Somebody revive Chuck Barris.
Everything that has happened since the deadly explosions destroyed the Babine Forest Products sawmill in Burns Lake and the Lakeland Mills facility in Prince George in 2012 has been a gong show.
First, the Criminal Justice Branch ruled that the WorksafeBC investigation rendered significant amounts of the evidence it had collected on the Babine case as inadmissible in court. Then, the provincial government refused to hold a public inquiry, in favour of a coroner's inquest, which was initially going to be a joint investigation into the two tragedies. Fortunately, the government backed down and allowed two separate inquests to go ahead but has refused to provide legal representation for the widows of the dead workers and the permanently wounded living victims.
There have been concerns from the very beginning that a coroner's inquest didn't have the legal teeth to get to the bottom of what happened and why. After taking part for the first three weeks, the United Steelworkers withdrew its legal counsel from the inquest on Monday, lacking confidence in both the process and the outcome.
The culprit once again appears to be WorksafeBC, which seems to have tarnished another legal investigation into the Lakeland Mills tragedy.
Despite the best efforts of coroner Lisa Lapointe and coroner's counsel John Orr, to give some answers to the victims and their families, WorksafeBC looks like it has put its corporate interests first. Its lawyers dodged and weaved around questions about the existence of another investigation into Lakeland Mills and what that probe found.
"What we were told was WorkSafe told them (the Sinclar Group, the owner of Lakeland Mills) they didn't need to (conduct their own investigation)," an exasperated Orr said on the courthouse steps Wednesday after Lapointe adjourned the inquest indefinitely. "I kept asking if the company did an investigation and the answer I kept hearing was no, they didn't. That was technically correct, the company didn't, the law firm (representing the Sinclar Group) retained CASE Forensics. The investigation was done but I asked the wrong question, I suppose."
In other words, WorkSafeBC knew of a separate investigation into the incident, had been offered the results of that investigation for its own report into the matter by Sinclar Group lawyers, even though that work was protected by client-solicitor privilege, and unilaterally decided that wasn't of interest to the inquest.
Before suspending the inquest, Lapointe let WorkSafeBC know exactly what she thought of that.
"You don't get to filter, that is not your role," Lapointe said. "And in fact, I would say as participants you have a legal responsibility that anything you have in your possession or information that you know about needs to be brought forward and then I can decide if it's relevant."
The questions Orr wants to pursue - and the victims and families deserve to have answered - is why WorkSafeBC declined to look at the work done in the separate investigation before issuing its own report. Orr is now suggesting he's going to be calling on WorksafeBC.'s CEO at he time, David Anderson, to answer that very question. According to Orr, Paul Way, the lead investigator for CASE Foresnics, the Seattle firm that investigated Lakeland Mills on behalf of the Sinclar Group's lawyers, has already agreed to testify.
The Sinclar Group's reaction to Lapointe's decision to suspend the inquest isn't helping. matters. Company spokesman Cam McAlpine said the CASE Forensics investigation would not have affected WorksafeBC's conclusions about the cause of the blast.
That may be so but again, that is for the coronor and the inquest jury to decide, not for WorksafeBC or The Sinclar Group to decide on their behalf.
Perhaps coroner inquests are adequate to investigate these two disasters but a broader public inquiry needs to be done by the provincial government into the disaster that seems to be WorksafeBC, a corporation supposedly working on behalf of workers but apparently looking out only for itself.
