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National Day of Mourning
Apr. 28th, 2020 09:46 amEvery year since I retired, I have been saying that I really must attend one of the noon-hour memorial services for workers killed or injured on the job. It normally takes place on April 28 on the Heron Road bridge, just a short distance from our home in Fisher Heights. That's the site of a major industrial accident (the Heron Road bridge collapse) that took place in August 1966, just before my parents and I returned from a vacation in Toronto and Niagara Falls.
The location of the memorial has always made sense to me, but until recently I always wondered why April 28 was chosen as the date for this observance. Why not in August, when the weather is certainly nicer for gathering in parks and more people would be on vacation and available to attend?
Apparently it's down to something that happened in Sudbury in 1984 and subsequently to the introduction of workers' compensation legislation in Ontario on this date in 1991.
By the fall of 1986, I had moved from my office building at Confederation Heights (just steps from the memorial site) to a Labour Canada building in Hull (pretty much inaccessible to me at the moment). The main Labour Canada Library had two Reference Centre locations in the same building, one of which was the Occupational Safety and Health (OSH) Reference Centre. Throughout the 1990s, the OSH branch of Labour Canada always produced publicity materials about the National Day of Mourning for workers killed or injured on the job. Eventually both the reference centres disappeared and even Labour Canada itself was absorbed into one of those Kim Campbell-era monster departments - I think its latest incarnation may be Human Resources and Social Development although perhaps even that is obsolete now. In any case, you can see what the Canadian Centre for Occupational Health and Safety (CCOHS) has planned for today at this URL:
https://www.ccohs.ca/events/mourning/
With pretty much all in-person gatherings being taboo these days, the usual noon hour gathering will obviously not happen today. I understand, however, that CCOHS is encouraging people to take a moment at 11 AM to remember fallen workers.
The location of the memorial has always made sense to me, but until recently I always wondered why April 28 was chosen as the date for this observance. Why not in August, when the weather is certainly nicer for gathering in parks and more people would be on vacation and available to attend?
Apparently it's down to something that happened in Sudbury in 1984 and subsequently to the introduction of workers' compensation legislation in Ontario on this date in 1991.
By the fall of 1986, I had moved from my office building at Confederation Heights (just steps from the memorial site) to a Labour Canada building in Hull (pretty much inaccessible to me at the moment). The main Labour Canada Library had two Reference Centre locations in the same building, one of which was the Occupational Safety and Health (OSH) Reference Centre. Throughout the 1990s, the OSH branch of Labour Canada always produced publicity materials about the National Day of Mourning for workers killed or injured on the job. Eventually both the reference centres disappeared and even Labour Canada itself was absorbed into one of those Kim Campbell-era monster departments - I think its latest incarnation may be Human Resources and Social Development although perhaps even that is obsolete now. In any case, you can see what the Canadian Centre for Occupational Health and Safety (CCOHS) has planned for today at this URL:
https://www.ccohs.ca/events/mourning/
With pretty much all in-person gatherings being taboo these days, the usual noon hour gathering will obviously not happen today. I understand, however, that CCOHS is encouraging people to take a moment at 11 AM to remember fallen workers.
