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Off The Fence: WCB overhaul needed to stop adding insult to injury
Susan Thompson
for Smoky River Express
On Oct. 21, a gunman took several hostages at the Worker’s Compensation Board (WCB) office in Edmonton. One of those hostages was relatively local. Randy Morrow, a WCB claimant from Peace River, was the only hostage who wasn’t a WCB employee.
The gunman, Patrick Clayton, faces 18 charges including unlawful confinement and pointing a firearm.
No one should condone this desperate man’s actions. Violence is never the answer, even though no one was hurt.
However, it seems Clayton’s frustration with the system has struck a chord in this province. People immediately spoke up to criticize the WCB itself.
There is clearly a massive amount of dissatisfaction with the WCB. If there wasn’t, we wouldn’t be witnessing the sudden, remarkable empathy of the general populace for a hostage-taker with a gun.
Apparently, too many people who have been through the maze of that dehumanizing, unfeeling bureaucracy themselves.
Of course, there are also those who say WCB claimants are simply whining, or milking it.
This is, after all, a province that puts a huge emphasis on working hard and pulling ourselves up by our own bootstraps.
It’s also easy to feel invincible, especially when you’re young and relatively healthy.
All of that changes, however, if you get injured on the job. Suddenly, the body you need to work doesn’t work. It doesn’t matter if you want to work. If work becomes painful, you can’t. It’s not a question of being whiny or lazy. It’s a physical issue.
Then there are those who say injured people shouldn’t be doing unsafe things in the first place. Blaming the victim, in other words.
Certainly there are many accidents than could be prevented. Still, sometimes workers are asked to do unsafe things by superiors or bosses, and do them because they fear losing their job if they don’t. Companies don’t all necessarily put the same priority on safety. Some can get cavalier with worker’s lives when deadlines loom, and human error is always a factor too.
And sometimes accidents simply happen. We’ve all fallen, bumped our heads, or been distracted for that split second it takes to get hurt.
There are also injuries from all kinds of things that are simply the result of time, like repetitive stress that causes carpal tunnel or herniated discs.
Injuries are not only painful, they can be hard to deal with emotionally. Yet too many injured people must jump through impossible hoops to get the care they need and support themselves, and their families, as they try to heal.
When an injury happens on the job, we all expect the WCB to be there for us. But instead of feeling helped, many people feel as though they were used up until they got hurt or couldn’t work anymore, and then abandoned.
My husband went through two years of pain with a herniated disc. He’s a healthy guy and tries to be safe. His injury is a common injury that can happen thanks to simple hard work, and it can be extremely painful and in some cases require surgery. Depending on how bad it is, it also makes it hard to walk upright, let alone lift things. It was hard for him to work at all in his physically demanding job. If he hadn’t healed, I don’t know what we’d have done.
Too many other people are in the same or similar situations and can’t get help.
Now our own MLA and Employment Minister Hector Goudreau says there is no overhaul planned of the WCB, even though the recent hostage-taking has clearly shown there is widespread discontent with the board.
The government itself appointed two panels to make recommendations on how to improve the WCB back in 2000. Those panels recommended that the government set up a tribunal to review long-standing contentious claims. There was even legislation passed in 2002 to set up a tribunal.
Has one been set up yet? No.
Worse, that was only one of 59 recommendations on things to do to improve the WCB the government’s own panels made. Since there hasn’t been any action yet on that one small recommendation, I doubt we can hold our breath and expect any action on the others.
Goudreau has now said as much. Although he has talked to the chairman and chief executive of the WCB to make sure the board is “heading in the right direction,” that’s all he’s done and all he’s planning on doing.
“Does that mean we’re going to revamp the WCB? I don’t think we’re going to go that far. Does it mean we’re going to change the process? Probably not,” he told reporters at when the legislature opened for its fall sitting on Oct. 26.
He also said there was no point to overhauling the board because you can’t please everyone.
“There are individuals, that no matter what decisions will be taken by the WCB, will never be happy,” Goudreau said.
It’s true no matter what you do someone won’t like it. But by that same logic, why make any decisions about anything?
The point isn’t to try to make every single person happy with the WCB. The point is to change the WCB so more people are happy with it.
Right now, it seems the voices of those who feel the board has been unfair are outnumbering the ones who feel the board is doing a good job.
You’d think that would be enough to prompt the government to take some real action.
Instead, the answer to the province’s injured is simply, too bad for you.
That’s just adding insult to injury.
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