WorkSafeBC has successfully laid regulatory charges in court in only three workplace safety cases since 1999, The Vancouver Sun has learned.
It is a marked departure from a five-year period in the late 90s when the province's chief workplace safety agency aggressively pursued court action to specifically bring an element of public censure to convicted companies.
Instead, in a policy shift in 1999, WorkSafeBC began to rely almost entirely on administrative penalties, which hit employers in the pocket book, but don't necessarily carry the same public reprobation.
As a result, it has almost no experience preparing cases for the courthouse, which could, in part, explain why the Crown said it mishandled two recent sawmill explosion investigations.
WorkSafeBC investigations concluded two deadly wood dust-fuelled explosions in 2012 were preventable, but in rejecting charges earlier this year, Crown counsel said that flaws in the investigations meant some evidence would not likely stand up in court.
WorkSafeBC faced heavy criticism for the bungled investigations -- including from Premier Christy Clark -- but defended itself saying it had successfully forwarded 31 charges between 1996 and 2010, which had netted 24 convictions, using the same investigation system it had used in the two sawmill explosions.
However, 28 of those charges were laid between 1996 and 1999, resulting in 21 convictions, according to WorkSafeBC information on the cases obtained by The Sun through a freedom of information request.
The information also shows that 19 of the 24 convictions were obtained through a guilty plea. Of the 10 cases that were heard in court, WorkSafeBC had a 50-per-cent conviction rate.
All three of the convictions after 1999 were obtained through a guilty plea.
"It means they haven't had a single test of their regulatory investigation since 2000," says Janet Patterson, a labour lawyer who has represented workers and is a co-author of Insult to Injury, a 2009 report about B.C. workers' compensation.
The convictions since 1999 include a $5,000 fine to Ambroy Equipment for ignoring a stop-work order, and an $80,000 fine to A. Groenhuysen Mechanical for an incident in which a skidder used to drag logs down a hill near Creston rolled over and crushed and killed the operator. It also includes $350,000 in fines for the deaths of three workers killed at a mushroom farm in Langley.
WorkSafeBC declined to make officials available for an interview to discuss the shift from prosecutions in the late '90s to the use of administrative penalties.
It said there were two other files referred to Crown after 1999 that didn't result in charges, but declined to provide details on them.
