Re: Law suit seeks relief for injured workers struggling with mental illness, July 5

Law suit seeks relief for injured workers struggling with mental illness, July 5

First of all, as a long-experienced representative of injured workers, let me express my sincere appreciation to the Star for all the excellent investigative coverage of the ongoing situation at the WSIB. As highlighted in Wednesday’s article, the WSIB continues to use section 13(4) of the Workplace Safety and Insurance Act (WSIA) to deny claims for Traumatic Mental Stress (TMS) from workers who submit claims for work-related psychiatric injuries. As noted in the article, there have been three separate decisions rendered by the Workplace Safety and Insurance Appeals Tribunal (WSIAT) in 2014, 2015 and 2016 respectively, in which those panels declared that the aforementioned section of the WSIA violated the Constitution of Canada and as such, those panels refused to apply them and allowed each of the claims.

Regular readers of the Star will also be aware that the WSIB also continues to ignore reports from treating physicians and other professional health-care providers, and instead engages the services of physicians and other health professionals who render contradictory reports that allow the board to improperly deny claims.

What your readers may not know is that because the WSIB denies so many claims, workers are forced to take their cases to the WSIAT, which is the last level of appeal. The current backlog at the tribunal stands in excess of 8,000 cases. As result, it takes years to actually get a hearing before that body. Meanwhile, injured workers are left in what could be described as an abyss of pain, suffering and devastation. In some cases, workers lose all hope and take their own lives.

To date, the office of the ombudsman of Ontario has refused to conduct a major investigation of the WSIB despite the fact that it has received numerous requests/pleas to do otherwise.

When Justice Sir William Meredith originally created the workers’ compensation system in Ontario more than 100 years ago, it was intended to ensure that, if a worker became injured in the course of employment, that worker would be provided with loss of earnings and other benefits. In so many cases, such is not the case because the WSIB continues to improperly cheat injured workers of that to which they are legally entitled.

Hilary A. Balmer Uxbridge, Paralegal and retired registered nurse, Uxbridge, Ont.