Before I begin this afternoon, I want to send out to my good friend Jim Lamontagne a very, very happy birthday greeting here from the Ontario Legislature. Have a good one, Jim.

This is a very important bill. We understand that. I think it’s also a time when we can really reflect on the true risk, the true tragedies that happen in our workplaces. We can reflect on this bill that I feel comes so short when it comes to truly protecting workers who put their lives at risk in the workplace.

We heard from the member from Thunder Bay–Superior North this week who talked about two snowplow drivers who were killed just this week doing their job keeping our roads safe for us to drive. A transport driver was also killed just doing their job; inadequate training was cited as the cause. I’d also have to say that we now have other workers who suffer fatal injuries. Very, very recently, two workers were killed. One was killed in Bowmanville, and another was just recently killed at work in Aylmer. There are not enough words to express what a tragic occurrence this is for families, for children, for mothers and fathers to have a loved one go to work, and you expect them to come home safe at the end of the day, and they die on the job. We cannot do enough to protect these workers. That’s why, really, I feel this bill comes up so short when we look at how many Ontarians are losing their lives or are being injured in the workplace. Why aren’t we doing more? Why is this bill really just tinkering around the edges when we could be doing so much more to make workplaces truly safe for workers?

There are some schedules in here and there’s some talk, but there really isn’t a clear, ambitious plan that’s here that will prevent workers from dying. We know that there are laws on the books, but what we also hear is that these are rarely enforced and that inspections have gone down. These are the kinds of things that we need when there’s existing legislation and existing regulation that—even that is not being adequately enforced to protect workers. We know, without that kind of enforcement, workers, sadly, will continue to die in the workplace.

For me and for so many families, the families that I’ve just discussed, Bill 79 could actually be called too little, too late, because for workers who are injured, for families that have lost loved ones, these measures here will do nothing to compensate for their loss and will do very, very little for future workers who are being injured in the workplace.

The labour movement, as we all know, has such a long and strong history of pushing for regulations and pushing for laws to keep workers safe in their workplace, and unions have been at the forefront of that, the labour movement has been at the forefront of that. One of the things that we say in the labour movement is, “Mourn the dead, and fight for the living.” That’s what we should be doing with a piece of legislation like this. We need to make sure. We never want to have these tragedies happen in the workplace, and we need laws that really seem to take this seriously, that are really there, with ambitious, proactive legislation to protect workers.

April 28 in Ontario and across Canada, and actually, in countries across the world, is the National Day of Mourning. This is the day that is celebrated—if it can be called “celebrated”—in recognition of workers who were killed or have been injured on the job and workers not just who have been injured on the job but who suffer long-standing health consequences of the kinds of exposures that they have in the workplace.

I just really very briefly want to talk about the history of the Workers’ Day of Mourning. It was started by two labour activists—not surprising—who were driving in April 1983 and they saw a funeral procession for a firefighter who had been killed in the line of duty. They thought that that was exceptionally wonderful, but they also worried that workers also needed to have similar acknowledgement and recognition of the losses that they suffered. So members of the United Steelworkers in Elliot Lake started to move towards creating a workers’ remembrance day, particularly for uranium miners who had succumbed to exposures in the mine. We heard a lot of this from our member from Sudbury, who talked about the kinds of exposures that mining workers have experienced, particularly in his riding.

The history goes back to acknowledging that workers, when they go to work, really are risking their lives. So this day was dedicated by the Canadian Labour Congress in 1983, and then in 1990, this became a national day of observance with the passing of the Workers Mourning Day Act. It was officially the National Day of Mourning for workers killed or injured in the workplace, an official Workers’ Day of Mourning.

It’s interesting to note that this acknowledgement has spread around the world. There is a gentleman, an activist in my riding—or in Hamilton—named Ed Thomas. He was a member of Local 5167 and he wrote a book cataloguing all of the Day of Mourning injured workers monuments around the world. While this started in Canada, this is a phenomenon that has spread around the world and it’s something that we need to make sure all of us, on October 28, are acknowledging.

Interjection.

During my time as the critic for community safety and correctional services, I worked alongside firefighters to make a number of changes, like changes that ensured survivor benefits would be protected when their partners died from occupational disease. That was originally called Bill 98, and the government of the day took that, put it into government legislation and fixed that problem. I’ve been working with them since the beginning—since I was first elected.

Right now, we recognize 17 cancers connected to the work of being a firefighter. Pancreatic and thyroid have yet to be added formally. We were hoping to see it in this bill. The government announcements and whatnot—that’s good. We hope they will follow through with that. Of course, we support that, but, again, it’s reassuring when we see it in writing, and until that happens, I will not only support it, I will continue to chase it.