Photo courtesy Mark Carney/X

I come to this as a student of occupational health and safety law and regulation. A comparison has drifted into view as the Carney government enthusiastically pursues its “build, baby build” manifesto. Certain assumptions are common to the overall capitalist agenda. These assumptions make it easier to legitimate the exploitation of people and their environments. They make this rapaciousness look normal, unchallengeable. This is what has happened over time in the occupational health and safety setting. It is here that the comparison with the Carney government’s unabashed rush to serve capital’s interests by turning back the clock to our extractivist past—indeed, to revive it by putting it on steroids—becomes revelatory. The urgency of the Carney government has brought the assumptions which naturalize capitalism out of the shadows.

The normalized slaughter of workers

April 28 is the day that people who care set aside each year to participate in what is now an international event: the National Day of Mourning. It is a day to remember those who have been killed, severely injured, or made sick while working. The sadness is coupled with the hope that the slaughter in the workplace will end.

And it is slaughter. Worldwide, the WHO/ILO records that, every year, 2.2 million workers die because they went to work. To put that more dramatically, 6,000 workers die every single day. In Canada, around 280,000 workers’ compensation claims are registered annually. There might be many more workers who have valid claims—a 2020 Workers Health and Safety Centre study reported that as many as 64 percent of injuries go unreported to a workers’ compensation board. There is much evidence of systematic claim suppression by some employers. More, some injured or ill workers are not eligible to make claims, as fraught arguments succeed in having them classified as not being employees. Typically, this happens to platform workers and in the trucking industry. Another factor which hides the toll is the fact that workers’ compensation regimes often refuse to acknowledge the workplace to be a source of life-blighting diseases, such as psychic and mental health injuries and cancers. Dr. Paul Demers, in a study for the Canadian Cancer Society, found that, annually, there are about 10,000 cancer cases in Canada attributable to exposure to carcinogenic substances found in workplaces. Workers’ compensation schemes awarded compensation in only 10 percent of the cases based on disease claims. A later study led the Canadian Cancer Society to estimate that between 1,610 and 5,152 Ontarians died in 2023 from work-related cancers. A University of Ottawa study puts the count of annual worker deaths in Canada somewhere between 9,800 and 13,200, rather than the 1,000 fatalities attributable to work registered by workers’ compensation board data.

It is slaughter, and we know it will not stop until the assumptions which underpin occupational health and safety regulation are discarded.

The regulators’ starting point is that the owners of the means of production may do with their private property whatever they like. As a polity, we are committed to the creation of overall welfare by reliance on the private sector’s production of goods and services in a competitive setting. As these private owners of property may choose not to invest their capital at all, or elsewhere, governments go out of their way to persuade them. “We are open for business,” they tell one wealth owner after another, more or less subtly.

Our governments are grateful when owners of capital invest it. They see and treat them as benefactors, as benign, as virtuous. We accord them the presumption of innocence. We assume that they mean no harm and that they must be free to choose the equipment and substances they want to use and the processes they want to deploy. These are the decisions they need to make as they determine whether their investment will yield profits. They are the best-placed actors to make those decisions and, as they are virtuous, benign people, we must trust them. If some practices lead to........

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