Ontario Conservative Labour Critic Randy Hillier rose in the House on March 25, 2015, to open up a new attack on injured workers across the province. In his inflammatory remarks during the morning Question Period, Hillier called on the government to scrap funding for the OFL’s Occupational Disability Response Team (ODRT), a program he characterized as nothing more than “slush fund” for labour.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
The ODRT is a model of injured worker advocacy that has a proud 25-year history. Since its inception in 1990, the OFL WCB Training Project, now ODRT, receives $800,000 annually from the Workplace Safety Insurance Board (WSIB). It provides province-wide training for workers and employers on their rights and obligations under the compensation system, with advanced levels of training on how to navigate the complicated WSIB claims and appeals process. Over two and a half decades, the ODRT has trained over 20,000 injured worker advocates.
This program, which Hillier says offers “zero value for money,” is responsible for easing adversarial relations between injured workers, employers and the WSIB by helping to find early resolutions to claims and assisting injured workers in returning to work.
ODRT trained advocates help the Board to gather the evidence required to expedite the claims adjudication process, which in turn reduces the cost and volume of appeals. While the financial savings to the province’s compensation system are significant, the ODRT’s impact on the lives of injured workers and their families is beyond measure.
What makes Hillier’s attack on the ODRT so disgraceful is the fraudulence of his claims. In his address before the Legislature, Hillier alleged that: “This grant to the OFL has been audited and explicitly recommended by KPMG to be shut down as it has absolutely no value for money for the taxpayers of Ontario.”
However, the WSIB is funded by employers, not taxpayers, and the actual KPMG report contained only one reference to the OFL or the ODRT, which stated: “As a whole, projects such as the OFL-ODRT improve the well-being of injured workers, and their working conditions, by being a leading provider of workplace insurance and disability prevention training and advisory services.”
Hillier went on to claim that the program had “zero oversight and no transparency.” In reality, the ODRT is audited annually, provides quarterly reports to the WSIB, and is required each year to provide a funding proposal to the WSIB.
He even went so far as to claim that WSIB funds were used to pay for staff retreats at a fancy Muskoka resort when, in fact, they subsidized an intensive training course for students at a hotel that is rated with just 2.5 stars out of five.
The outlandish allegations that Hillier has made about the ODRT were so wildly divorced from reality that they laid bare his willingness to use injured workers as political cannon fodder for his partisan agenda.
“Hillier’s flailing against the ODRT is simply a lingering vendetta against the OFL for mounting the campaign that demolished the Progressive Conservative ambitions in the Ontario election and chased Tim Hudak into political oblivion,” said OFL President Sid Ryan. “This newest Tory attack on injured workers is a helpful reminder of the anti-worker agenda Hillier’s party had in store for Ontario.”
