Ceremony in honor of workers who died at work

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Jennifer Chenier was home last May when her son, Nick, called from a workplace just a couple blocks from the family’s Manotick home. Nick, 20, was an employee of Best Green Hedges Inc. and, unusually, called to ask if his mother could bring him lunch.

“When I left him, he ran out and I said, ‘What’s going on?’ He said. ‘Oh, you don’t want to know. This job is a disaster,’” she recalled. He “took the sandwich and left.

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“That was the last time I saw him”.

Later that afternoon, Jennifer was on a date in Barrhaven casually scrolling through social media when she saw there was a power outage in Manotick. In the comments she read that a hedge trimmer had been seriously injured.

Please don’t let it be Nick, she thought.

Nobody answered his calls. When the news came after what seemed like an endless wait, it was the worst news possible.

Nick had been electrocuted when the aluminum pole trimmer he had been assigned for the job came into contact with a 16,000-volt hydraulic line in the hedges. He died instantly of cardiac arrest.

“I can’t call it an accident,” he said Sunday while speaking at a ceremony at Vincent Massey Park marking Canada’s National Day of Mourning for workers injured or killed on the job.

“I rarely feel joy or happiness. Every day has been a horrible struggle to get through the day knowing that I will never see him get married, have children, be best man at his brother’s wedding. … My heart hurts”.

Nearly 1,000 Canadians died on the job in 2022, the most recent year for which complete statistics are available, according to the Canadian Labor Congress. Another 300,000 lost time due to work-related injuries.

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In the Nick Chenier case, the Ministry of Labour, Immigration Training and Skills Development brought charges against Best Green Hedges director Sheldon Bestgreen and supervisor Steven Deans. On Thursday, Bestgreen pleaded guilty to failing to ensure the company took all reasonable steps to comply with the province’s Occupational Health and Safety Act at the Manotick workplace. The company was fined $45,000, a penalty that Jennifer Chenier called a slap in the face.

“Knowing that this could have been avoided, knowing that if the people responsible for keeping him safe had listened and done their job, it lives with me every day,” he said.

The Ministry of Labor fine was imposed on the same day that Ottawa police announced they had charged Nick’s supervisor, Steven Deans, 38, with one count of criminal negligence causing death.

It is the first time in Ottawa that criminal charges have been brought against an employer for the death of an employee, said Sean McKenney, president of the Ottawa and District Labor Council, host of Sunday’s ceremony.

“I am disappointed by the penalty imposed on the employer (a $45,000 fine and a victim surcharge is not enough) but, on the other hand, we are very satisfied with the charge of criminal negligence causing death. It doesn’t bring Nick back, but the hope is that he sends a message to employers that it’s something they need to respect: the health and safety of their workers.”

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Sunday’s ceremony was held just yards from the Heron Road Bridge, the site of a catastrophic collapse in 1966 that killed nine workers. It was another workplace disaster — the 1992 explosion and fire at the Westray mine in Nova Scotia that killed 26 workers — that led to 2004 legislation allowing criminal charges for workplace deaths.

However, police have been slow to adapt to the law, which is another reason McKenney was glad to see Ottawa police act on Nick Chenier’s death.

“The Crown and police services have very little experience in applying the Criminal Code to a workplace injury or death,” McKenney said. “They have always said: ‘This is what the Ministry of Labor does.’ Little by little we are beginning to see that change.”

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