown did not approve.
"Should [WorkSafeBC] have done a better job? Yes," Sinclair said.
"To lay all the blame on the board is laying it in the wrong place."
Prosecutors across Canada have been reluctant to use federal criminal legislation to to lay criminal charges against individuals and companies in workplace safety violations, lawyer Norm Keith, who specializes in occupational health and safety law, told Business in Vancouver on January 28.
"It's appalling how little the police and Crown attorneys have done to deal with health and safety," he said.
