There is life after politics, or as Steve Mahoney would prefer to think of it, between politics.
Yesterday, Mahoney delivered the keynote address at the huge annual convention of the Municipal Health and Safety Association at the Toronto Congress Centre in Ontario.
Mahoney demonstrated that he has absorbed his lessons as a City councillor (1978-87), an MPP for Mississauga West (1987-1997) and MP for the same riding (1997- 2004) well.
He was everything you would want in a luncheon speaker. Like funny: “I retired from politics in 1994 for health and fatigue reasons; the voters were sick and tired of me.”
In explaining why he went to Queen’s Park, he managed to advertise his future campaign for mayor of Mississauga while associating himself positively with the town’s reigning monarch: “I had supper with Hazel and mentioned that (Premier David) Peterson had called me. I told her I had always wanted to be mayor of Mississauga and wondered if she was thinking of giving it up at any time soon. ‘You know, Steve,’ she replied, ‘They need good people at Queen’s Park.’”
Mostly though, Mahoney was effective at hammering away with the theme that any single workplace accident is one too many.
Appointed as chair of the WSIB Workplace Safety and Insurance Board last year through his long-time Liberal Queen’s Park connections, Mahoney has pounded away at the public consciousness with the WSIB’s ongoing campaign to make workplace safety part of our everyday culture.
“I have been corrected for saying that our number 1 priority at the WSIB is to protect the injured worker,” said the Erin Mills resident. “Our number 1 priority is to make sure the worker is not injured in the first place.”
In our blame-the-victim mentality, we often fail to recognize a workplace accident for what it is.
Which brought Mahoney to the case of William Wallace Currie, a 47-year-old Sault Ste. Marie man who was blasting rock in 1934 so that Lakes Superior and Huron could be connected. On a rainy September morning, Currie was about to go diving underwater to set dynamite blasts when his son Lockie suggested the weather was getting too nasty.
“I can get wet up here or I can get wet down there and get paid for it,” said Currie, who was fatally injured a few minutes later when lightning hit the diving equipment on the boat and detonated the dynamite prematurely.
The youngest of Currie’s five children, 15-year-old Annie Bernice, received survivor benefits for a single year. “She is my mother and she is still alive and well and living in Mississauga,” Mahoney said in delivering the personal punch line to the piece.
It was only after he became chair of the WSIB that Mahoney learned the full story of how his grandfather, whose picture in his working gear still hangs on the wall of his cottage, had died.
He asked his staff to research the files after his son Matt suggested Mahoney might consider having a plaque erected in his grandfather’s honour.
“It’s a good example of why society doesn’t connect with workplace fatalities,” Mahoney said after his presentation. He and his family had never really thought of the tragic loss of Bill Currie in that light.
The only acceptable number for industrial accidents is zero, Mahoney said in his address. “There is a growing army on the road to zero and I hope you will all join me on that road,” he told about 200 people.
They clapped loud and long for a sober message that was obviously delivered with style and sincerity.