The British Columbia Court of Appeal recently threw out last year’s decision by the provincial Supreme Court rejecting a WorkSafeBC order against an asbestos-removal contractor.
On Feb. 26, Judge George Macintosh of the B.C. Supreme Court ruled that Seattle Environmental Ltd. had not violated a 2012 order to comply with the province’s Workers Compensation Act and Occupational Health and Safety Regulation. The judge stated that the order had been too complex and vague for the company to follow and that WorkSafeBC had not set it out “in unambiguous terms” (COHSN, March 1).
But WorkSafeBC appealed the decision, and on Jan. 13 of this year, Justice John Savage of the Court of Appeal in Vancouver wrote in a unanimous court decision that the order’s terms “are not ambiguous or insufficiently clear so as to be incapable of supporting a finding of contempt, given the nature of the statutory regime for workplace safety and the procedural history.”
The case’s origins go back to July 31, 2012, when WorkSafeBC filed a petition for orders restraining Seattle from exposing people to asbestos. The province’s occupational health and safety authority cited 17 incidents in which the company had allegedly violated the Act and Regulation, while noting that it had issued 244 orders to it, according to Judge Savage’s written decision.
“The respondents,” Judge Savage wrote, “are in the asbestos-abatement business. Asbestos has been determined to be a dangerous carcinogenic substance that requires special detection, handling and abatement techniques. As a result, these businesses are highly regulated under British Columbia workplace safety legislation.”
The judge noted that while the Act and Regulation may be complex pieces of legislation, this does not excuse people in a highly regulated profession like asbestos removal from following them.
“Requiring familiarity and understanding of statutory and regulatory requirements for workplace safety from voluntary industry participants is not an impermissibly onerous requirement,” wrote Judge Savage. “This is especially so, given the nature of the business in this case.”
The decision received praise from the B.C. Federation of Labour (BCFED) and the B.C. Insulators Union. In a Jan. 29 news release, BCFED president Irene Lanzinger said that she was “comforted that the Court of Appeal reinforced employers’ responsibility to abide by health and safety laws.”
But Lanzinger cautioned that the provincial Liberal government was still not doing enough to protect workers and that its asbestos-removal laws were inadequate.
“They failed to act on practical solutions that unions proposed to protect the well-being of workers in the asbestos-abatement industry,” she said. “Workplace protections are weak and not always rigorously enforced.
“Under the B.C. Liberals, workers are only an afterthought in our ‘workers’’ compensation system.”
Seattle Environmental faces $355,000 in fines for oh&s violations, according to BCFED.