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The Current Transcript for May 10, 2017

Host: Anna Maria Tremonti

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Listen to the full episode

Prologue

[Music: Theme]

SOUNDCLIP

November 7^th, I received an email from the employer saying that my position was going to be outsourced to a management company because they couldn't accept my request for compassionate care leave.

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: Well, her story was all over the news yesterday—a single mother of four fired from her job at a small organization while away caring for a six-year-old son being treated for leukemia. Access to leave for compassionate care varies across the country. The Canadian Cancer Action Network says a family with a child with cancer goes into debt an average of $30,000 to $40,000 within months. In a nation where the government is extending leave for parents of newborns, do we as a society have an obligation to support those caring for older children? And if so, how do small independent businesses navigate all of that? We've got that discussion and debate in just a moment. Also today—

SOUNDCLIP

The captain told me to stay back. He knew because I would be emotional because I knew them. And he was right. I was. You can’t wipe tears out of your eyes when you’ve got a face mask on.

AMT: in the days after a massive fireball ripped through the Westray mine, rescue workers who descended into that hell cannot forget what they saw or what they fought for after—a new law that would hold business owners criminally responsible for the deaths of those killed on the job. All these years later, one case has seen one boss jailed. We're asking why the law is not being used much in an hour. And she is one of those journalists whose long articles are rich with ideas, emotions and stories of people you might not have heard of. And now Ariel Levy is writing about herself.

SOUNDCLIP

The second night I was in Mongolia, I went into labour and I gave birth to my son in my hotel room and for 10 minutes, I was somebody's mother.

AMT: The New Yorker’s Ariel Levy joins me for a candid discussion on life and loss and the thin line between the two in half an hour. But we begin with that message from the president: You're fired. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current.

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Why did Trump fire FBI director James Comey?

Guests: Mark Hosenball

SOUNDCLIP

Look, this is terrible. It makes me mildly nauseous to think that we might have had some impact on the election. But honestly, it wouldn't change the decision. Tell me what you would do. Would you speak or would you conceal? And I could be wrong, but we honestly made a decision between those two choices which even in hindsight—and this has been one of the world's most painful experiences—I would make the same decision.

AMT: Well, that is FBI director James Comey one week ago testifying in front of a Senate committee defending his decision to tell Congress about new developments in the Hillary Clinton e-mail investigation two weeks before Election Day in the US while being silent about a probe into contact between Russia and Donald Trump's campaign. And in a story full of shocking developments, another one yesterday, late yesterday—in an abrupt and unanticipated move, the White House announced James Comey has been fired for his role as FBI director effective immediately. Mark Hosenball is a national security correspondent with Reuters. He joins us from Washington, DC. Hello.

MARK HOSENBALL: Hello. How are you doing?

AMT: Are you getting whiplash?

MARK HOSENBALL: It's pretty strange. It's almost surreal.

AMT: Well, what reasons did the White House give for this decision?

MARK HOSENBALL: Well, the reasons that the White House gave, they put out a statement by the new deputy attorney general—who’s generally regarded as a guy of great integrity—basically saying that he thinks that Comey should be fired because Comey mishandled the Clinton revelations and in fact in effect was too mean to Clinton. Now given that when Comey came out with the Clinton revelations about her e-mails, that such revelations were cheered by Donald Trump, then the presidential candidate of the Republicans, it's very hard to believe. I mean the guy who wrote this memo, the deputy attorney general may believe it, but it's very hard to believe that that's really the reason underlying why Trump decided to sack Comey. Decided to sack Comey because Comey was too mean to Hillary Clinton? That just doesn't sound right. So therefore, people are at least speculating that there is a more sinister motive to the sacking of Comey, namely because Comey was leading an investigation into Trump and his associate’s dealings with Russia.

AMT: Well, let's just remember here. So far that scandal, the inquiry to try to get to the bottom of Russia's ties to the Trump campaign, it's pulled in Paul Manafort, one of the campaign managers who had to step aside; Roger Stone, a long-time confident; Carter Page, one of the campaign's early foreign policy advisers; Michael Flynn, who was forced out his national security adviser. Even the Attorney General Jeff Sessions recused himself from the rush inquiry because he didn't disclose that he'd met during the campaign with the Russian ambassador to the US. So what are you thinking? Is this inquiry going to stop?

MARK HOSENBALL: I don't think the inquiry is going to stop. It's going to be very hard to stop such an inquiry. By the same token, you know none of these people have been indicted for anything. There’s nobody facing criminal charges as a result of this. Certainly Roger Stone lost his job. Manafort lost his job but probably not for that reason. Carter Page seems to be just a very bizarre individual. Roger Stone, I've actually been looking at and I actually don't think he really was involved with the Russians in any significant way. So I mean this is all still in a pretty early stage of these investigations of the Russia connection. And arguably by intervening in this way, maybe Trump is trying seriously to disrupt those investigations. Their investigations as well by Congress, I think the Senate Intelligence Committee well is conducting a very slow investigation, is conducting a serious investigation. The House Intelligence Committee's investigation was seriously disrupted. But we're a long way from actually any results in these investigations. So certainly I would say that the firing of Comey is going to further disrupt and delay any results if there's any substance of this. I mean it is pretty clear that some of these characters had connections with Russia, whether they were connections that rose to a criminal level and whether there is any proof ultimately that Trump himself is under the control of the Russians or subject to Russian influence or somehow collaborating with the Russians to sabotage Hillary Clinton's campaign, we don't have real proof of that.

AMT: Well, no, but that’s what the inquiry was trying to look into, was it not?

MARK HOSENBALL: Correct.

AMT: Okay. So let me—I've been looking at the tweets from RealDonaldTrump since this happened and there's two. Well, there’s several. But one he says: “The Russia Trump collusion story is a total hoax. When will this taxpayer funded charade end?” Another one is: “Director Clapper reiterated what everybody including the fake media already knows. There is no evidence of collusion with Russia and Trump.” What do you make of that, Mark?

MARK HOSENBALL: Well, first of all I think Trump actually put those out before the sacking of Comey was announced. This is the Trump line. That doesn't mean that it’s true. Trump has often said things that are untrue. But by the same token, the investigators have not yet produced conclusive proof or even you know very convincing proof, evidence that Trump himself anyway was categorically collaborating with the Russians to sabotage the Clinton campaign through hacking or whatever. So you know there's a long way to go in these investigations. And as I say, at the very least, the sacking of Comey disrupts those investigations though it doesn't necessarily stop them.

AMT: Could this backfire on the Trump administration?

MARK HOSENBALL: Absolutely. I mean the first reaction I got from people inside the government who were shocked by this, who should have known about it but didn't, was this could backfire very nastily on the Trump administration. And it could even licence Comey to go out and start criticizing Trump more aggressively, although I think he'd probably be very careful about disclosing classified information, but he could certainly voice his opinion very strongly if he feels that he was badly wronged. And I don't think that would reflect terribly well on Trump.

AMT: To be continued. Mark Hosenball, thank you.

MARK HOSENBALL: It’s weird.

AMT: Yeah. Thank you. That is Mark Hosenball. He's the national security correspondent with Reuters. He joins us from Washington, DC. So we're going to move from a debate over the politics of a president right now to one over policy for parents.

Back To Top »

Compassionate leave for parents with critically-ill kids seriously flawed, says expert

Guests: Debbie Dean, Kate Bezanson, Corinne Pohlmann

SOUNDCLIP

Most Albertans, most Canadians would understand that nobody should be in this position. Just because the employer, their argument is they've done something legal here, in terms of the employment standards, unfortunately what they have done is legal which needs to change. But I don't think that most people on the street would think that minimum standard is what should be met here. It's not a human response.

AMT: Well, that is Amanda Jensen and you may have heard her story on the news yesterday. Her six-year-old son Jake was diagnosed with leukemia. Her employer was initially understanding and supportive. She was granted compassionate care leave from her job at the Lethbridge Lodging Association. A month later, they terminated her unpaid leave and employment. Legally Ms. Jensen's termination may not be that unusual. The federal government allows employees to take time away from work to care for a critically ill child. That's an unpaid job protected leave of absence. But the parametres differ province to province. Debbie Dean has experienced this firsthand. Her son Cameron was diagnosed with leukemia when he was three years old. Debbie Dean’s in Newmarket, Ontario. Hi.

DEBBIE DEAN: Hi. How are you?

AMT: Well, I'm well. Thanks. How did your employer treat you when Cameron was first diagnosed?

DEBBIE DEAN: When he was first diagnosed, they were extremely understanding. They were very accommodating. They let me be with him in the hospital for the first month, no questions asked and were very supportive, gave me the option. We need to do something. Your desk can't sit empty. Do you want to go on a sort of maternity leave concept or do you want to work part time? So I was in a position with Cameron that there was definitely some very tough days, but there was also some days where he was literally watching YouTube. So I was fortunate for myself but I was able to work part time.

AMT: What kind of work were you doing?

DEBBIE DEAN: In sales for a really large multinational corporation at the time. So I was fortunate that I could work remotely and not necessarily be in the office full time.

AMT: And then management changed. What happened?

DEBBIE DEAN: Management changed and time went on. It's a long process. For boys with leukemia it's three and a half years of treatment. They told me basically they needed me to come back full time and I felt like I was working full time hours anyway, so that wasn't going to be an issue. But they wanted me to sign a document indicating that I would be in the office for office hours. So either 8:30 to 5:00 or 9 to 5:30 was the requirement which was going to be challenging because my son still had a compromised immune system. Everybody at his school is wonderful. I know within minutes if somebody has the chicken pox. But the before and after school program, there's people bussed in and to jeopardize his health just so that my body was in a chair didn't seem fair.

AMT: How many jobs did you go through, Debbie?

DEBBIE DEAN: He’s still under treatment. I'm on my fourth job right now.

AMT: And the job now you do is commission sales?

DEBBIE DEAN: It's a small base commission sale. So you know the company I work for right now has been extremely understanding. They knew going in the circumstances around my son. We all thought he was stable at the time. He has suffered a couple of relapses and one while I was with this current company. So I’ve probably been out of the office, I would say a total of 12 weeks since joining them two years ago. And they have been wonderful. They've paid me throughout. Fortunately I still generated the sales basically on a draw system. So I have been fortunate that I found a very understanding company but it's taken quite a few companies to actually get to that point.

AMT: Has Cameron's illness affected his father's job the same way?

DEBBIE DEAN: His father is self-employed so he wasn't capable of having that critically ill child benefit. His business has suffered as well. It's difficult to focus on two priorities at the same and obviously your child is always going to win out on the scheme of things.

AMT: And just to clarify: you're separated right now. Am I right?

DEBBIE DEAN: We are separated at this point, yes.

AMT: So how hard has this been financially for you and emotionally?

DEBBIE DEAN: Financially, we're still digging out. We seem to just start emerging out of debt and you know something else comes up. So he's had two relapses. It will take a few years to dig out of where we are. We're looking at selling the house that we co-own together just really to pay off some of the financial debt. And emotionally, you know a lot of people go into post-traumatic stress disorder. A lot of people are medicated coming out of this. It's a very emotional rollercoaster. You have great days where you just appreciate hearing your son laugh and you have days where you're just praying that he's going to pull through. So you run the gamut. I couldn't wish this on anybody.

AMT: And how is Cameron?

DEBBIE DEAN: Cameron’s doing really well at this point. He did a clinical trial down in Philadelphia using immunotherapy. So it’s the leading technology out there right now, using the human's own immune system to battle the disease and for him so far, it's been quite successful. We're very optimistic.

AMT: Debbie, thank you for sharing your story with us.

DEBBIE DEAN: You're welcome.

AMT: Debbie Dean—her son Cameron diagnosed with leukemia when he was three years old. She joined us from Newmarket, Ontario. Well, lots to talk about here. Kate Bezanson is Brock University's sociology chair and an expert on social policy and family issues. She's joining us from St. Catharines, Ontario. Corinne Pohlmann is the senior vice president of the Canadian Federation of Independent Businesses. She's in Ottawa. Hello to both of you.

BOTH VOICES: Good morning.

AMT: Kate, let's start with you. Under the rules, how much time can parents take off to care for a child with serious illness? Federal rule?

KATE BEZANSON: Well, the federal rules are a bit complicated. There are several benefits associated with EI. But the most commonly used one is the provision for parental leave, for leave rather for parents with children with severe illnesses.

AMT: And that’s what? Is that 35 weeks?

KATE BEZANSON: That is 35 weeks. The problem is of course, with these kinds of policies is they’re subject to whatever regulations provinces have put into effect and many provinces have not updated their employment standards legislation to allow for job-protected leave at the provincial level. So you might be able to access the EI benefit itself, but you might not be able to get job protected leave at the provincial level.

AMT: Corinne. Okay. So let me just go to Corinne. What's the reality for small businesses when it comes to accommodating parents who have a child with a serious illness?

CORINNE POHLMANN: I think for the most part, many small businesses try to do what they can to accommodate. Often in a small business, there are maybe five, 10 employees. You know all your employees. They're like family. They may even be family. And they're going to do everything they can to accommodate. But they also have to balance that with making sure the business stays afloat and making sure that all the employees who also may have other issues are also being recognized.

AMT: So is it possible for every small business?

CORINNE POHLMANN: No. It's simply not possible for every small business, especially when there's a lot of uncertainty around how long a key employee might be away. And so I think often like I said, they try to negotiate and work through the issue with that employee because it's in their best interest to make sure that that employee’s able to come back because it's an important part of that business. So they'll do what they can but it can be difficult at times to accommodate.

AMT: So do we as a society have an obligation to confront this and to help parents? Kate Bezanson, what's your view on that?

KATE BEZANSON: I guess I would say if we're thinking about—and thinking especially about Debbie Dean’s story that we just heard and Amanda Jensen's story in Alberta—I think there are really four issues that we need to pay attention to in thinking about leaves and caregiving in Canada. And the first is that Canada really has no coherent family policy and this has significant implications, especially for vulnerable populations who are trying to access leave. I would say that this variation in policies between provinces and territories can have the effect that where you live can determine what you get. And of course, this also has implications especially for women who are awesome caregivers and often as a result of their caregiving, work in part-time, casual or non-standard work and that means that they may not qualify for EI leave such as compassionate care.

AMT: So what do you see as a solution?

KATE BEZANSON: I don't think there's necessarily an easy solution. I think that caregiving is complex and it's often gendered. I think that there are definitely roles for families, for social services and programs, significant roles for employers and for communities. But I think that we need to remember that EI leaves are only one part of a much larger care spectrum and we have an emerging crisis of care in Canada that will only intensify over the next 30 years as we see a demographic shift occur.

AMT: Well, let me pick up on that with Corinne because we're talking about children right now and as children get older, there's parental leave obviously for newborns. What about compassionate care for even the elderly? Corinne, how do you see the need for changes there on a government level?

CORINNE POHLMANN: Well, I think all of these leaves become important and we have to be cautious about trying to overregulate as well because the problem once you start regulating a certain amount of time that you can allow employees to go off, you start restricting the flexibility that could be there in the first place. And what we find often is sometimes once regulations come into place, employers then just sort of gravitate towards whatever the regulation says and no more, no less. That can be a challenge as well. So we're always very cautious about governments when they move down these paths to really think about what they're doing because it may not always be in the best interest to really over regulate it in such a way that the flexibility that may be there now may suddenly disappear because the employer feels like they have to stick to what the rules say.

AMT: So how can small businesses retain valuable employees who may have to deal with an ill child, Corinne?

CORINNE POHLMANN: Well, I think from a smaller business perspective, they're going to do what they can to balance it and they have to take into account the fact that if they only have six employees and one’s away, everybody else has to sort of take up the slack and think about that. And I think they're going to do what they can to accommodate. It's really a matter of understanding the situation that the person is in, making sure that they're communicating more openly and I think that's something that is a benefit of a smaller company that they're able to do that and hopefully work through the situation that can be tough on everybody.

AMT: We're almost out of time but Kate Bezanson, are you looking for policies at a federal level that just aren't there yet?

KATE BEZANSON: I think actually—well, picking up on what Corinne just said, I actually think that we need a stronger regulatory approach rather than a more flexible regulatory approach. And I say that because we have for example an employment standards code in Alberta—which is where Amanda Jensen is from—that has an eligibility threshold that requires continuous work for the same employer to qualify for leave. This is not the case for example in British Columbia. And that's likely not compliant with the provincial human rights legislation or with the Charter.

AMT: So you're saying it goes beyond a federal, that provincial has to harmonize.

KATE BEZANSON: I think it goes beyond and I actually think when we think about leave, we really are talking about the provinces and the territories. The federal government's role is essentially around EI. But above and beyond that, unless you’re a federally regulated workplace, you're not governed by the Canada labour code. So it's where you live is what you get.

AMT: Okay. We have to leave it there. We are out of time. Thank you, both of you.

KATE BEZANSON: Thank you so much.

AMT: It's something to keep on going with this discussion. Kate Bezanson, Brock University’s sociology chair. She's an expert on social policy and family issues. Corinne Pohlmann, senior vice president of the Canadian Federation of Independent Businesses. If you're a parent or an employer who's been on either side of this issue, let us know. Send us an e-mail by going to our website, www.cbc.ca/thecurrent. Tweet us @thecurrentCBC or find us on Facebook to comment. Stay with us. The news is next. This is The Current on Radio One.

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'For 10 minutes I was somebody's mother': Ariel Levy explores life and loss in memoir

Guests: Ariel Levy

AMT: Hello. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti and you're listening to The Current.

[Music: Theme]

AMT: Still to come, in 1992, the explosion that rocked a mine in Pictou County, Nova Scotia and took the lives of 26 miners inspired legislation aimed at holding employers criminally responsible when workers die on the job. Twenty-five years later, we are looking at how effective that legislation has or has not been and the legacy of the Westray mine disaster. But first, Ariel Levy lost her child within 10 minutes of giving birth to him in a hotel room in Mongolia. She's chronicled what that taught her in a new memoir on love and loss. Five years ago, Ariel Levy's life was firmly on track. She was a staff writer with the fabled New Yorker magazine. She owned a home with a beautiful garden on an island. She was in her second trimester of pregnancy and married to a woman she loved. And then everything changed. She was in Mongolia researching a story about that country's booming economy and how it was impacting women when personal tragedy struck. Ariel Levy has just released a memoir about this time in her life. It's called The Rules Do Not Apply and she joins me from our studio in New York City. Hello.

ARIEL LEVY: Thanks for having me.

AMT: If someone had asked you six or seven years ago what your life would look like now, how would you have described it?

ARIEL LEVY: You know, I think that this would have been one good option actually. I mean I think that up until the point where I got pregnant, I had spent a long time really tormented about whether to have children. I really felt on the one hand like it would be the greatest adventure there could be. And on the other hand, that it was a trap and that once you became a mother, your path would calcify in front of you and all your decisions would be made for you and you would lose the status of protagonist in your own life. So I was really ambivalent about that. And when I finally decided that I wanted to be a mother and I got pregnant right away when I was 37, I was ecstatic and suddenly unambivalent. But since that's not what ended up happening, since that baby died, you asked what I would have wanted my life to look like, what I thought my life would look like, this is one good option. That I wouldn't have a child and that I would have a lot of freedom and independence.

AMT: And before everything changed, you write that “it was unseemly how successful I felt.” Why do you describe it like that?

ARIEL LEVY: I think that I just felt like everything was going my way. Like for example, I just mentioned that I got pregnant so easily. I mean many of my friends by the time I got pregnant, many of my friends had struggled mightily to try to have children because it’s a generational trend among privileged people, that women are waiting to have kids until it's so late that the body isn't cooperative. It's just a design flaw that at this moment when you're finally feeling like you're mature enough to be able to take care of someone else, your body says I'm out. So I don't know if I'd use the word smug, but I just felt like the cat who ate the canary. I just felt like I had my career and I had managed to get pregnant at the last minute without any trouble. And I just felt like I had it all.

AMT: Almost in the parlance of having it all, having everything, right?

ARIEL LEVY: Yeah. It just felt like there was nothing I wanted that I wasn't getting.

AMT: What happened in Mongolia?

ARIEL LEVY: Before I left, I wasn't particularly concerned because my doctor had said you know it's fine to fly until the third trimester which it is. But I was unlucky. The second night I was in Mongolia I went into labour and I gave birth to my son in my hotel room. And for 10 minutes, I was somebody's mother and that was both the most traumatic and also the most transcendent experience of my life. You know it's a profound thing to watch another human being come out of your body. And I knew as soon as he was born that this was going to be it, that we were only going to have that time together in the bathroom in Mongolia, that there was no way he was going to live.

AMT: Why were you so sure?

ARIEL LEVY: Because it was much too soon. It was much too soon.

AMT: He was 19 weeks.

ARIEL LEVY: I was only 19 weeks. Anywhere in the world if you give birth to a baby at 19 weeks, he's not going to live. And you would have known from looking at him. I mean he was perfect but he was tiny. I mean it was not going to happen. So that was that and the problem was of course that a switch flipped in my heart really and I experienced maternal love and soon thereafter, I realized that a switch had flipped in my body and I was lactating. I was producing milk for a baby who wasn't there. So when I got back to New York, I mean it was sort of an identity crisis. I felt in the deepest part of myself like a mother but I had no child. So this reality for me was invisible to the rest of the world and I found that almost unbearable.

AMT: And I want to talk about that, but before we do I'd like to ask more questions about those moments with him.

ARIEL LEVY: Sure. Sure.

AMT: Because you describe those moments you had with him, those few moments when he was alive as black magic.

ARIEL LEVY: Well, because I mean magic in the sense that we all know that women can brew up human beings in their body. But until you do it, until you watch one come out of you, it's sort of hard to imagine that reality in a real way. I mean for me anyway, when it actually happened, it did feel like magic. It did feel like I am some kind of a witch that I can do this. But black magic, because you know it was only 10 minutes and then he died. And then as a matter of fact, I could never get pregnant again after that. So black magic because of that.

AMT: Why did you take a picture of the baby?

ARIEL LEVY: Because the whole thing was so surreal that I was worried if I didn't take a picture of him, I would not believe it had happened, that I would think the whole thing was a kind of dream. That's one reason. And another reason is people who have children, I mean I see it all the time. My friends, you know they gaze at their children in awe and just think oh my god, you're so beautiful and you're so human. I can't believe I made you. And I felt that way and I knew, as I said, I knew we were only going to have this time together.

AMT: Do you still look at that picture?

ARIEL LEVY: Well, I rarely now but when I first got back, I mean I looked at it constantly. Constantly. It was one of the only things that felt real to me if that makes sense. I mean that reality trumped my regular reality so it was the only thing I had that felt true.

AMT: You write in great detail about the experience of giving birth, even about having to pull out the placenta on your own. You are alone in the room when this happens. Why did you share so many intimate details?

ARIEL LEVY: Because I think it's a matter of feminism. I think that the really profound experiences that women experience around menstruation, fertility, infertility, pregnancy, birth, the death of children, menopause—all that stuff that's just a fundamental part of being a human female animal—doesn't get spoken about very much. And it ought to because it's such a big part of the lives of half the human population.

AMT: And you found that when you started writing about this, people stopped you on the street. People wanted to talk about what happened to them.

ARIEL LEVY: Well, now since the book has come out, you know whenever I go do a reading, there's always at least one woman and I can spot her instantly and I know she's going to come up to me afterward and say I just lost a baby because women who've just lost a baby have this particular look. I certainly had it. They just look blown apart and mystified because there's very little—I don't know what to call it—cultural affirmation for the level of grief you experience when you lose a baby. I wouldn't have understood it before it happened to me. You know if someone had said oh, this woman had a miscarriage, this woman had a late term miscarriage or a stillbirth, I would've thought oh, that's too bad. But I would not have understood that what it felt like for the woman was that her child had died.

AMT: When you got back to New York, you were sitting on the couch you had picked out at a different time in your life. And I’ve got the quote here—you'd picked it out “when I was young, when I had no idea that all over the city, all over the world, there were people walking around sealed in their own universes of loss.” How did the grief you experienced change you as a writer, as an observer of others?

ARIEL LEVY: I don't know that it changed me as a writer, but I think until you experience the loss of someone you love, it's very hard to conceive of what an altered state grief is. No one I’d really loved had ever died, certainly not out of sequence, like a grandparent had died or something but no one where it just wasn't the plan. And my experience of that kind of grief was that you live in it. I felt like I was in a tunnel of grief and I kind of couldn't see outside of it and it's isolating because no one's in there with you. It's your reality. It's no one else's reality. And then eventually for me, grief—it went from like something I’d lived in to something that lived in me so that there will always be a place that hurts in me for that baby. But I don't walk around in an altered state mourning it anymore now, four years later.

AMT: And you don't think it changed your writing at all or how you see things. Are there not things you see—you just told me that when you're in a room at a reading, you can spot the woman whose lost the baby.

ARIEL LEVY: Well, I think it changed me as a person in many ways. I mean I think that for one thing, I was disabused of my illusion of control. And I'm grateful for that. I mean that was a worthwhile thing to have happened to me. I mean I'd trade that realization to have my son lived and have a four year old now obviously. But given that that's not up to me, I think it's a good thing to be disabused of your illusion of control. And I think that coming to understand that everybody doesn't get everything and that you can want something in the deepest part of your heart and not get it, I mean that's adulthood. That's growing up.

AMT: Your marriage was also unraveling at the time. Why?

ARIEL LEVY: For a number of reasons. But the simplest ones? The simplest two are that I had an affair, which is the one real regret of my life actually. And also because my spouse, two weeks after I got back from Mongolia, left for rehab and alcoholism was a real problem in our marriage. And so, yeah. So it wasn't just I lost the baby and then two weeks later I lost my spouse because someone doesn't go to rehab the first time there's a problem. By the time someone is going to rehab, generally there have been some pretty heavy duty problems already. And I just felt at that moment like I can't do two recoveries at once. I'm busy with my recovery. I can't focus on anything else.

AMT: You make the point it took you a long time to acknowledge the depths of Lucy's addiction to alcohol. Why do you think it took you a long time?

ARIEL LEVY: Well, it's very common among spouses of alcoholics. I mean you have a vested interest in denial, don't you? I mean if you admit that the person you love is ill, has an illness that he or she cannot control, it means you're completely powerless and that's terrifying.

AMT: Can you see yourself getting married again?

ARIEL LEVY: As a matter of fact, I am getting married again.

AMT: Do you want to tell us about that?

ARIEL LEVY: Sure. I'll tell you about that. None of this is in the—well, some of it’s in the book.

AMT: I was going to say is this where you stop the book? It is, isn’t it?

ARIEL LEVY: Yep. It is.

AMT: Okay. I think I know what you’re going to say, but go ahead.

ARIEL LEVY: You definitely do. So after the ambulance came and took me to the clinic in Mongolia and my son died before the ambulance got there, and I got there and I remember on the ride over thinking I wonder if I'm going to lose my—I wonder if I’m going to go mad. I mean I remember having that thought because it just felt like a real possibility. And I think one of the reasons I didn’t was that I got to the clinic and this person walked through the door and it was very strange. I just felt an immediate sense of safety and I don't know what else to say, human connection. And my doctor and I—he was a doctor from South Africa where I had done a lot of reporting and we talked about that. And I just felt that connecting with another human being at that moment felt like salvation. I can't explain it any other way. So when I got home, he sent me an e-mail with my medical report. I needed it for my insurance or something. And I asked him—because believe it or not I couldn't get my doctor in New York to call me back after this happened, appallingly enough. And so I asked this doctor—John is his name—is it normal that I'm lactating? I mean I didn't know. I’d never lactated before. I didn't know if this was dangerous actually. And he wrote me back and said the milk let down reflex after miscarriage is one of nature's less kind tricks. And I just thought that was such an elegant and apt way to put it. And we started writing to each other and we sort of became pen pals and he had this fascinating life story and had lost so much himself. And we wrote to each other for a long time and little by little, we sort of became friends and then eventually we started visiting and then we fell in love and now we're getting married.

AMT: That's a lovely story.

ARIEL LEVY: Yeah. But it's not in the book because—it is in the book that we started writing to each other and that connecting with this other person who was the only other person on earth who saw the reality that no one else could see, who saw me and thought here is a mother with her baby who has died. You know he saw the baby. He saw me for that moment when I was a mother. And no one else could see that and that was—I can't explain it. It was killing me, that. And so that was a very strong connection but then it just sort of as luck would have it, turned out we also enjoy the same things and have the same sense of humour and so on. But I didn't go into that in the book beyond just saying that this was sort of my pen pal and that we had this epistolary friendship because I think while it's technically true to say “and then we fell in love”, t would have actually been really misleading to put that in the book because it would make it sound like “and then Prince Charming came and saved me.” And he didn't. No one could save me from the grief of losing my child or losing my first marriage. I had to do that on my own.

AMT: I want you to talk to me a little bit about love. You've been in love with men and women and with someone who transitioned from a woman to a man. How have those relationships compared to each other?

ARIEL LEVY: You know I think gender is the least of it. I think you know all those people you just mentioned and everyone on earth, everyone's distinct. I understand that for some people, their sexual preference or proclivity—whatever you want to call it—is really clear. Some people are only attracted to people of this gender, that gender and they can't conceive of falling in love or having sex with anybody else. You know that's not the reality for someone who is bisexual. And so keeping that in mind, I just don't think there's any comparison. It's like everyone's a human. Comparing falling in love with a man and falling in love with a woman, it's like it depends which woman, depends which man.

AMT: At one point in the book, you write, “women of my generation were given the lavish gift of our own agency by feminism. Life was complying with my story.” How much do you credit feminism for the life you have?

ARIEL LEVY: Almost completely. The reason the book is called The Rules Do Not Apply, I was thinking about the rules that my mother and certainly her mother had to follow and very few of those rules even applied to me. Very few of those rules even were like remotely a thought in my head. I was not told that I had to get married and have children. I was completely encouraged by both of my parents to be a writer and to follow my dreams basically. So I think all the time about the ways in which I'm the beneficiary of the women's movement’s success.

AMT: And was feminism to blame when things went off?

ARIEL LEVY: Definitely not. I think that people have this notion that feminism told women you can have it all and I don't think that that's true. No one can cite for me, you know the feminist writer or theorist or whatever who ever said that, because nobody ever did. I mean the idea that you can have every single thing you want in life without sacrificing anything is not the thinking of a feminist. It's the thinking of a toddler. And I think that nobody gets at everything. I mean that's just not the human condition and I think what feminism told women is you're fully human. You're a full human being. But the human condition is: nobody gets everything they want. So why would that not apply to women as much as men?

AMT: It also kind of told women they could make choices but at some point along the line, you learn that sometimes you don't have control over those choices.

ARIEL LEVY: I think that's true for men too though. I mean I think what we're really talking about is mortality and nature and the fact that your body will betray you at various times in your life. And I think you know it's certainly true around reproduction that it's a worse deal for women than men. I mean it’s no comparison. Men can have children for so much longer than women can. And the stuff we're talking about earlier, I mean the bloody business of being a woman—it’s no picnic.

AMT: You think of this as a coming of age book.

ARIEL LEVY: Absolutely. I mean because as I said, what really came to me from all this is being disabused of my illusion of control and I think that's—being a grown up is realizing that.

AMT: How hard was that?

ARIEL LEVY: It was not easy. [laughs] I didn't love it but I'm glad it’s happened. It's not bad news. It's a kind of liberation to realize you can't have everything you want, you're not in control of everything and there's no point in trying to sort of game the system. You won't win.

AMT: No matter how much you think you have control.

ARIEL LEVY: Yeah and again, I think that's not about being female. I think that because you know in my lifetime—I'm 42—so much has changed so quickly and also big rules changed during my lifetime that I never thought would happen. I mean we had our first black president. I had thought we were going to get our first female president, but instead we got our first orange monster president. But we came close. And also you know during my lifetime, Edith Windsor who I wrote about for The New Yorker who was the plaintiff in the Supreme Court case in the United States that brought down the Defence of Marriage Act and effectively legalized same sex marriage in this country, she is someone who thought to herself this isn't fair. These rules should not apply. I’m going to make sure they change. And she accomplished that. And so I think that thinking the rules don't apply to you is the mark of a visionary, having the audacity to think “just because those are the rules doesn't mean I'm going to follow them.” That brings you courageous historical figures. However, imagining that your life has no limits? I mean you're going to get disabused of that eventually.

AMT: Finding out that some rules are still there.

ARIEL LEVY: Or are mutable.

AMT: Yeah. Exactly.

ARIEL LEVY: And the big one is death. The big one is nobody gets out alive.

AMT: Well, it's funny because as I was reading this, I really thought of this as a coming of age book and I didn't think of it as a later like oh, finally coming of age. It's like a second coming of age.

ARIEL LEVY: I'm so glad you saw it that way because that's how I feel. It's like in your twenties, you sort of transform from a child into like a pseudo adult or a young adult. That was my experience. But between 20 and 40, I went from being like a pseudo adult to an actual grown up with some sense of limits and a certain humility and that's what this experience. This is sort of the climax of that coming of age, that second coming of age.

AMT: It's almost as if you are fortunate enough to escape trauma in your childhood, at some point grief will find you as an adult.

ARIEL LEVY: Well put. Yeah.

AMT: In the beginning of this book, you were in crisis. Now you tell us you're getting married. What have you learned about love and loss?

ARIEL LEVY: You know I've learned certainly that loss is inevitable. And when I first got back, I would wake up and think you know this is not acceptable and it just felt to me like a crime against nature that my baby was dead. And then eventually I realized you know actually this is nature herself, like this is not against nature. This is nature. And so I mean I think I'm aware of the ephemerality of life in a different way now. What have I learned about love? Oh my god. Well, I mean I guess it's a similar sort of thing. It’s just something can make no sense but work and you're not in control. I mean so you know it doesn't sound real practical—like you fall in love with someone who works in Mongolia and lives in South Africa when you live in New York. I mean who would have thought that would work out? Like I didn't think it was going to work out. But it did. But it has.

AMT: That's why they make so many songs about love. That's what we all care about.

ARIEL LEVY: I guess so, huh?

AMT: That's what we all care about. Ariel Levy, it's really good to talk to you. Thank you for your work.

ARIEL LEVY: Oh, thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure.

AMT: Ariel Levy. Her memoir is called The Rules Do Not Apply. She joined us from New York City. Well, stay with us. Coming up in our next half hour, Vernon Theriault had been working in the Westray mine for about six months when an explosion killed 26 of his colleagues. What he saw when he arrived on the scene to help that morning 25 years ago led him to believe he'd seen what hell looked like. He's one of the people who lobbied for a new law for workers killed on the job. We're going to look at how that law has or has not been used in the years since. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current on CBC Radio One, Sirius XM and on your radio app.

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'I knew what hell looked like': Westray miner recalls scene of historic disaster

Guests: Vernon Theriault, Linden MacIntyre, Stephen Hunt

AMT: Hello. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: John Thomas Bates, age 56 years old.

VOICE 2: Larry Arthur Bell, age 25.

VOICE 1: Bennie Joseph Benoit, 42.

VOICE 2: Wayne Michael Conway, 38.

VOICE 1: Ferris Todd Dewan, 35.

AMT: Those are some of the names of the men who were killed in one of Canada's worst mining disasters. Yesterday the people of Pictou County, Nova Scotia remembered them. Twenty-five years ago, May 9^th, 1992, the world changed for the people there.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: At approximately 5:20 a.m., what appears to be a very significant explosion occurred in the underground operations at the Westray coal mine in Plymouth, Pictou County, Nova Scotia.

VOICE 2: I will read to you the names of the 10 men whose families have been notified. Larry Bell, age 25.

VOICE 3: The 11 families who've been hoping against hope that the young men and their families would come out alive learned of their losses and are grieving.

VOICE 4: Two of the 11 confirmed dead are residents of my town. In fact, they lived side by side on the same street which I can see from my home. So it’s deep sadness, my town is in deep mourning and our flags are at half-mast and our public functions have ceased.

AMT: Twenty-six miners were underground at the time, most of them just coming to the end of a grueling shift. No one survived. The Westray disaster was a landmark in Canadian history. Its legacy is known as the Westray Bill or Bill C-45. That's legislation meant to hold companies responsible when employees are hurt or killed on the job. Today, there are questions about the effectiveness of this law. My first guest lobbied in support of the bill after he saw the devastating aftermath of the Westray explosion 25 years ago. Vernon Theriault had been working as a miner at Westray for six months when the disaster occurred. He'd come off a shift the night before. He was due back at the mine to work at eight o'clock the next morning. Vernon Theriault joins me from New Glasgow, Nova Scotia. Hello.

VERNON THERIAULT: Good morning.

AMT: You hear that the names of people being read. You knew all of those guys, didn't you?

VERNON THERIAULT: Yes. Yes, I did. I knew some better than I knew the other ones, but I did know them all.

AMT: And 25 years later, I would imagine it's still difficult.

VERNON THERIAULT: Oh, it's hard. It's hard at times. It’s hard all the time, but this time of the year even gets harder. Like Larry Bell, I played hockey with and we talked the shift that he went under for his last shift. We talked about getting pictures done. He won the MVP that year in our hockey league and we didn't get a chance to do that.

AMT: Tell me about the morning of May 9^th. How did you find out there had been an explosion?

VERNON THERIAULT: Actually I got a phone call from a sister-in-law at around 5:30 and she said she heard a lot of sirens heading over to the mine. I told her it’s probably a cave-in. We had a lot of cave-ins in the last little while there at the mine site. So on my way into work, I pulled up to the Mounties and the Mounties asked where I was going. And they said the mine blew up. And that was just like a brick hit me in the chest. It was hard to take.

AMT: And you had been working in the mine. The mine hadn't even been open that long. It was about eight months. What was it like in that mine before this happened?

VERNON THERIAULT: It was pretty dusty. A lot of dust, coal dust. I'm not an experienced miner or anything so I didn’t know about the coal dust. There’s a safety thing that should be done to keep the dust down, something that’s used in rock dust, I guess they say. And that would help keep the mine safe too but the conditions like that wasn’t [unintelligible]. The areas you go in, you didn’t feel safe. I tried to get out of there. After being in a couple of months, I tried to get my old job back and my job was gone from the tire shop that I was at. I didn’t have anywhere to go to get another job there, so I had to stay there.

AMT: What were you doing in the mine, Vernon?

VERNON THERIAULT: The job at the time was on a boom truck. On the boom truck, we used to take the supplies right up to the working area of the men. The supplies, we tried to get it as close we could to the men on the boulders.

AMT: You got involved with the rescue. You volunteered. What was it like when you got down that mine?

VERNON THERIAULT: When I went over Saturday morning to go down underground there on the rescue, we were bare-faced miners. It was hell, just being down there 12 hours beforehand. Coming out of the tunnels 12 hours beforehand and then going down the next morning, I knew what hell looked like then. It was a disaster. We had pieces of metal all over the road. We had machinery underground there that was just blown out. I tried to explain this but we have two tunnels. And what I mean by tunnels like you've got two roads side by side and you have these side roads that go from that other road. Well, we had crossovers we’d call them and we had them down to number 10 crosscut. And these crossovers had steel doors. Well, these steel doors were blown right out of there. The job as the draggermen were to go down first. We went in behind the plywood and we put the plywood up.

AMT: What’s a draggerman?

VERNON THERIAULT: A draggerman, he’s a miner. But they’re your rescue squad. If something happened in the mine, they go in and they have oxygen and they have the mask with the oxygen on the back.

AMT: Okay. And you were bare-faced miner meaning you didn't have a mask.

VERNON THERIAULT: Yes. Well, I was only there six months and I wasn't trained for a draggerman. And really like years later, I’m realizing I probably wouldn't be able to do that job because it's a job that these men are under a lot of stress up to going in. And I realized that on the rescue because after we cleared the road down the number 10 crosscut, I was driving tractors and these tractors we used to drive the draggermen down. These draggermen, they go into the bodies and it was bad. The areas were bad. And the third day when they found the bodies, they kind of explained to me who they found and that. That was just like me being there with them, like that area with them by talking to them. It was hard, really hard to take.

AMT: Vernon, you went on to be part of the push for the new law to protect workers. Why was that important to you to start lobbying for that law?

VERNON THERIAULT: Well, it was hard because 26 men got killed underground there. A whole shift got killed. It shouldn't have happened. There should have been a law in there for anybody that got killed on the job. But there is no law. When I got involved, I knew I had to do what I had to do to try to get this law passed through. And I helped the steel workers to lobby with them and let the MPs know what it was like to work underground. What I’d seen in that six months of how it was unsafe, the working conditions, it was enough for me to tell those MPs and the Senate and lobby the time I did to help steel workers get that bill passed through.

AMT: Vernon, I can hear how much it stays with you still after all of these years. I appreciate you talking to me today.

VERNON THERIAULT: Thank you. It will never go away and this time of year always brings it back big time. But days later, I'll get back into my regular lifestyle. But there's things that brings it out too at times, especially when you get on the news and you hear somebody get killed on the work. That’s just hard to take.

AMT: Well, we're going to talk about that and this law that you lobbied for other workers as we continue on. Vernon, thanks for speaking with me.

VERNON THERIAULT: Thank you. Bye.

AMT: Vernon Theriault was a bare-faced miner at the Westray mine. He later received a medal of bravery for the rescue work he did. We reached him in New Glasgow, Nova Scotia today. The Westray mine was a chance at a new beginning for Pictou County's economic future after the last mine in the region had closed in the late 70s. Westray was plagued by problems from the start. Workers complained about the lack of safety training on the site, frequent cave-ins inside the mine. In 1992, Linden MacIntyre was a co-host for the CBC's Fifth Estate. He was investigating the Westray mine even before the mining disaster and he made the documentary The Last Shift about the tragedy for The Fifth Estate. Linden MacIntyre has since left The Fifth Estate. He is an author and a Giller Prize winning novelist and he's in our Toronto studio. Hi, Linden.

LINDEN MACINTYRE: Hi, Anna Maria.

AMT: He talked about the dust. That was really important.

LINDEN MACINTYRE: Yes. I went down there. We were off the air at the time. We had done a documentary on this boondoggle which was basically what we called it. So I went down just to find out what happened and to find out what happened I went to talk to some old coal miners with a lot of experience. And one, I remember him saying to me. He says you know what happened. Just use your eyes. Look around. I said look at what? And he said look at all this stuff and Vernon referred to this. He said just look at all that stuff around the yard at the mouth, the head—

AMT: At the head of mine, yeah.

LINDEN MACINTYRE: The head of the tunnel. And he says you'll see gear. There are heavy equipment that came from down below. How did it get there? I said you tell me. He said it blew out in the same way a cannonball blows out of a cannon. He said dust in that mine became like gunpowder. And at that point, the theory was that it was an act of God, that it was a methane explosion. And he said, the old miner said no, no, methane is a flash. This was an explosion caused by coal dust. That makes it a crime because there are strict regulations to control the coal dust that’s there and to keep it under control and those regulations weren’t followed. A key point that Vernon raised was that he'd only been there for six months. I was underground at Westray before it blew up and I swear every miner I met down there was a first time coal miner. They had been hard rock miners who were sick of the frontier hard rock lifestyle. Hard rock miners hate coal mines but they didn't know what they were dealing with down there. I talked to one guy afterwards. He said the dust was so bad in Westray mine that he used to have to duct tape his pants legs to his boots to keep the boots from filling up with dust.

AMT: I was reading that somebody said that their white bread for their sandwich down there would turn black because of the dust.

LINDEN MACINTYRE: Yes. It was ridiculous. I wasn't there when they were mining coal but I was told by miners who were there that the dust was up over their boots which made it absolutely a criminal enterprise.

AMT: Well, let's talk about that mine being opened because you just called it a boondoggle. What led to that mine being opened at all?

LINDEN MACINTYRE: Well, because Donald Cameron, the premier in Nova Scotia was from that constituency. Brian Mulroney, the prime minister of Canada had represented that constituency when he was first elected to the House of Commons. They gave him an easy ride into the House of Commons and he sat in that seat until the next general election. He felt he owed to the community. The community did have an unemployment problem. So the idea of a coal mine comes up. Well, immediately in Ottawa, there was a huge public service uprising. You can't open another coal mine in Nova Scotia. The government of Canada had already spent hundreds of millions of dollars on coal mines in Cape Breton. They owned them. Why are you opening a new coal mine at public expense in a place where the coal industry had died already? No, no. We're going to do it. And just by pure political muscle, Donald Cameron and Brian Mulroney pushed this mine forward. The other big question was why Curragh Resources? Why Clifford Frame? Why this Yukon hard rock mining operation? What are they doing down there? Well, Clifford Frame was well connected with the Conservative Party. So it was a political venture from the start and that was our thrust. The secondary thrust was that this coal field was notorious back in the 1800s for cave-ins, for fires and explosions.

AMT: It was very unstable. The coal seams were really unstable.

LINDEN MACINTYRE: The geology was bad and there was a lot of gas, a lot of methane gas in the coal seams. Now that should have been manageable. And this is what we were told: this will be manageable using best modern practices for coal mining. So everybody assumes it's going to be ultramodern mine. These old 19^th-century safety problems won't exist. Well, guess what happened? The modern practices were short circuited by the management of the mine. The miners themselves, a lot of these fellows had no experience with coal mine. They were sabotaging—this I think is a fact—methane monitors because every time the methane monitor went off, the mine had to shut down. So somebody would stick a wad of gum on a methane monitor and so it wouldn't go off. That wasn't the problem. The problem was what they were wading around in up to the top of their boots: coal dust which was like gunpowder.

AMT: But there was a safety report that had told the mine management to clean up the dust.

LINDEN MACINTYRE: Yes. The inspector had been down there. He said you're supposed to dilute that dust with—first of all, you’re supposed to clean it out of there. And what you can't clean out you're supposed to dilute with rock dust so that it's not as explosive. And this was ignored.

AMT: And so there was an investigation that followed the disaster. The provincial government opened an inquiry into the disaster just days after it happened. Who was held responsible?

LINDEN MACINTYRE: Well, the government had a public inquiry that went on and on. I heard all sorts of people. It confirmed the fact that laws, serious laws were being broken. It laid out the groundwork for criminal accountability. But then there was a lot of fumbling. You know the crown failed to meet disclosure of evidence requirements. Charges were laid. Charges were dropped. There was a constitutional challenge at one point. When they finally got down to it, the owner of the mine and his second in command refused to testify.

AMT: This is Clifford Frame.

LINDEN MACINTYRE: Clifford Frame.

AMT: What happened to him? What happened to his company?

LINDEN MACINTYRE: His company went bankrupt about a year after the explosion and Frame just went on. I don't know where he is now but he just went on with his life. Gerry Phillips, who was the one person in the mine who had a strong coal mining background in England should have known better. The last I heard of Gerry Phillips, he was in the states someplace running a chain of nursing homes. So the people who were ultimately responsible, they walked away from it. They went on with their lives. They were tarnished in Pictou County, Nova Scotia. If they ever go back there, who cares. The rest of the country, except for this day every year when the Westray law gets mentioned; when workplace health and safety becomes an issue, we think of Westray. But the 26 guys, there's 11 of them still down there. There’s 11 bodies who were never recovered.

AMT: They never recovered their bodies.

LINDEN MACINTYRE: So every time I drive by there, I see the sign, the Westray monument and I go back to that. As the previous guest said you just do not—that will never fade in the minds of the people that were directly involved.

AMT: You talk about this investigation that you did like it was yesterday. Why has this stayed with you this way?

LINDEN MACINTYRE: Well, I grew up there in that area. My father was a hard rock miner. I covered the coal mines of Cape Breton for many years as a newspaper reporter down there. I have been down underground in the coal mines. I knew coal miners. I knew Angus MacNeil who was killed at Westray. I know his whole family. One of the first sights I saw when I was watching the feed coming in on the CBC was Angus’ sister-in-law and Angus’ brother was also a hard rock miner. And I said oh my god, truly Neil didn't go to that place because she had already lost one husband to a construction accident. The first thing that flashed through my mind: she's lost her second husband to this mining—

AMT: Because you saw her on the TV. You saw her wiping her eyes.

LINDEN MACINTYRE: I saw her on TV with a Kleenex up to her mouth. I thought Louise is there again. And anyway it was her brother-in-law Angus that was killed down there. So I mean like this was personal for everybody in that area because everybody down there, certainly in the northeast part of Nova Scotia has a connection with the coal industry. And for 26 people to go in a mine that shouldn't have been there in the first place was horrific.

AMT: Linden, thanks for talking about this.

LINDEN MACINTYRE: Okay.

AMT: Linden MacIntyre, journalist, novelist. He was co-host of The Fifth Estate on CBC Television for 24 years. We have a link to his documentary about the Westray disaster on our website, www.cbc.ca/thecurrent. You can watch The Last Shift which was his second documentary on Westray on our site. Well, my next guest testified at the inquiry into the Westray mining disaster. At the time, Stephen Hunt was the mining health and safety expert for the United Steelworkers. When the inquiry resulted in no civil or criminal charges, he decided to do something about it. He lobbied the government to change the Criminal Code to make it possible to prosecute business owners and management for a death or injury in the workplace. More than 10 years after the Westray disaster, the federal government unanimously passed the Westray Bill, or Bill C-45. Stephen Hunt is now the Western director for the United Steelworkers in Canada and he's in Stellarton, Nova Scotia. Hi, Stephen.

STEPHEN HUNT: Hi, Anna Maria.

AMT: So you’re right where it happened right now. How did the Westray Bill change criminal liability for owners and management of businesses where employees die on the job?

STEPHEN HUNT: Well, Anna Maria, it started with the inquiry. So Justice Richards overheard the inquiry and he issued a report and it was entitled “A Predictable Path to Disaster: The Westray Inquiry” and in that he made several recommendations. Recommendation 73 was to the federal government to amend the Criminal Code of Canada to include a criminal conviction or a criminal charge for negligence causing death or serious bodily harm.

AMT: The Westray bill becomes law in 2004. How effective has it been at prosecuting company officials after employees have been killed or injured on the job?

STEPHEN HUNT: Not at all. In fact we still lose about a thousand workers a year to workplace deaths that are recorded and not all of them would be deaths caused by criminal negligence causing death or serious bodily harm. But we just simply know that many, many were just simple negligence. It's very similar to what happened at Westray. You don't have to kill 26 at a time. One at a time still qualifies.

AMT: Am I right, Mr. Hunt, in understanding that there is only one case where someone was given significant jail time?

STEPHEN HUNT: The Metron case in Toronto, one of the principals was given three and a half years in jail. It’s under appeal right now. He's out. So that's it up until now. We track, Anna Maria, and we watch carefully across the country to see what's going on and try to support wherever we can. So so far, we could track 11. Most of them are plea bargains or absolute discharges.

AMT: And so let me just go back. The Metron case in Toronto was Christmas Eve, five guys on a scaffold. The scaffold collapses and four die.

STEPHEN HUNT: Right.

AMT: Okay. And the manager gets three and a half years in jail?

STEPHEN HUNT: That's right.

AMT: But that’s under appeal. Has anybody else ever been convicted?

STEPHEN HUNT: Well, there has been some plea bargains. So there's some convictions but no jail time and just I would say nominal penalties. So it's just the cost of doing business. You pay the fine and move on.

AMT: But it's on the books, is it that people aren't prosecuting, that they don't feel they have the evidence? What would you think that is?

STEPHEN HUNT: No, I think there's lots of evidence. I think there's no political will to do it that's all. And it's a different class of people. I mean who wants to see a CEO in jail? I mean it's as blunt as that. There's just no political backbone to enforce the law. It's simple. I mean we've seen enough cases over the 25 years since Westray. Surely you know when you look at the saw mill disasters, the two saw mill disasters in British Columbia, they were so similar to the disaster of Westray. And in that case, the similarities were brutally. What Linden just talked about, they couldn't charge the company criminally because the investigators botched the investigation so bad they tainted the evidence. Exactly in the same fashion as Westray. Exactly.

AMT: How many Canadians die on the job in Canada?

STEPHEN HUNT: It averages about a thousand a year that are recorded. So there's more. So people that die because of disease, they may be elderly but they die. But their lives are taken because of their work maybe 30, 40 years before.

AMT: And what are the most dangerous jobs in this country right now?

STEPHEN HUNT: Well, I think—you know I mean there's statistics on this and I am always leery of statistics. I say that every job in Canada is dangerous right now when you lose a thousand. If you think about it, you put that across the board. There’s people that work in schools and offices and in mines, in the forest industry and heavy construction. It's usually construction, some fishing depending on what coast you're on and what's going on. But it really doesn't discriminate.

AMT: Right. How does our record in Canada compare to other industrialized countries?

STEPHEN HUNT: We're not very good. So on a per capita basis, we have the highest death rate in any of industrialized nations.

AMT: So what do you want to see done to hold employers responsible?

STEPHEN HUNT: Well, Anna Maria, we started and made a commitment 25 years ago. We were organizing Westray and we made a commitment to the victims and the surviving victims—because I think everybody that's touched by this place is a victim—that there’d be no more Westrays and we meant that when we said it 25 years ago. We lobbied. We're still on a campaign called Stop the Killing, Enforce the Law and we've gone to parliament. We've gone to every attorney general across the country and we started in Pictou County with the six municipalities. They endorsed our campaign. They were the first ones to endorse. We've taken it across the country and we're starting to see a change. What we want to see? We want to see a couple of CEOs in jail—not a lot of them. We think a couple significant jail terms for murder would be the paradigm shift we need in Canada to stop the killing in workplaces.

AMT: Stephen Hunt, thank you for speaking with me.

STEPHEN HUNT: Thank you.

AMT: Stephen Hunt, Western director for the United Steelworkers in Canada. He joined us from Stellarton, Nova Scotia in the Pictou County region where all of this happened. That is our program for today. Stay with Radio One for q. Tom Power’s guest today is Father John Misty who will perform songs from his new album, Pure Comedy. We're going to leave you today with the voices of more miners with the singing voices. The Men of the Deeps is a choir of working and retired coal miners from Cape Breton. They were established in 1966. They get the last word today with their performance of “Working Man”. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. Thanks for listening to The Current.

[Music: “Working Man” – The Men of the Deeps]

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May 10, 2017 full episode transcript

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