Older and wiser

Kevin Heikkila had to become an expert on his own claim before things began to improve

CALGARY -- Calgarian Kevin Heikkila says he maintained his dignity in the face of harsh treatment by the Workers Compensation Board. But it would have been easier if he could walk.

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In the middle of Kevin Heikkila's bathtub there is a stool. If it wasn't for the stool, and a few handrails here and there, a casual visitor to his somewhat ramshackle home might have no clue a paraplegic person lives there.

He likes it that way. Days after being crippled in a skylight accident back in 1991, Heikkila was being shown by a buddy who was also paraplegic how to pull wheelies. "It made me realize that I lost the use of my legs, not the rest of my life."

His life, in fact, is often pretty good. He has a girlfriend who sings like the bejesus and he plays sax in the same band. Recently, he retrained and became a human resources manager for a Calgary firm.

Rebuilding his life, however, would be a lot easier without fighting his claims with the Alberta Workers Compensation Board, he says. If it were just a case of technicalities that had to be enforced, he says he'd understand. But until some recent improvements, the WCB made Heikkila feel as worthless as his legs, including sticking him with a $30,000 bill for a lawsuit he lost but that the board case- managed.

"If you don't know their policies and mandate and what they follow, and everything you're entitled to before you even start the process, then you won't get it," says Heikkila. "It's as simple as that. For at least eight or nine years, it was an absolute nighmare. After appealing and researching, and looking into their policies, and confronting my case managers, things became a little easier.

"But the reality is that it hasn't gotten that much easier. They still try to hold back things that I'm entitled to. For example, after 10 years of fighting for a bicycle with hand controls, they finally bought me a bike. But now they won't buy a light for the bike. If I want to do brace walking, they won't have a physio come to the house, I'll have to go to the physio for a maxmium of one day per week. They reduced my personal care allowance from $1,200 to $800 without giving any basis for it. They just said I didn't need it."

It's not a new complaint. Four separate provincial committees - including two as recently as 2000 - lambasted the WCB for mistreating injured workers.

The two most recent even suggested the board projected a "culture" of denying claims. Another, led by prominent Tory Victor Doerksen - now a candidate to replace Ralph Klein as Tory leader - was particularly scathing. "Too often it seems that injured workers, rather than being helped and assisted during a difficult and traumatic time, are marginalized by the WCB," it concluded.

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That's why Doerksen's own party promised to fix the problem. And over the six years since the Friedman and Doerksen reports were released, the party has made some well received legislative changes to do just that.

But one, in particular, hasn't been quite so well received. In 2002, the province introduced legislation to follow up on its promise of a tribunal into long-standing contentious claims. It had the guidelines in place for the tribunal's operation, and by that September, a three-member MLA committee was set to report on how it would be funded.

Then it all fell apart.

The Canadian Federation of Independent Business began lobbying against the tribunal, arguing that businesses faced potential massive WCB premium hikes - on top of nearly 80% hikes over the four years prior - to pay for the tribunal. It got the support of the Alberta Chambers of Commerce and the Petroleum Services Association of Canada.

By early 2003, former Human Resources minister Clint Dunford was besieged by more than 1,000 letters from the business community, asking for the tribunal to be killed. The CFIB members did not argue that either of the Friedman or Doerksen reports were wrong; they simply suggested that employers should not be bearing 20-year-old costs generated by bad WCB case management.

For its part, the WCB opposed the tribunals from Day 1 and, despite former CEO Mary Cameron's public assertion that money should not be an issue, had also characterized it as the complaints of a small percentage of disgruntled workers. In fact, Friedman's report had found that nearly 80% of more than 800 workers contacted were unhappy with their WCB treatment, the polar opposite to the WCB's own polls.

Meanwhile, the government was ostensibly still supporting the tribunal; it set up a Tory MLA committee to ensure the Friedman and Doerksen reports were properly instituted.

But a funny thing happened over the next two years: the government simply dropped its support. There is no clear explanation in the many Hansard legislative debate records as to why it chose not to proceed with the tribunal, and it didn't make any official statements.

But there were plenty of hints. By early 2004, Dunford told the legislature contentious claims were no longer a government priority. He did not, however, explain why it had changed its mind and why the reports were no longer valid when he slagged the entire concept in the House on March 16, 2004.

"We have various estimates as to what the cost of the administation of this program would be. But I can tell you that my priorities at the current time rest with other members of our client base that fall within our mandate, and that is the poor and the vulnerable here in the province," Dunford said.

"Until such time as we are able to fully enact the kind of reform that we feel is necessay in that particular area, we're not willing to invest our money in second and third chances."

A month later, he referred to complaints about the WCB as "the tyranny of the anecdote." In the same session, he said the government's priority instead was to reform the Assured Income for the Severely Handicapped, which was seeing an increase in recipients of 6% per year. Suggestions that many AISH recipients were former injured workers denied coverage were scoffed at by Dunford.

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While the provincial government was doing an about-turn, Ralph Teed was enjoying his most successful period of beating the WCB in the 20 years of fighting the board. He didn't get every benefit to which he was entitled until this year, but by 2004, his injured workers groups had managed to force the reviews and made major inroads in his own case.

Teed injured his back in 1985 while working in the oil-patch. Although he was often able to wade through his case file on his own, he also got help from Edmonton advocate Kevin Becker, a former WCB case manager who left the organization in disgust and later accused it of internal policies designed to deny workers coverage.

"I just knew there was something seriously wrong with the system, based purely on how I was being treated by people," says Teed. "It wasn't just the denial of benefits, because I'd always win those eventually. It was the fact that in every case, I had to fight them tooth and nail."

But Teed didn't meet any other activists until around 1995, when he went looking for other people experiencing the same problems. What he found shocked him. Rather than being deadbeats, the injured workers had genuine arguments; they were often so angry, discouraged and confused by the system that they came off as malcontents. But behind that facade, they were "crying out loud, and with anger," he says.

"I was told by the WCB in that early period that I was going to have to get rehab and actually be re-educated for a job, so I moved my family and the girls down south to Edmonton. Well, I didn't get no rehab. I didn't get anything." The WCB told Teed there was nothing conclusive to show he even had a back injury. It wasn't until a surgeon opened up his back - at Teed's request, to support his 1994 appeal - that it relented.

"And right away, as soon as they look at the X-rays, the doctor says, 'He's got some serious troubles': he says the die they've injected into my back is everywhere, there was no disc left. The disc interior, when they operated, they found had leaked into the nerve areas and the joints.

"But I didn't really win and I didn't know that. It turns out that you think that you've proved you're injured, but then the whole nightmare starts over again."

If there was a way to clawback his benefits, Teed says, the WCB found it. At one point, he was ordered to try and work in a back brace, despite doctors warning that he could not stay in one spot for more than 10 minutes without chronic pain. Convinced he was cheating, the WCB hired private investigators, who Teed says informed his neighbours they were police surveilling a drug dealer.

EDITED TAPES

Teed believes they then tried to use edited tapes to prove he was physically active, at one point actually cutting the tape to the wrong point, so that it shows a different person the WCB then contended was Teed.

By 2006, he'd won every appealable benefit available to him. And right up to 2006, he had to fight for them. "They'd produce doctors, psychiatrists, all of whom sided with the WCB, some of them without even having examined me.

"I would go to the appeals commission again, and again, and again. And eventually, they'd alway side with me. But for the WCB, it was deny, deny, deny. Even when their arguments made no logical sense at all or you had absolute proof, they'd just move ahead, and eventually you start to believe they're hoping you'll just give up.

"It's a game. They make everything a legal thing. I'm not a lawyer, and I don't have the money for lawyers, but every little legal thing they can fight they will, and you'll sure start wishing you had a good lawyer."