Examination of Historical Cases in Ohs

Examination of Historical Cases in OHS

The modern day state of occupational health and safety is such that we now have, in all jurisdictions in Canada and in most developed countries of the world OHS legislation. Usually, this legislation clearly identifies the duties of workplace parties, particularly the employer and the powers of external government agencies that enforce the legislation.

All provinces and territories have OHS legislation. An example of OHS legislation is the Occupational Health and Safety Act (Ontario), popularly referred to as the "green book". Federally governed workplaces are under Canada Labour Code Part 2. In addition to jurisdiction specific OHS legislation, all provinces and territories in Canada have workers' compensation legislation. While some provinces such as British Columbia and the Yukon have a fused OHS and workers' compensation management, others like Ontario have these roles divided between two government departments or entities. In Ontario, the Ministry of Labour manages OHS (the Occupational Health and Safety Act) and the workers' compensation (Workplace Safety and Insurance Act) is managed by the Workplace Safety and Insurance Board (WSIB).

A logical way to think about the Occupational Health and Safety Act and the Workers' Compensation Act is that the OHS Act is meant to ensure prevention of accident, injuries, illnesses and death in the workplace while the Workers' Compensation Act is meant to look after the well being of injured workers and the families of dead workers. Consequently, not only do workers enjoy a statutory protection against injuries and illnesses at work; today, they also have access to a "no fault" compensation system if injured at work or in the course of employment.

As impressive as that is, two things should be noted. First, early 19th century workers had little to no statutory protection on the two counts discussed above. Second, the availability of OHS and workers' compensation legislation does not mean workers are fully as protected as they ought to be in today's workplaces in Canada. While we celebrate what we have been able to accomplish, we should not forget that a lot more still needs to be done to ensure fatalities and serious injuries in Canadian workplaces are a thing of the past.

In the early 19th century, the only recourse available to workers after being injured or to their families upon workplace death was to bring a lawsuit against the employer. As you will see later in this module, even though some of the lawsuits appear to be straightforward and correct on points of law for which a worker should have expected to win and be awarded damages, most were unsuccessful at the courts due to various deficiencies which shall be discussed later.

Even though common law seeks to do justice, as discussed in Module 1, it is an adversarial system which