Today’s blog includes an excerpt from an excellent editorial by Tom Sandborn about the death of Sam Fitzpatrick, a young worker who was killed while scaling rock in Toba Inlet in 2009. Tom Sandborn has been reporting on the Fitzpatrick case and the company involved, Peter Kiewit Sons ULC (“Kiewit”), for years. This excerpt includes his…
News & Views
Claim suppression – no more
“Claim suppression” involves any practice which discourages or prevents a worker from filing or pursuing a compensation claim for a work injury. In B.C., the Workers Compensation Act offers no protection to workers who may be disciplined or fired for filing a compensation claim. This is a deep concern for workers injured on the job, especially if they…
The Ombudsperson speaks out on WorkSafeBC
The Ombudsperson of B.C., Jay Chalke, has just issued an important report, “Severed Trust: Enabling WorkSafeBC to do the right thing when its mistakes hurt injured workers.” The report focuses on the tragic case of a cabinet-maker, Mr. Snider. Today, this blog belongs to Mr. Snider, the Ombudperson’s report and the issue of WorkSafe’s accountability to injured…
Dignity and fairness – a human rights approach to injured workers
In 2006, the United Nations published the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. This is not a sleeper U.N. Convention. Canada, as part of its commitment to the Convention, passed the Accessible Canada Act in June, 2019 and a few months ago, the B.C. government passed provincial Accessibility legislation. The B.C. law will be implemented…
The disability experience – whose life is it?
From most accounts, disabled people have made significant strides towards equality and inclusion. There is a line of improvement for “Persons with Disability”(PWD), from the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities in 2006 to “disabled rights” legislation in Canada in 2019. There is even a growing academic field of “disability studies” which explores…
Welcome to the Compensation Café!
Welcome to the “Compensation Café”. We have all had good conversations in cafés and lunchrooms & bars & coffee shops. My hope is that this virtual “Compensation Café” will provide space for good conversations about compensation issues for injured workers. The schedule is ambitious – a new blog each week for a year. Half of…