Members of organized labour, health and safety representatives, community leaders and even retirees came together in Sudbury Monday to officially mark Canada's National Day of Mourning for workers who have been killed or injured in the workplace.
Speakers at the Sudbury event noted that not all injuries are physical; that mental injuries can also occur in the workplace.
The event was hosted by the Sudbury and District Labour Council in partnership with the Centre for Research in Occupational Safety and Health (CROSH) at the Fraser Auditorium at Laurentian University.
Jessica Montgomery, president of the labour council, reminded the audience that April 28 is the day the labour community mourns for the dead and fights for the living.
"Every year, too many workers leave for work and never return home,” she added.
Over the years, the labour community in Sudbury and many other parts of Northern Ontario have focused on the deaths and injuries in the mining industry and other resource industries.
“This year, the Canadian Labour Congress has asked us to turn our attention to the injuries we don’t always see — the invisible ones. Heat stress, chronic and traumatic mental stress, burnout, trauma — injuries that leave no visible scar but leave deep marks all the same," said Montgomery.
She said safety is more than just checking the boxes and following the rules. She said safety has to become a state of mind.
"Real safety starts when people feel safe to speak up when someone says 'this doesn't feel right' … because that's psychological safety and must be the root of every strong safety culture, because when people are afraid to speak out, they're not just quiet, they're at risk, often alongside of their co-workers," said Montgomery.
Nickel Belt MPP France Gélinas told the audience another example of extreme workplace stress is the growing number of nurses, and other health care workers, who face anxiety and burnout because there are not enough people to do the job in hospitals and long-term care homes.
She said that is because the ratio of nurses to patients is not high enough to let the people properly care for their patients. Gélinas said it causes significant upset for health-care workers.
"How many times do you look in the parking lot, even here in Sudbury, and in many big hospitals where you see health-care workers crying in their cars? Why? Because they want to care for us, and there aren't enough of them to be able to meet their needs," she said.
Another speaker at the event was Dr. Sandra Dorman, a director at CROSH (the Centre for Research in Occupational Safety and Health at Laurentian University) where research is done into the many occupational illnesses and injuries that befall so many people every year.
Dorman commented on the many times people in the workplace are impacted by the things they see, hear and experience. She mentioned her father, a career police officer with the Ontario Provincial Police, who would often worry when she was a child about her riding her bike around town.
While Dorman said she never worried too much about her bicycle excursions but remembered her father commenting she might be more concerned if she only knew how many times police officers were at the scene when children on bicycles were killed or injured. She said that formed part of his workplace stress.
Dorman drew a parallel with conversations she had with iconic union leader Leo Gerard, former president of the United Steelworkers.
"Every year he would come up and he would say, you know, we worry about the workers, I mean, obviously that have been injured and died on the job, but there's still the other workers that were there when they died that have to go back the next day and live with that and their struggles, right?" Dorman recalled.
"And I know that it was his sort of lecturing around that that initiated the mining mental health study in 2015 which was the first of its kind, that tracked PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) in mine workers, and also looked at substance abuse in mine workers," said Dorman
Dorman said that miners, firefighters and police officers who witness critical incidents all have to deal with it because these are incidents that cause mental trauma for those who are there when critical incidents happen.
She said she knows there are times when people go though such incidents that they sit down afterwards with others to talk through it. Dorman said this can be meaningful and helpful for people.
"So having said all of that, I guess I would say there's still a lot that we can do to help people," said Dorman.
Also speaking out was Mike Squarzolo, president of the Sudbury Professional Firefighters Association, who said, like many others in his field, he has his own stories of workplace trauma and knows of many other stories of emergency workers having to cope with critical incidents.
"Today, I want to talk about the injuries we don't always see, the ones that aren't obvious in the moment, but show up years later,” Squarzolo said. “The invisible injuries, the toxic exposures that lead to cancer and the mental stress that leads to post-traumatic stress disorder, these are just as real, just as devastating and just as deadly.”
Squarzolo told the story of a colleague he knew well, who had to step down from his role in the firefighters' association because of PTSD.
It was a short time later, Squarzolo said he got a call from the chief advising the man had taken his own life.
"His death was recognized by WSIB as a result of his job. For us, it was a line of duty death," said Squarzolo.
"I had the honor and the heartbreak of planning his full-honors funeral. These illnesses don't always happen from one terrible moment. Sometimes they build slowly. Yet over time, one traumatic call after another, sometimes they show up years later.”
Psychology, medicine and science are catching up, said Squarzolo, but he quickly added that is not enough.
He said all the advances in science and psychology are not going to help unless those changes are recognized in law, and then adopted by employers.
Following the presentations in the auditorium the group took part in an outdoor wreathlaying ceremony in the courtyard, where the flags were lowered to half-staff and a moment of silence was held.
Len Gillis covers health care and mining for Sudbury.com.