Natural Resources Committee on Dec. 2nd, 2013

[Joan Crockatt, Conservative, Calgary Centre, AB]

What about the average worker?

[The Chair, Conservative, Leon Benoit]

Thank you, Ms. Crockatt. I'm sorry, but your time is up.

[Joan Crockatt, Conservative, Calgary Centre, AB]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Leon Benoit]

We go now to Ms. Duncan, followed by Mr. Trost and Mr. Julian.

Go ahead please, Ms. Duncan, for up to five minutes.

[Linda Duncan, NDP, Edmonton Strathcona, AB]

Thank you very much.

You're likely aware that the Department of Public Works and Government Services has been convicted of violating four counts of occupational health and safety laws, including failure to have any kind of basic health and safety policy in place, failure to train, and failure to ensure that any contracting parties have been fully trained and informed.

Given the nature of this business and given the duties under this legislation to establish occupational health and safety policies and practices, what confidence can the workers have that this will be expedited in a more rapid way than Public Works did it? You had already waited 12 years.

[Jeff Labonté]

I'd simply say that I don't know about the Public Works case, but I'll certainly take your question as you presented it.

The workers have a regime today in which there are a number of regulatory aspects that fall under provincial jurisdiction that apply, and they have aspects that apply as contractual conditions that are established between the operator and the offshore boards, which take into account occupational health and safety issues. There is existing health and safety committee work that goes on between the workplace, the workers and the employer. The amendments proposed in the bill help clarify those things to put them clearly in the accord act so they're not falling under more than one act and under the responsibility of more than one minister, federally, for example. They provide a greater degree of certainty and provide additional authorities that would continue to strengthen the workplace.

Certainly, the two provinces have felt pretty confident that the amendments provide a stronger occupational health and safety regime and have moved forward. We're hoping that we'll continue the discussion with parliamentarians so that the bill can move forward and that it can be put into place so that those things will be put into the statute as they are evolved from practice.

[Linda Duncan, NDP, Edmonton Strathcona, AB]

Actually, your response goes to my next question.

In fact, the legislation appears to create the most complicated procedure I've ever seen for making decisions on health and safety. We have the Minister of Natural Resources, the Minister of Transport, the Minister of Labour, the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador, the Government of Nova Scotia, and then we have the two offshore boards. There seems to be a lot of uncertainty in the case of a simple worker of who exactly is going to be making the decisions.

That goes to the obvious question of, why is it that provincial occupational health and safety laws were the only ones that were being exempted for application to the protection of these workers? Wouldn't it have been simpler just to incorporate by reference the respective two provincial laws into federal law, where there already are decades of experience in delivering these programs and decades of experience with already trained and employed officers?

[Jeff Labonté]

I think the challenge here would be to address the uniqueness of the legislative frame of shared management and the mirroring of the legislation, and the requirement that there are certain distinction points, as I pointed out. As a person steps on a helicopter, they're under the authority, in this instance, of more than one minister of the crown, whether that's the provincial context or whether it's the federal context. By putting them into the accord act, it is an attempt to simplify that the clarity and the accountability—

[Linda Duncan, NDP, Edmonton Strathcona, AB]

You still have three ministers, two jurisdictions, and many officers making one decision.

[Jeff Labonté]

The regulation is actually made, and it's clear and it spells it out. The different ministers who have authority to have input on that regulation depends on the expertise. I don't think that's significantly different from other workplaces of this nature across the country. I'll grant that it's actually a little bit more complicated in the offshore because we have the added element of the provincial and federal marrying together, but certainly the effort here is to try to clarify. The regulations will be clear. They'll spell it out only once.

I understand your point that there are many actors involved.

[Linda Duncan, NDP, Edmonton Strathcona, AB]

It didn't really answer my question. Why is it that provincial occupational health and safety laws are the only provincial laws that are not a continue to apply? We're dealing with a very distinct issue, some problems with occupational health and safety. There were issues to do with the Ocean Ranger going down. There's the issue with the helicopter crash. It seems logical that what we need is one point in time, one person who makes the decisions.

I see an extremely complicated process, where somebody says, “That helicopter doesn't look safe to get on,” and then we go through I can't believe the number of authorities. It's not really clear in the legislation at what point in time a decision is made and by whom.

[Jeff Labonté]

The decision-maker is the offshore board. There's only one in each jurisdiction. The regulations that are established to provide the authority of the offshore board are mirrored in both the federal jurisdiction and the provincial jurisdiction. There's the federal process and a provincial process, but the board is provided the authority to make the decisions. There's only one decision-maker.

[Linda Duncan, NDP, Edmonton Strathcona, AB]

Are you saying the board will decide if the work is dangerous?

[Jeff Labonté]

The response is to your question of who the workers deal with when they express a concern about a situation that they don't think is safe.

[The Chair, Conservative, Leon Benoit]

Ms. Duncan, your time is up.

We go now to Mr. Trost, for up to five minutes.

[Bradley Trost, Conservative, Saskatoon—Humboldt, SK]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you to each of our witnesses for being here.

What I'm going to do here is try to take the perspective on a practical level as a worker who is going to go out there to work and try to figure out what this would mean to him, her, me, or whoever is going out there.

Mr. Labonté, you said in your remarks that there were three basic rights that workers have: the right to be informed, the right to refuse dangerous work, and the right to participate in safety decisions. I'll admit that I haven't read every page of this bill yet. I may not get there.

What would this mean? How would this work in practice? How would I understand this? How would it relate directly to workers out there? Could you give some examples of what it would mean to be informed? How would I participate in a safety discussion if I were a worker? What would be the right to refuse?

What is dangerous or what is not can be incredibly subjective. What I'm getting from what you're talking about, you want to give the worker the benefit of the doubt because this is potentially a high-risk occupation. Could you give me a few practical illustrations of what it would mean to someone who's going out on the rig for the first time?

[Jeff Labonté]

I'll start and then I'll pass it on to my colleagues.

First, it is a safe workplace. Efforts are made every day by the workers, the boards, and the operators. The operators have responsibility for their workers and they take those responsibilities extremely seriously, as any good employer would.

Certainly on the rights that are being enshrined, a worker can believe that work may not be safe and can refuse to take part in that work. Then there is governance. There are worker committees that involve the work community, the safety officers of the board, the regulator, and the operator to kind of explore whether that work is dangerous, if there should be changes made, and if the environment should be changed. There's, if you will, a mechanism to engage.

[Bradley Trost, Conservative, Saskatoon—Humboldt, SK]

Okay, so if I feel I'm not being informed, can I go to the work committee and the safety officer and say, “You've got to give me a briefing on x, y, and z”?

[Jeff Labonté]

About being informed, anybody who gets on an aircraft heading to one of those platforms has to go through a mandatory training program before getting on the helicopter or the boat, even visitors. If you and I go as visitors, we will go through a mandatory briefing before we even get on the vehicle.

If I'm a worker who travels regularly, there are regularized updated briefings as they go through and go on. Then there's sort of the regular literature and the materials you'll find in the workplace that are distributed to workers. Then there's a dialogue through the committee structure that allows workers in the workplace to continue to be in constant discussion and dialogue about what some of the issues are, and if there are concerns, allows those concerns to be expressed and dealt with before they become issues and before they become hazards.

Then in the instance that is fairly extreme when there is something that could be deemed or thought to be dangerous by a worker, the worker has the right to refuse to engage in that particular activity.

You would expect, and I think practice demonstrates, that it's a pretty powerful right and one that you wouldn't utilize if you hadn't gone through due diligence, informed, taken steps, and believed that you were trying to make sure that your workplace remains safe. Certainly the experience as it kind of unfolds is very dynamic; it's fairly ongoing and it's something that a lot of time and effort is put into. There are very practical, as you said, ways: mandatory training, mandatory experience, and specific tasks and techniques that have to be managed. There are committees that can review things and appeal mechanisms. There's a whole suite of things.

[Bradley Trost, Conservative, Saskatoon—Humboldt, SK]

If I'm summarizing this correctly, as much as people such as the chief safety officer and the worker committees, etc., have the duty to enforce these three rights, if I'm the individual employee, I actually have the ability to enforce these three rights for myself as well.

[Jeff Labonté]

Even more so, there's an expectation that it's part of your responsibility. The responsibilities don't fall only to the operator, only to the board; they fall to the worker, to the worker's union, his labour group, to all of the parties who visit the platform. It's everyone's responsibility. That's part of what this bill moves for and what some of the aspects are, to just talk about a safety culture, a culture in which safety is part and parcel of everyone's mindset at every aspect and at every turn, and in doing so, it requires active engagement of all parties.

[The Chair, Conservative, Leon Benoit]

Thank you, Mr. Trost.

Mr. Julian, you have about two minutes for questions and answers.

[Peter Julian, NDP, Burnaby—New Westminster, BC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair. That's very generous of you.

I'm going to take the two minutes to go over two questions that have come up, which I don't think have been fully answered. Hopefully, you can help us with that.

The first is Mr. Cleary's question around why an independent safety regulator was not put into the bill. Nova Scotia called for it and Newfoundland called for it. We really need an explanation as to why the federal government refused to accept what were clear recommendations from those two provinces.

The other thing that's very helpful for us to know, because we've had contradictions between Bill C-4 and Bill C-5, is to what extent the two ministries are actually working together so that Bill C-4 doesn't destroy any of the benefits that are in Bill C-5. If you could answer those two questions, that would be very helpful for us.

[The Chair, Conservative, Leon Benoit]

I know that you've had these questions asked before. You have a whole minute to answer them again.

[Jeff Labonté]

On Wells' recommendation 29, the boards and the government have moved forward with structuring the boards and the responsibilities so that safety remains a priority. I've spoken to the role of the chief safety officer, some of the authorities the safety officer has, some of the design of the unit within the board itself, and certainly, the conflict that has been suggested here is one that doesn't exist in practice. Certainly, the legislative changes that are proposed here will further the independence of the safety officer. We believe that the process and the 28 other recommendations that have been pursued and implemented are—