Today is the National Day of Mourning, which recognizes those who’ve died or been injured at work.
The town of Lunenburg will be live streaming a ceremony this year, in place of their usual in-person event.
Danny Cavanagh, President of the Nova Scotia Federation of Labour, said the government needs to do more to prevent workplace death.
“Our labour standards in Nova Scotia are completely outdated,” he said in an interview. “They haven’t been modernized; they haven’t been updated in their entirety for 40 plus years now.”
Cavanagh noted that in a rapidly changing world, labour standards should be reviewed every five years as new technology is introduced.
32 people died related to work in 2020 — more than the province has seen since 2008, when 20 people died from work related causes, according to data released from the Workers Compensation Board and the Department of Labour and Advanced Education .
In 2020, 18 were on-the-job deaths, while the other 14 were related to either long or short-term injuries or illness sustained from work.
This number is linked in part to the six lives lost in the sinking of the Chief William Saulis and the Portapique mass murder which claimed the lives of two people who were working, said Stuart MacLean, CEO of the Workers Compensation Board.
He likened workplace safety to the COVID-19 pandemic and says the way to lower workplace related deaths is to foster a safety culture in workplaces.
“There’s all the same elements of what’s taking place in the pandemic: … you have [to have] strategies around raising awareness and following best practice approaches. The hard hat becomes the mask,” he said in an interview.
The Nova Scotia Federation of Labour normally hosts a ceremony of their own to mark the day of mourning outside Province House in Halifax. This is the second year that the pandemic has cancelled the plan.
The town of Lunenburg will live stream their ceremony on the town YouTube channel and on Zoom at 12 p.m. today.
“We have to commit ourselves to continuous improvement and to really caring about this,” said MacLeod “It’s not enough to know about it, we have to care about it to the point that if we don’t, it can be life or death.”
