The Ministry of Labour named its independent workplace safety review panel yesterday, nearly a week after yet another death on an Ontario construction site.
The panel, headed by former deputy labour minister Tony Dean, will be the first thorough review of the province's health and safety practices in more than 20 years.
The 10-person advisory group draws from the academic, business and labour communities and will make recommendations to the Ontario government in the fall after examining current legislation, how safety practices are carried out in the workplace, entry level safety training and the impact of the underground economy on health and safety practices.
While observers applaud the formation of the panel, some wonder why it wasn't assembled sooner and why work hasn't been expedited in response to the recent spate of construction deaths.
Last Friday, a man died on a construction site at the University of Toronto Scarborough campus after plummeting 32 feet through a hole on the second floor of the building and landing in the basement.
The carpenter had been building formwork inside the university's $70-million Instructional Centre, which has been under construction since last summer, said Jim Derenzis, director of facility management at the university's campus.
The worker was rushed to Sunnybrook hospital where he died. The cause of the accident is under investigation.
On Feb. 19, a 43-year-old foreman identified by family as Rod Keough of Newfoundland, died after falling off a sixth floor balcony of an apartment building on a renovation site in Scarborough. He was wearing his safety harness, and the Ministry of Labour did not find that the contractor, Holl Restoration Inc. of Thornhill, Ont., had violated any rules.
Sid Ryan of the Ontario Federation of Labour said the death, along with six others in the past three months, has placed a greater urgency for the panel to get started on the review.
He called the ministry on Wednesday - the 50th anniversary of the Hoggs Hollow disaster, in which five Italian migrant workers died in a tunnel collapse - to ask why almost two months of work has been lost since the panel was initially announced on Jan. 27.
While plans for the panel were already in place, the deaths of four migrant construction workers who fell from a 13-storey building at Christmas placed pressure on the ministry to tackle an industry in which inspections tend to happen only when an accident is reported.
"It has been urgent from the outset," Mr. Dean said in an interview. "This has been a long time coming and we're keen to get started and we'll get started as quickly as we possibly can."
He also hopes to recommend a central information database, which could, for example, make it harder for underground operations to get away without having health and safety committees.
Doing something about repeat offenders of health and safety violations will be a priority, but much of the focus will be placed on how these accidents can be prevented, Mr. Dean said.
Fifty people died in workplace accidents in Ontario last year, 16 of those were doing construction work.