When a visibly ill electrician went home from the construction site, eyebrows were raised.

When the entire crew of electricians, 10 men, were sent home later that day, there were heated confrontations and alarm.

But no information was relayed to all the other workers at the Guelph condo site by its developer and primary contractor.

“Did the guy test positive for coronavirus?” asks John, a carpenter, who was present. “Nobody would tell us. But all the electricians? If it’s not safe for them, it can’t be safe for us either. We work side by side, all the labourers on that site. They should have stopped everything right then.”

John, like many others, unwilling to allow his last name to be published, fearing retaliation from his employers, had enough; he laid down his tools and walked off the job last week.

That was the advice Premier Doug Ford had given to construction workers: If you feel unsafe, leave.

“The situation is just too dangerous,” says John, who’s applied for employment insurance, joining the 2.13 million jobless workers across Canada who’ve registered EI claims in the past two weeks. “We have wives and children at home and I’m not going to take the risk anymore of bringing COVID into the house.’’

By provincial decree, construction has been deemed an essential industry.

But condos and houses are hardly urgently essential enterprises in the short term, as health and safety officials have repeatedly stated.

Unlike Ontario, Quebec, most hard-hit by the coronavirus pandemic among Canada’s provinces, has suspended all construction activity except for emergency, security and dispatching service.

Ford said on Wednesday that the list of essential businesses would be “adjusted,” but had nothing further to add at his Thursday press conference.

Step outside (if you can) and look up at all the construction cranes dotting the skyline. The fenced off sites still bustling. The hoarding erected around projects both public and private, as if there’s no pandemic afoot at all, with the global infection level on Thursday surpassing one million.

Thousands of workers who realistically can’t be protected from infection on job sites. Who can’t maintain a safe two-metre — it’s a hockey-stick length in Canadian parlance — distance from each other.

How can their health be so easily dismissed?

“Job sites are not very clean at the best of times,” notes John. “Two feet apart? Forget it! You’ve got 35 guys changing in the same small shack. No running water. No sanitizers. I get that construction is essential. But a condo high-rise, how is that essential?”

Half of John’s co-workers have split, but work on the condo has scarcely stalled. “They’ve been replaced new guys coming in.”

Desperate-for-work people.

Which is a whole other story in a fiercely unionized industry that fought so hard for worker rights and safety provisions.

Some construction projects have certainly shut down. Mattamy Homes, one of Canada’s largest residential builders, for example, suspended all site-based operations on March 18, after Ontario declared a state of emergency.

However, sources told the Star, other developers and contractors have called a halt only under pressure, after it became known among site workers that someone in their midst had tested positive. A downtown Toronto project had a sole security guard on duty Thursday. “Everybody was sent home on Monday,” he said. “Cleaners were brought in, everything scrubbed down. I’m told the workers are coming back this Monday.”

Yet how can sites be cleanly maintained, with workers standing cheek-by-jowl as they go up and down on maintenance elevators, as they eat their lunch together, change clothes in close proximity, with the infected often asymptomatic even as they shed the virus?

Last Sunday, the Ministry of Labour, Training and Skills Development issued updated guidelines covering responsibilities for contractors to provide better sanitation onsite with a focus on “high-touch” areas such as site trailers, door handles and hoists. Contractors have also been urged to stagger shifts, restricting the number of workers onsite at the same time and limiting elevator usage.

Subcontractors who sign on to provide specialized skilled workers are under intense pressure further up the development chain to keep the projects operational.

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Some have told their workers to take two weeks off, unpaid, but don’t expect the job to be there when you want to come back.

“I’m a skilled worker,” Tony, a joiner who walked off the job, told the Star. “I’m not worried about getting another job later, not in this city. I was more worried about being onsite now. If they don’t want me, I’ll go somewhere else.’’

There’s no collated reference-point warning construction workers about which sites have registered a positive COVID-19 test, and, while the ministry has deployed extra inspectors to evaluate hygiene and safety standards on projects, no certainty that contractors are self-reporting to public health officials.

The ministry’s most recent statement did contain a warning, though. “Employers and constructors should know: Failure to comply with the Occupational Health and Safety Act and its regulations could result in a stop-work order.”

Phil Gillies, executive director of the Ontario Construction Consortium, has pleaded with the provincial government to, if not entirely delist the industry as an essential service temporarily, then at least clarify the situation for both employers and employees confused and concerned about their safety.

“I estimate that 40 per cent to 50 per cent of workers have gone home,” said Gillies.

He echoes what so many workers who’ve spoken with the Star have said: Impossible to stay clean and sanitized.

“You’ve got workers in close contact, sharing stairwells, sharing elevators going up 30, 40 storeys. They’re lifting beams — how are you supposed to do that six feet apart? A drywall worker cannot lift a full sheet by himself. It’s hopeless. On some sites I’ve heard of, where they put a sanitation dispenser at the entrance, they’re disappearing. Who knows who’s taking them? Could be workers, could be people just passing by because sanitizer is now hard to find.”

Aaron, a health and safety coordinator for LIUNA Local 183, no longer knows what to tell construction workers who call about their concerns on the job and equally fearful those jobs will disappear if they complain.

“What we’ve been telling them is that it’s up to the employer to say if a site is unsafe. And they seem to think that having handwashing stations and sanitizers is good enough to make it safe. But if the workers don’t feel safe, walk off the job.

“That’s hard because a lot of them are tied to their debt.

“Really, the problem here is that the government has been so unclear.”

Hardhats verses hardheads.

Neither offer protection against a pandemic.