It's easy to forgive employers for thinking what they're seeing when they look out the window is the Wild West.
And for the longest time it was. Northern troubadours The Gumboots celebrate the heroics of one such fellow in their ballad Willy and the Bandits, which tells the tale of the late, legendary bush pilot Willy Laserich and his crew.
Laserich was known to fly through snow storms to deliver the injured and ill to hospital from remote communities in the High Arctic. He was clearly an admirable figure, flying by the seat of his pants to take care of Northerners in need.
As far as News/North knows, the Adlair Air founder had a perfect safety record. Alas, other northern employers – or rather, their employees -- have not been so lucky. And this is when the romanticized image of a final frontier North comes crashing back to Earth.
The cold, hard facts found in the 2015 annual report by NWT Workers' Safety and Compensation Commission (WSCC) suggest the territory has a long way to go to improving workplace safety. The report highlights 13 work-related fatalities between 2013 and 2015.
According to a 2017 report on workplace deaths prepared for the University of Regina, the NWT had the worst five-year average out of all provinces and territories with an average of 15.3 deaths per 100,000 workers.
In 2016 there was only one but it was no less tragic and preventable. Nineteen-year-old David Vinnicombe, from Longreach, Australia, had come to the Great White North seeking fun and adventure. He ended up dead at a road construction project outside Inuvik, crushed by an industrial earth-packing machine he had not been properly trained or supervised to drive.
“Instead of planning a party, we were planning a funeral,” said his mother Renee Vinnicombe while reading a victim impact statement via webcam at a Dec. 5 sentencing hearing held for her dead son's employer Allen Services Ltd., which is facing a $100,000 fine for safety charges related to Vinnicombe's death.
A decision in that case is expected in late February.
The territory, historically, as noted above, is well known for “flying by the seat of its pants” during times of need. In the early days there were fewer options and communities depended on resourceful people to “get things done.” But as the North develops and infrastructure improves so do professional standards.
These standards are there to ensure things not only get done but are done safely.
Considering the territory's workplace fatality record to date, this is an issue that needs a much wider discussion.
To not get to the bottom of why the NWT has such an abysmal workplace safety record and figure out ways to improve it, is to invite more tragedy and crushing penalties for employers who refuse to get with the times.