Now my daughter will be eternally embarrassed, and for that she will not be grateful.
Robin and I experienced a tragedy some 15 years ago, on November 19. Her brother, my son, was killed in a workplace explosion in Brampton, Ontario. He died by fire. You have a graph from Louis that will show you that 2% of fatalities occur from that source. Sean had third-degree burns to 95% of his body in a workplace that had many different violations.
It's a bit discouraging to be here, as much as I relish the opportunity to speak to you. In Nova Scotia last week a verdict was handed down for a young man who died of third-degree burns to 95% of his body handling the same kinds of chemicals in the auto industry, and the fine levied in Nova Scotia was half that of the one issued for the employer of my son 15 years ago.
After spending 15 years trying to work on changing attitudes and culture and workplace safety, and understanding that these things are preventable, and demonstrating across the country--not me, I don't mean I've demonstrated--there has been a radical reduction in workplace injuries, which will go to prove the point that if you focus on this stuff, you can find solutions. But it is sad to see that the attitudes that underlie this, meaning accountability in workplaces and the weight we place on that, are still uneven across the country. It sends a terrible message from Nova Scotia to the rest of Canada. I certainly do hope there will be an appeal of that in the province.
That notwithstanding, what I wanted to talk to you about today is the national.... Well, pick what you'd like: would it be the national injury disparity or the national lifespan gap? Here's the reality. If you live in Ontario and send your child to Saskatchewan or Manitoba--I don't know the numbers exactly--you're one and a half to two times more likely to have your son or daughter die or be permanently disabled at work. The same would be true across other forms of injury where mortality rates and injury rates are higher from province to province across the country.
Provincial jurisdiction, the Confederation model that serves us well in so many ways and on so many fronts, causes some serious gaps or discrepancies.
By now we understand there are some huge best practices. Some interventions work, but they're applied in different provinces in different ways. Where is the national leadership on the issue?
About seven or eight years ago I went to see an assistant deputy minister in the federal labour department, which has some role in workplace injury but not much. I told the fellow at the time that I was trying to figure out what role the federal government might play in impacting workplace safety, at least through bureaucracy. It's such a provincial jurisdiction. It's all regulated by the workers' compensation boards, etc., and there was no money in his department. I understood that. What would it take for a federal government of any political stripe to assume some sort of leadership role in setting a standard for the country as a whole? I said from what I could tell, from what I understood, from what I saw, there was really no leadership on that issue in the federal government. He looked at me--and he knew why I was there, and how I came to be there--and said I was right, there was no leadership at the federal level.
This is in part an appeal. We need to set some national standards. They don't exist. They do exist in other countries. You've heard all sorts of testimony from other people about national strategies, yes. Mental health, suicide threat, yes. So what's the issue, really?
There are lots of technical solutions, and I'm not going to pretend to present them to you because there are people who are far more qualified than I am to do it. But I can tell you that by the end of today there will be 35 more dead Canadians and there will be more than a dozen quadriplegics and that there is no discrimination or political stripe to this--a director of communications for the Liberal Party, the team doctor for the Senators, a quadriplegic from Manitoba who is serving as an MP, the suicide of a son of the Minister of Finance in a Tory government, and on and on--there's no politics around this. We need some unified national leadership.
It is discouraging, I've got to tell you. After 15 years of this, it is discouraging not to have seen this evolve.
It is just great that you're in here talking over these issues and there's an opportunity maybe to achieve some consensus on what is of course a relatively divided country in political terms these days.
There's one thing we all value. Our kids, our moms, our dads, our friends, and human life are meaningful to all of us.
I want to conclude by saying there are really five things that you do need to focus on. Forget the specifics. You need to focus on five things, and they are really general and vague.
First is consistency. You need to get consistent on this. I heard in one province, on the worker safety piece of it, a few years back, Alberta to be specific.... No, they said, we did young workers' safety last year--as though they exposed one generation of kids in one year to a workplace media campaign, and now they're going to be on to road safety this year. No. Consistency is key to this.
In Ontario, for example, where there are 45% fewer severe trauma injuries for young workers than there are anywhere else in the country, by rate, it's because for ten years they have been doing it. They did cut it out this year. They stopped it this year because there's a new financial regime in town, and of course it's a good financial question. Yes, we have a lower workplace injury base than anywhere else in the country, but we spend $90 million a year in Ontario on workplace injury prevention alone. That would be compared to zero dollars, by the way, at the federal level, but $90 million dollars a year.... But could we have done it for $50 million? A good financial question. Now, let's cut that out, and let's cut that out, and in the process this reduction of consistency could potentially cost human lives. Who dies because they weren't aware of it? I don't know. We can't attribute it to that. That is the concern, the consistency that's required.
The other parts are commitment. If you say there should be leadership and you're committed to it, you will make it happen. I expect that of my MP, who is sitting in the room.