New law forces MAPAO changes

At its recent annual meeting in Toronto the Mines Accident Prevention Association of Ontario (MAPAO) celebrated 60 years of progress in Ontario’s mining industry.

The immediate forerunner of MAPAO was created as a result of the disastrous underground fire at the Hollinger mine at Timmins, Ont., in 1928 when 39 men died. The subsequent court of inquiry determined that management at Hollinger had neither the knowledge nor the equipment to cope with such an emergency and one of the recommendations carries through to us today as the mine rescue system.

MAPAO has come a long way since then and with the recent passage of Bill 208 it has reached a major turning point.

Bill 208 had a controversial passage through the Ontario legislature. As opposition leader, Bob Rae opposed it, but he has given his approval since assuming office as premier of Ontario.

Neither management nor labor are entirely satisfied with the bill’s provisions nor its implications. Both have reservations on the manner in which the acts and regulations will be administered in practice.

Essentially, Bill 208 replaces the adversarial relationship which exists between labor and management, with the mandated requirement to deal with all matters involving health and safety, on a co-operative and unified basis. Special interests of management and labor are to be subordinated to safety on the shop floor.

One example is MAPAO itself, a management organization with a board selected from the senior ranks of the mining industry. From now on, the board will be composed of directors selected equally from both management and organized labor.

So far organized labor has been unable to accept the idea of representatives from the non-unionized labor sector although 60% of the workforce in Canada is not unionized.

The workhorse of Bill 208 is the Workplace Health and Safety Agency governed by a 20-person board representing both labor and management equally.

At the workplace level, Joint Health and Safety Committees (JHSC) oversee the conditions under which employees work. If these conditions are unsatisfactory, then the JHSC can bring considerable pressure to bear. Under extreme conditions, the JHSC can call for stop-work action and this would have effect whether the workplace was unionized or not.

Both labor and management speakers at the recent annual meeting in Toronto stressed that work stoppages of this nature would be extremely unlikely. The “right to refuse unsafe work” was quoted by labor vice-chairman Paul Forder as not having been substantially abused since its inauguration. Similarly, Management vice-chairman Paul Parker quoted his extensive experience at Inco Ltd. where potentially disruptive circumstances had invariably been solved by consensus.

At an earlier period in the province’s mining history, regulations of health and safety and mines were articulated as a comprehensive set of rules. The job of the government’s inspectors was then to ensure that the rules were followed. The government acted as policeman.

The policeman system has gradually been modified over the years and Bill 208 completes the 100% conversion to an internally disciplined system run by the people who are most intimately concerned, the operation’s employees and supervisors. This is the “Internal Responsibility System” (IRS). Government involvement is virtually eliminated at the shop level.