Fack

I’ve been sitting on whether to post this because I don’t want to speak out of turn, and I know that there are many bigger issues in the world right now, but I think people in Sudbury need to know what is happening with WSIB.

I’m one of the 140+ WSIB employees in Sudbury who was given 20 minutes’ notice of a meeting that instrumentally changed my life and my career. This started out as rumours among staff but we thought surely there was no way they would obliterate the Northern footprint… well is not a rumour or speculation. Northern staff are being eliminated, and there are going to be real consequences for the people who rely on WSIB. Especially the injured workers in the North.

I’m obviously worried about my own job and future as I am unable to uproot my life on a dime and move to Southern Ontario, but I’m even more worried about what happens to injured workers when you remove the people who actually understand Northern Ontario. WSIB has been slowly moving toward this “provincial” model for years, and I’ve seen firsthand how disconnected that can become.

For a while I had a nurse consultant and a manager from down south. They were good people and I have nothing against them personally, but there were times when I had to explain things that I thought should have been obvious to an organization serving the entire province. I had to explain why someone in Sudbury might have to get on a plane to access healthcare somewhere else in Ontario. There seemed to be this idea that people and services are all relatively close together, when that is simply not the reality here.

Northern Ontario is different. We have mining, agriculture, forestry, remote communities, First Nations and reserves, huge distances between communities and completely different access to healthcare. A worker in Sudbury, Timmins, Thunder Bay or a remote community can face very different barriers to treatment and return to work than someone in Southern Ontario.

We also have experienced case managers who understand these realities because they live here. We have bilingual staff who serve communities where that matters. Payment specialists that go the extra mile to make sure someone’s nickel bonus is being calculated properly. Nurse consultants that understand the complexities of Northern healthcare care. People who understand the industries, the geography and also the challenges workers face. A lot of that knowledge has been built over years, and now we are losing those people while WSIB is already dealing with a workload crisis and a hiring freeze.

If you’ve dealt with WSIB and experienced long wait times, problems getting treatment approved, difficulty getting someone to understand your circumstances or anything else that you think isn’t working, please start telling your elected representatives about it. Call your city councillor, the Mayor, your MPP and the provincial government. Tell them what happened to you and how long you waited. They need to hear directly from Northern Ontarians about what these changes are going to mean.

I know this can sound like employees complaining because we’re losing our jobs, but this is much bigger than that. We are talking about removing a huge amount of Northern knowledge and experience from an organization that is supposed to serve injured workers across this region. I really hope people in the North start paying attention to this, because once these people are gone, you can’t just replace years of local knowledge with someone sitting in an office hundreds of kilometres away.

I’ve also contacted our own Mayor, Paul Lefebvre, because Sudbury has recently provided land in connection with WSIB and Workplace Safety North for the new facility. WSIB has already been promoting this investment as evidence of its strong presence in Northern Ontario, but a building does not replace the Northern team. You can put a WSIB sign on a brand new building, but that doesn’t replace the people who have spent years understanding the workers, employers, industries and communities here.

To me, it feels like a slap in the face to Northern workers to point to a new building as proof that WSIB is investing in the North while simultaneously removing the people whose actual work has an instrumental impact on the provincial caseload. You can’t claim to be committed to Northern Ontario because you built a building here while getting rid of the Northern staff who actually serve the people living here.

Thank you for taking the time to read this post, and to my fellow WSIB colleagues, it’s been a genuine pleasure getting to work with such an incredible team.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/sudbury/wsib-job-cuts-northern-ontario-9.7313694

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