United Steelworkers say fines not enough in mine deaths

A United Steelworkers official in Thunder Bay says a$300,000 fine is not nearly high enough of a price to pay for the 2014 death of a Lac des Iles mine worker.

Someone should be behind bars, and at the very least be facing criminal charges, Herb Daniher said on Thursda, days after a court ruled the fine was sufficient in the death of Pascal Goulet, who was killed instantly on July 10, 2014, leaving behind a wife and two children.

Management on all job sites – not just mines – should take things a step further and make sure there is no risk.

Daniher said it’s clear what happened at Lac des Iles. A manager on site told workers to increase production in the morning and later that day a fatality occurred.

While the company, Lac des Iles Mines Ltd., has made changes, they already should have been in place.

And it’s the people at the top that need to be sentenced, Daniher said, referencing a decision last week when an Ontario judge imposed a three-and-a-half year sentence on a Metron Construction manager for criminal negligence that resulted in the 2009 deaths of four workers.

“Unfortunately it didn’t get to the top. It got to a foreman or a supervisor that was sort of a front-line person. That’s not where these decisions are made. If the manager of the mine basically has a pep talk and tells people basically they’ve got to work harder, they’ve got to work smarter and production is the No. 1 priority, then maybe you have a component of safety to that,” Daniher said.

USW Ontario director Marty Warren agreed fines are not the answer – at least not a complete one.

“The Westray Act that was finally passed into law in 2004 after a decade of lobbying is supposed to hold employers criminally accountable for workplace death and injury. But there have been more than 10,000 workplace deaths since the law was passed and only one manager has received a prison sentence,” Warren said.

Twenty-six workers were killed in 1992 at the Westray Mine in Plymouth, N.S. Mine management were blamed, along with politicians and bureaucrats.

"Clearly, there is more work to do to ensure the Westray Act is enforced when a worker is killed on the job. Police and Crown attorneys must be trained and empowered to investigate and prosecute workplace death and injury as they would any other potential crime scene,” Warren said.