Ontario’s Ministry of Labour is investigating the death of another worker at Fiera Foods, the industrial bakery in North York that was the subject of an undercover Toronto Star investigation two years ago. The worker is the fifth to die at the company or one of its affiliates in an industrial accident since 1999.

Police said they were contacted early Wednesday afternoon about a medical emergency on Marmora St., where Fiera’s main facility is located. The Ministry of Labour was subsequently notified of an industrial accident, according to a spokesperson for the Toronto Police Service.

In a statement to the Star, Ministry of Labour spokesperson Janet Deline said a worker at Fiera had suffered “fatal injuries” and an inspector had been dispatched, but further details were not yet available.

“Our thoughts are with the family and colleagues” of the worker who died, she said. “Our investigation is ongoing.”

Fiera Foods is one of the continent’s largest industrial bakeries. Temporary workers make up around 70 per cent of its workforce, according to documents obtained from the Workplace Safety and Insurance Board. Deline could not confirm whether the worker killed Wednesday was hired through a temp agency.

In an emailed statement to the Star, Fiera’s general counsel David Gelbloom said he was “saddened to confirm” that a worker was “tragically hurt in a workplace accident and later succumbed to those injuries.”

“We have been touched by tragedy previously and we are heartbroken by today’s tragic accident. We are co-operating with all appropriate authorities to determine the cause. Over the next number of days, we will be placing all our efforts into finding answers while supporting the victim’s family and our entire team,” he said.

Gelbloom added that in recent years, the company had “committed even more resources and efforts to health and safety initiatives which have included working with third-party experts and the Ministry of Labour.”

Four temp agency workers have died at Fiera and its three affiliated factories in North York since 1999 — including 23-year-old refugee Amina Diaby, who was strangled by her head scarf after it became entangled in an improperly guarded machine in 2016. Fiera pleaded guilty to health and safety charges related to her death and was fined $300,000 by the Ministry of Labour.

Documents obtained by the Star found that neither Diaby nor her co-worker had “received training in the location and use of the emergency safety buttons.”

A Star reporter who worked undercover at Fiera for a month in 2017 was hired through a temp agency and received about five minutes of safety training, no hands-on instruction and was paid in cash at a payday lender without any documentation or deductions.

The Ministry of Labour launched a series of proactive inspections at Fiera in early 2018, focused on the company’s main facility but not its three affiliated factories, according to ministry investigation records obtained by the Star.

The main facility was inspected 11 times resulting in 24 orders for health and safety violations. The orders were for issues ranging from improper machine guarding to failing to take reasonable precautions to protect a worker. The ministry said the orders have been complied with.

The inspections did not include any visits to Upper Crust, one of Fiera’s affiliate factories, where a 52-year-old temp worker died in October 2018 — four months after the ministry’s probe wound down.

The minimum-wage temp was found fatally injured on the ground between a loading dock and a tractor trailer, 17 minutes before his shift was due to end, according to a WSIB injury report obtained by the Star.

Upper Crust was not included in the ministry’s inspections of Fiera because “affiliated companies did not fall within the scope of the initiative,” Deline said.

Workers’ compensation data obtained by the Star has shown that temp agency workers in Ontario are increasingly being placed in non-clerical environments like factories and warehouses, and that they are twice as likely to get hurt in these sectors as their non-temp counterparts.

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Ontario’s previous Liberal government initiated a measure that would have ensured all companies who use temps are liable for their injuries at the workers’ compensation board, which workers’ advocates have long argued is a key financial incentive to protecting these vulnerable workers.

But the Liberals did not create the regulations necessary to enforce the new law before being booted from power last year. The Ford government has not moved to implement the measure.

Sara Mojtehedzadeh can be reached at smojtehedzadeh@thestar.ca, 416-869-4195