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Jamie Smith, tbnewswatch.com
Protesters occupy Michael Gravelle's office Wednesday morning.
The province’s Workplace Safety and Insurance Board is hurting the workers it’s supposed to help, says the president of a local support group.
Members of the Ontario Federation of Labour and the Thunder Bay and District Injured Workers Support Group were occupying MPP Michael Gravelle’s office Wednesday morning to protest what group president Gerald Landry calls the "horrific results" of people trying to deal with WSIB. He said the members, around five of them just after 10 a.m., would stay there all day or until they could speak with Gravelle.
The Thunder Bay MPP, who is also Ontario’s Minister of Northern Development, Mines and Forestry, was out of town Wednesday morning. His office was one of six constituency offices to be occupied across the province.
"There’s some real mean-spiritedness going on. It’s just catastrophic," Landry said. "They are causing trauma themselves to injured workers."
Injured workers are being cut off from benefits, which forces them to apply for Ontario Works.
Others are forced back to work even though they qualify for the federal government’s disability fund. Some are bullied by employers when they do return to work or are harassed by private investigators and WSIB return-to-work specialists. It’s all part of the board’s attempts to cut costs, Landry said.
“We see far, far too many people that are neglected," Landry said. "They try to keep people in the dark as to the policies and programs they do have."
The WSIB is supposed to help injured workers maintain the quality of life they had before being injured.
But Landry said there are far too many people coming into his office these days who just want to give up on life because of the challenges they are facing.
"People are just distraught," Landry said.
According to the OFL, benefits have decreased by 20 per cent since 1996 when inflation is factored in.
But Gravelle said the Liberal government has raised benefits, sometimes as much as 7.5 per cent in 18 months.
"That by no means brought them back to a level that was acceptable to them but it was one of the opportunities we had to try and bridge that gap between what their benefits were and what they should be," Gravelle said Wednesday afternoon on the phone from Toronto.
He had the chance to speak with the occupiers in his office on speaker phone Wednesday morning.
Gravelle said he had the chance to listen to their concerns and tell them that he was advocating for injured workers.
"There’s no question that there’s still a great deal of work to be done but this is something from the moment I was first elected in 1995 I’ve been working hard to represent the interests of injured workers and I will continue to do that," Gravelle said.
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