Just as important as remembering those who lost their lives to a work-related incident is supporting those who are left behind to pick up the pieces, according to speakers taking part in the local Day of Mourning ceremony Tuesday afternoon.
A few dozen people gathered over the lunch hour at the workers' memorial on Queensway Street to remember those dead or injured as well as to call for changes to the way workplace safety is handled.
Lynne Rozenboom knows all too well the lingering effect a work-related death can have on a family, as she is still reeling from the death of her husband Dirk in 2008.
Rozenboom volunteers with WorkSafe BC, sharing her story and the benefits of the organization's peer support program that gives those who find themselves in similar situations, among other things, a resource for handling their grief.
A B.C. Hydro line technician, Dirk never came home after the helicopter he was in to do line patrols crashed one afternoon, killing the four people aboard.
"In the ensuing years, I have had to learn so many things I didn't think I'd need to," said Rozenboom. After losing her partner of 22 years, Rozenboom said she had to learn to find a reason to get out of bed every day, eat healthy meals for one and learn practical things such as operating the brand new tractor mower Dirk had purchased mere weeks before his death.
"I had to learn heartbreaking things, like how to explain to my grandson that every helicopter he saw in the sky was not going to fall out of that sky."
Observed on April 28 nationally, the Day of Mourning was first recognized in 1984 by the Canadian Labour Congress before becoming a national observance in 1990 through the passing of the Workers Mourning Day Act.
"The symbol adopted for this day is the canary, long sacrificed by miners to warn them of oxygen deficiencies so they can get out of the shaft before suffocating," said Aaron Ekman, secretary treasurer of the B.C. Federation of Labour. In the modern day, there's no need to make such sacrifices, with advancements in technology.
But last year, there were still 173 claims accepted for work-related deaths, 98 of which were the result of occupational disease caused by exposure to asbestos.
"We don't need a canary to tell us there's an epidemic in our province," said Ekman. "It's time the killing stopped, it's time injuries were prevented, it's time negligent employers were sent to jail for their negligence and it's time workers and our families get the justice we deserve."
As with every Day of Mourning marked in Prince George since 2012, those affected by the Jan. 20 and April 23 explosions at Babine Forest Products and Lakeland Mills, respectively, were not far from mind.
The coroner's inquest into the Prince George explosion was suspended March 26 and is set to resume on May 11.
While Ekman repeated the call for a public inquiry, the president of the United Steelworkers Wood Council, Bob Matters, simply expressed a desire to see the proceedings come to an end.
"I'm not heaping criticism upon the process or upon WorkSafe or upon the work site, but simply to remind everybody of the critical need for this process to come to a timely conclusion," he said. "The inquest is not about finding fault as you all know, but rather as an attempt to isolate the cause and/or contributing factors to what happened in these events. It's a process where just maybe - just maybe - we can prevent something similar from happening in the future."
