A Three-Year Rise in BC’s Deadly Workplace Accident Rate

University of Regina human resources professor Sean Tucker wants you to pay attention to the workers who die on the job.

One hundred forty-six workers died from a work-related cause in 2024 in B.C., according to WorkSafeBC data. Of those, 78 died from disease related to their work.

The most recent data from all of Canada’s workers’ compensation boards is a little behind. It shows 1,056 Canadians died from workplace-related illness or injury in 2023.

Pictures of a dozen of those workers’ faces are included in Tucker’s annual report on workplace injury and death in Canada, which he produced with University of British Columbia public health researcher Anya Keefe.

Every year since 2017, Tucker and Keefe have compiled data on the rates of work-related deaths to help regulators and employers identify and act against deadly trends.

“This is a statistical report, but we’re talking about people’s lives,” Tucker said. “We’re talking about the loss that survivors experience — children, spouses, friends, co-workers — from people dying due to injury or occupational disease on the job.”

The Tyee sat down with Tucker to break down the data just before the National Day of Mourning on April 28. The day commemorates and honours workers who die or suffer injury or illness on the job.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The Tyee: Why track workplace fatality rates across Canada?

Sean Tucker: My co-author Anya Keefe and I wanted to fill a gap. We have reports on the number of work-related deaths per year, but we didn’t have a rate, and you need a rate to compare data among provinces. That was really the impetus for this project.

We want to know which jurisdictions have relatively higher rates of work-related deaths, and which ones have relatively lower rates. We also want to understand the trends within a province over time.

It’s important to acknowledge with this report that there’s a significant lag in the data. This is a 2025 report, reporting on 2023 deaths.

What trends are we seeing here in British Columbia?

Since the 1970s, the trajectory in B.C.’s workplace fatality rate has been downward. However, in recent years we seem to have levelled off or are increasing.

What we’ve seen in the last three years is a steady increase in the traumatic injury fatality rate. WorkSafeBC refers to these as “other” fatalities. These include incidents like falls from heights, electrocutions and contact with machinery. It’s not dramatic, but it’s not moving in the direction we want to see.

After steadily increasing for five years, B.C.’s occupational disease fatality rate declined in 2023.

In terms of work-related fatality claims by sector, the red line represents the number of traumatic injury deaths. The increase between 2022 and 2023 is a concern.

Since 2020, there has been a troubling increase in worker deaths in construction. Deaths in manufacturing, represented by the olive-coloured line [below], have also increased.

It seems that [construction and manufacturing] are primarily driving the overall increase in work-related traumatic fatalities in B.C.

Health care, across Canada, is also a major source of workplace injury. That’s an ongoing concern and an ongoing area of attention for the regulator.

We have a significant staffing shortage in health care, and yet we manage to injure a lot of health-care workers each year. So we need to work on those working conditions.

What are some of the holes, or limitations, in the data?

Our data is based on accepted claims, and we know that injury reporting is an issue. We know that that’s a function of both workers not being aware of the requirement to report, or viewing their injury as not serious enough to report.

We also know that there’s claim suppression among some employers, so what we see at the end of the day is only a representation of some of what’s been accepted as an injury claim.

In terms of occupational disease fatality claims, we know that there’s underreporting there as well, because there’s a long latency period between exposure and death in many cases.

If a treating physician doesn’t take an occupational history for the patient, or someone who has cancer doesn’t make the connection to their work, then it may never be reported to a workers’ compensation board, never adjudicated and never show up in our statistics.

In your report, you make recommendations to workers’ compensation boards across the province that they release the previous years’ data earlier, standardize how they collect data and find ways to prevent underreporting. Why is this so important?

We know, for example, that there are different reporting policies at WCBs. For example, in some provinces, if you have a heart attack at work it counts as a workplace fatality. In others, it doesn't.

We also see differences in terms of claims accepted for things like violence in the workplace and harassment in the workplace. We know that sexual harassment and violence is prevalent in some workplaces, and we know we’re not capturing all of those instances very well.

So there’s a long list of differences across the country. These are small policy differences, but they can affect all of the rates we calculate.

I wanted to highlight the harassment complaints because it sometimes gets overlooked.

Let’s talk about it.

This is a human rights issue. It’s a matter of dignity, but it’s also a health and safety issue.

I think having stats on bullying and harassment in the workplace is really important. For workers who are experiencing this, WorkSafeBC is an outlet for reporting if you don't feel safe reporting in your own workplace.

What are you hoping comes from all this?

We hope that regulators, those with the responsibility for enforcement, will read the report.

We hope that workers’ compensation boards will read the report and think about trends over time, and take action on those results to improve injury prevention.

We hope that health and safety practitioners who are reading the report will share it with others in their organization to raise awareness about the need for stronger prevention in workplaces.

Ultimately, we’re all about prevention. We want to prevent serious injury and death in the workplace and that’s why we do this work.