Hi Everyone,I'm new here, as you can tell. I wish I'd found this place last year when I really began this "crusade".
Two years ago, my husband slowly drowned as he waited for rescue after the air taxi taking him to work crashed with four other men on board. It appears they all survived the accident, but only my husband was ever found. He was a logger on his way to work. The whole story is here: www.questforjustice.ca
We really need help. Three of the men were in committed relationships (three widows including myself), the fourth also had a child making the total children to lose their father ten, aged two months to eleven years. The fifth man had no financial dependants.
Because the government gave up the official search for the wreckage and the families were faced with supporting themselves without their breadwinners, we were advised by everyone that the subrugation of our rights to WorkSafe BC in order to receive survivor pensions was advisable. There would be no-one to sue anyways, if it came to that, because of the Worker's Compensation Act's protection of employers and the fact that the "Beaver" is such an old aircraft, there wasn't going to be any avenue after an out of country entity either. They were wrong. And of course, we never thought the government might hold some responsibility.
So needless to say, none of us have great amounts of money with which to hire lawyers to help us expose what we have learned. We believe it to be easily provable that there was criminal negligence in the failure to provide a safe workplace. But the RCMP will not prosecute because the Transportation Safety Board and Transport Canada will not say that anything was done "wrong". The RCMP keep telling us we need a lawyer, not understanding that we cannot sue the employers or the maintenance facility. The WorkSafe BC lawyers do not seem keen to help us seek justice - the little queen certainly does not like to sue the big queen. We have done our own research, hired our own experts, written reports, letters, had fundraising efforts to help with the costs of "proving" our claims (including search and recovery of the wreckage and searching for and attempting recovery of the engine). Now we have also begun an online petition "Five Deaths Demand Justice": http://www.petitiononline.com/cgaqw/petition.html
What it comes down to is this. There are serious safety problems both in the transport of forest workers and in the air taxi industry. Many of these issues are a direct result of the problems related to jurisdictional access between federally and provincially regulated programs/industries.
We want people to know about these issues. Our petition is trying to force a public inquiry. It is being endorsed by the United Steelworkers and the BC Federation of Labour (in it's third day of existance).
If anyone has any ideas, advice, comments, criticisms, etc., please let me know.
Kirsten Stevens
"dhc2widow"