Ontario’s Retirement, Group Home Workers Deserve Protection If Hurt on the Job

Adding these healthcare heroes to the umbrella of WSIB coverage is the best option for Ontarians

Cambridge, ON— CLAC applauds Ottawa South MPP John Fraser for bringing the focus of the Ontario Legislature onto giving basic workers’ rights to personal support workers and other healthcare heroes working in residential homes. Fraser’s bill, Bill 54, WSIB Coverage for Workers in Residential Care Facilities and Group Homes Act, 2022, will be debated later today. The bill proposes to expand the public workers compensation insurance to workers in retirement homes, residential care facilities, and group homes, giving these employees the protection they need in their essential roles.

“Workers and their families in this sector deserve to have the security that if they are hurt or injured on the job they will be supported,” says Ian DeWaard, CLAC Ontario director. “These are front-line healthcare workers who face numerous health and safety risks in the workplace, including those connected to patient lifts and transfers, as well as violence and physical assault. Bringing them into the public system is long overdue and is needed to better support our healthcare heroes.”

Retirement homes, group homes, and homecare facilities are not included in the list of workplaces for which WSIB coverage is mandatory because of how the initial legislation was structured. As a result, workers in these important sectors are not covered by the public no-fault system if they suffer an injury while at work. This legislative change had been recommended by the Ford government’s operational review of the WSIB, which was conducted in 2020, early in the government’s mandate.

“It is only fair that workers doing the same work should have the same kind of protections,” says Fraser. “To be excluded based on who your employer is, is wrong.”

CLAC represents workers in retirement homes and community living homes and has been advocating to have these workplaces added to the Workplace Safety and Insurance Act for many years. The union has long argued that private-sector insurance provided by most of these employers is inadequate because, unlike WSIB, it fails to account for the loss of earnings experienced by part-time employees with concurrent employment, disregards the relevance of prior workplace injury, and does not allow workers to meaningfully challenge unfair decisions.