A tangled web

Albertans hurt on the job find the road to compensation strewn with pitfalls

MEDICINE HAT -- There's a door in Dan Darnell's kitchen that explains why he's smiling. It's covered with a collage of family pictures: special events like weddings and birthdays, and outings with family and friends.

He needs the pictures, though he can hardly see them. Paralysed on one side, 90% blind in both eyes, with just a tiny field of vision out each corner, Darnell can smile anyway, because if he stands to the side of the pictures, he can see a few at a time and fill in gaps in his damaged memory.

He can see just how many people love and support him.

"That's one of the cool things since my brain surgery," he says. "I don't remember a lot of things that I did wrong but I remember everything that I did right. Except for my grandson Harley being born and baptized and all that."

It's been nearly 20 years since Darnell was injured while working on a rig to bring an oilwell into service, but he's reminded daily by his white cane - "I call it 'the stick of power,' " he optimistically jokes - by his inability to pick up his grandson and, most significantly, by regular updates to his fight with the Alberta Workers' Compensation Board.

His case is far from cut-and-dried: while working on the rig near the Old West town of Manyberries, Darnell was struck in the face by a sheared-off compression spring bolt. Some 4,800 pounds per foot of pressure drove the bolt through his cheekbone, destroying it, through his nasal cavity, destroying it, and shattering his front teeth.

"I was on top of the wellhead, standing quite a few feet up and from there I flew off and landed on my head," he says. "And the next thing I remember was the boys dragging me by my shoulders across the lease. And the only other thing I can see is a white spray, which is all the pieces of my teeth."

Though the oilpatch can still be tough toward workers who try to claim compensation, it was worse back in the mid-'80s, as the industry tried to recover from a worldwide slump and the national energy program. Fearing he'd be blackballed, Darnell did what he figured any self-respecting 'rig pig' would do: he drove home, his head the size of a basketball.

Later that evening, at a walk-in clinic, a doctor tried to stitch up his face and sent him to a dental surgeon. "All he could do was smear plastic on the chunks of teeth because there was too much swelling to really do anything."

Over the next six months, surgeons were contacted and his face repaired, though he says it took two months before his head was even X-rayed. Darnell went back to work, even though he'd occasionally black out and fall down a flight of stairs and would sometimes have migraines so painful he couldn't stand. He was eating 50 tablets of codeine a week.

"I was a mess. It was six months after that that I tried to work at Safeway, because I figured it would be something different - it seemed that whenever I did something physical the symptoms would just get worse."

The WCB helped Darnell get back to work, covering costs for rehab at a chronic pain clinic. In 1991, he was informed he had a permanent disability due to the pain, but that it was not sufficient to prevent him from working. Given his solid experience in the 'patch, that was good news: Darnell was making good money.

"But I was still having strange symptoms. Over time my side would go numb for a day or two, and then it would go back again. And then, you know, a month later it would be two days, then a week, two weeks, a month. But it always came back."

Darnell didn't know it, but a blood vessel in his brain was leaking. An MRI conducted at WCB expense in 1995 said his brain was fine and that there was no lasting damage related to his accident. Lacking faith in the results due to his symptoms, Darnell took easier jobs for less money, afraid of repeating an incident in which he blacked out while at work and broke his leg falling down stairs.

"In 1997, my left side went completely to sleep. I couldn't feel anything. So they went back in and looked around, and they went back and looked at the 1995 MRI and, sure enough, there was evidence there of bleeding. And I read through my file and find that, back in '93 when they did a CT scan, they found what they thought was a "calcification." But it wasn't, it was this bleed."

Though he was scared of what it could mean, Darnell's doctors told him the bleeding could be causing his symptoms. By 2000, the leak turned into a rupture, blinding Darnell and making the partial paralysis permanent. Some 12 years after he was initially injured, he was prepped for brain surgery.

Far from worrying, Darnell expected that, as a worker covered by the Workers' Compensation Board, everything would turn out OK: if surgeons could fix him, he could head to the rigs. If they couldn't, he'd adjust to life on compensation.

- - -

As Darnell was having holes drilled into his head to relieve the pressure on his brain, two injured workers named Frank Pagnotta and Ralph Teed were setting up a tent outside the Workers' Compensation Board in Edmonton.

Both were there to complain about treatment at the board's hands. Though they had received benefits over the years for their injuries, each gain required months and sometimes years of fighting with WCB case managers, along with repeated trips to its appeal commissioners.

Injured workers across Alberta - and Canada, for that matter - already had a loose-knit affiliation. By the time Pagnotta started the protests in 1999, he was getting some support from them. By the time he and Teed started pitching tents, other injured workers started showing up to join their protests.

It culminated in multiple rallies outside the WCB building in downtown Edmonton, along with protests at the legislature. Politicians started paying attention; the government called for two reviews of how workers are treated, one dealing with WCB policies and staff satisfaction, while the other dealt with the appeals process.

The latter was chaired by retired judge Samuel Friedman, the former by Conservative backbencher Victor Doerksen, now a longtime member of the Tory inner circle and a contender for that party's leadership. Both spent months interviewing more than 1,300 injured workers and employers across Alberta, before finally issuing reports.

Though it wasn't the first time critical reports had been issued regarding the WCB, the level of condemnation was stunning. Some 59 recommendations were framed by one common understanding: that for years, the WCB had maintained a "culture of denial" when it came to giving workers what they were due under the Workers' Compensation Act.

Unlike government, though, the WCB is not electorally accountable; though it is governed by provincial legislation and accountable to the Human Resources Department financially, it receives all of its operating capital from the workforce: employers are charged annual premiums and, in exchange for coverage, workers give up the right to sue their employer, co-workers or the board when injured.

Earlier studies in 1998 and 1991 had highlighted similar problems and Pagnotta was familiar with the history. When asked whether the 59 recommendations would make a difference, he hedged his bets: "I'll believe it when I see it."

The foremost recommendation was for a contentious claims tribunal to review as many cases as necessary back to 1988, when the appeals commission was established. It was not well received by the WCB, which rejected about 50% of the recommendations overall and warned of dire consequences if up to 24,000 old cases were reopened.

It also rejected proposals to pay for outside WCB advocates to help workers, the appointment of appeals clerks to monitor timeliness during the process, and increasing the time a worker has to appeal a WCB case decision from one to two years. A slew of other suggestions also were shot down by the board, although it qualified everything by saying it would abide by any legislative changes the government might make.

The government itself seemed much more accommodating. It backed the vast majority of the proposals, including the plan to review contentious claims, and promised to establish a tribunal in 2002. It even set up a task force, led by former Attorney General Jon Havelock, to figure out how.

"It really looked for a while there like they were taking the whole thing seriously," injured worker Ralph Teed says now. "We thought we'd won a major victory."

Almost immediately, there were rumblings that the task force was not realistic. Almost all of the complaints centred around money, and no one was suggesting the workers had been treated fairly. But the question of who would pay the millions required to establish it arose immediately.

By September 2001, Finance Minister Pat Nelson had warned the cost would have to come out of Human Resources' existing budget. By November Human Resources and Employment Minister Clint Dunford was musing that perhaps there wouldn't be retroactive payments to workers who'd been caught in the "culture of denial." The board was warning it could cost anywhere from $117 million to $170 million just to process the claims, money it would get from employers.

"Before we take the steps necessary to establish the tribunal, we need to have a process in place that will be open and equitable for all concerned," Dunford said that month. "I want to make sure that injured workers understand we are moving towards establishing a process for reviewing these claims, but there is still more work to be done.

"When you're an injured worker and you're trying to get justification or restitution then any delay by any minister is the wrong thing to do. What's important to me is that we do the right thing."

The WCB's then-CEO Mary Cameron, already under fire for a salary and benefits package that topped $350,000, was even more encouraging. "We're not putting this on the shelf. We're going to work on it," she said. "We don't think cost should be a primary concern if it improves the system."

But it was.

When a southern Alberta rig worker hurt his head on the job, it was the start of a revolving-door fight with the Workers' Compensation Board that critics say typifies how the agency deals with some injured workers.