Commentary on Paul Demers’ Report on Occupational Cancer in Ontario

        Early this year Paul Demers issued his anticipated report Using Scientific Evidence and Principles to Help determine the Work-Relatedness of Cancer.   Ontario’s Ministry of Labour, Training and Skills Development commissioned the report.  It provides critically important insights into what Paul Demers says is “the extremely large gap between the estimated burden of occupational cancer and submitted claims” to Ontario’s Workplace Safety and Insurance Board (WSIB).  These insights are damnable.  They highlight the fact that the seriousness of the problem of occupational cancer in Ontario is greatly underappreciated.

        A large portion of the blame for this extremely large gap cited by Demers lies with the Ontario’s servile medical profession.  Specifically, his report stresses that medical students in this country receive little training in occupational health.  The result is a serious lack of detection and reporting by medical professionals of patients having occupational or work-related diseases. 

       Demers correctly asserts that improvements in this training would increase the number of workers being compensated for occupational diseases.  Improvements in training would specifically end the current situation where the onus of recognition of when a patient’s disease is occupational in nature effectively falls on the patient meaning the afflicted worker.  In view of this, it is little wonder that on average in Ontario there are only about 170 allowed WSIB claims for cancer annually and a large majority are asbestos related, according to Demers.

       The WSIB shares a lot of the blame for this large gap between the estimated burden of occupational cancer and the number of claims filed at the WSIB for it.  The WSIB facilitated this gap over time by reducing its internal scientific capacity to address occupational disease issues.  Paul Demers points out that the WSIB has no research capacity in this regard making the WSIB incapable of investigating the problem of cancer in high risk industries.  The WSIB is likewise incapable of investigating occupational disease clusters like those exposed at a General Electric plant in Peterborough and in the rubber industry in Kitchener-Waterloo.   It also turned a blind eye to a cancer cluster in a closed GM plant in St. Catharines.

       The WSIB similarly deserves a failing grade because it almost always focuses on establishing whether a single carcinogen is the cause of a worker’s cancer disregarding the possible impact of exposures to multiple carcinogens.  Demers highlights this by correctly emphasizing that exposure to multiple carcinogens can have a synergistic effect.  This results in a greater effect on a worker than the sum of the solitary effects of the exposure to each carcinogen.  This is so important because, as he notes, workers are rarely exposed to just one workplace carcinogen.  The cluster at the General Electric plant in Peterborough made this very clear.

        The cumulative outcome of these failures by the medical profession and the WSIB is a self-induced blindness to reality about occupational cancer in Ontario.  Cancers that are occupational in nature are not being recognized as occupational in nature on a vast scale as a result.  Untold numbers of Ontario workers have died and continue to die from cancer that is occupational in nature without knowing it and being compensated for it.

       Yet, despite this, the Occupational Cancer Research Centre, which Paul Demers is associated with, estimates that approximately 3000 cancers are diagnosed per year in Ontario due to exposure to sixteen of the most well known carcinogens.  The number of claims for occupational cancer have dramatically increased since 2005.  The statistics now show that over twice as many Ontario workers die from occupational cancers as from traumatic injuries.

        These statistics might lead to a conclusion that the situation is in fact improving with respect to workers being compensated for occupational cancer.  But, to the contrary, this report’s revelations constitute abundant reason to believe the problem of workers dying due to occupational cancer is getting worse.  The likelihood of this alone indicates that the WSIB has abysmally failed workers in Ontario who have had and continue to have occupational cancer.  There should be outrage across Ontario in response.

       There is yet another big reason why there should be outrage.  This reason is not addressed in Demers’ report.  Namely, the huge failure to compensate the victims of occupational cancer in Ontario through the WSIB means that the enormous costs associated with their illnesses is wrongly being born by Ontario’s healthcare system.  In other words, Ontario’s taxpayers are bearing these costs not the corporations responsible for workers developing occupational cancer due to their exposure to workplace carcinogens.  These corporations have effectively been getting away with murder for decades with the taxpaying public picking up the tab.

        Paul Demers’ report on occupational cancer in Ontario should make it clear that this must be stopped and stopped in no uncertain terms.  The corporations who bear responsibility for the illnesses and deaths of countless workers due to occupational cancer in Ontario must be made to pay the costs for it.  The WSIB’s negligence must end by forcing it to do whatever is required to make this happen.

Bruce R. Allen is a paralegal based in St. Catharines, Ontario.