For two years David Marshall was Canada’s top diplomat in Barbados. And during that time in the first decade of the 21st century, Marshall, once Canada’s assistant auditor general, earned a reputation in Barbados as being an approachable and sensitive high commissioner, who was keenly interested in the island nation’s economic and social development.
“I always found him very professional, affable and keen to learn about Barbados and to get an understanding of our culture, politics, and our economics,” said Teresa Marshall, a retired permanent secretary, who served in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
“I also found him to be keen to provide assistance to Barbados and to enhance the bilateral relationship between our two countries. I would say he did a very good job when he was here.”
A Barbadian who interacted socially with Marshall when he was high commissioner agreed. “I considered him a good standard bearer for Canada,” the woman said. “He was easy to talk to and was always interested in what was going on in Barbados.”
If that’s the image the Canadian public servant who also has an enviable track record in business, where he served as vice chairman of the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, the parent company Barbados-based FirstCaribbean International Bank, it stands in sharp contrast to the picture often painted of him in Ontario. A headline in the Toronto Star, Canada’s largest circulating daily paper, tells that part of the story.
“Meet the man injured Ontario workers ‘love to hate’,” was the way the paper put it. “David Marshall is a man both praised and reviled.”
That love-hate relationship can be traced to his current job as president and chief executive officer of the Workplace Safety and Insurance Board of Ontario (WSIB), a provincial agency that runs the workplace insurance system for employers.
It receives premiums from employers, provides disability benefits to injured or otherwise ailing workers; pays close attention to employee health; and tries to get them back to work as quickly as possible – many critics say too quickly.
And for that responsibility, he is being paid CAN$400 000
(BDS$641 823) annually and has just had his stay as CEO extended for another two years.
But herein lies the rub. While the Ministry of Labour gives him top marks for a job well done, Marshall angers workers, trade unions and families who complain that the WSIB and its extensive bureaucracy seem more interested in employers’ concerns than in the workers.’
Critics trace the problem to Marshall’s mandate: to get the agency’s finances in order; reduce its unfunded liability, meaning the money it has to pay workers but doesn’t have; help injured workers get back to work; boost safety in the workplace; and improve employee health.
“Everybody loves to hate the WSIB . . . but we are doing a lot for workers,” Marshall was quoted as telling a Toronto newspaper recently.
“The combination of fewer injuries, better return to work, better management of our investment fund and higher premiums than we need for day-to-day we are well ahead of our schedule that the government has set in order to become fully funded” by 2027.
Depending on who is writing it, the highlights of the agency’s report card would look something like this:
The unfunded liability, according to the Star, has plummeted from more than CAN$14 billion (BDS$22.5 billion) to about
CAN$9 billion (BDS$14.4 billion) in five years.
On average some 200 000 claims are received by WSIB from injured or ill workers annually, 60 per cent of them being resolved without employees being absent from the job.
“We have seen a steady decline in the number of claims being accepted . . . and an increase in workers being told they can go back to work no matter how badly they are injured,” charged Catherine Fenech, an official of the Ontario Network of Injured Workers.
Between 45 to 46 per cent of claims receive stamp of approval automatically. That’s because of the use of a sophisticated information system, “Computer Logic”. At the end of the first decade of the 21st century, WSIB was paying out more than CAN$3 billion (BDS$4.8 billion) in benefits. But by 2013, the payouts had fallen to CAN$2.5 billion, (BDS$4.1 billion) a 22 per cent decline.
The “number of traumatic fatalities has actually gone up by 43 per cent between 2009 and 2013,” charged John McKinnon, executive director of Injured Workers Consultants Community legal clinic.
There were 68 fatalities on the job in 2009, a figure that rose to 97 in 2013. “If a worker is injured, they get 85 per cent of their wages and if they can’t go back to work until 65, they get a pension plan that we fund completely,” insisted Marshall.
Those numbers explain why Sid Ryan, president of the Ontario Federation of Labour, was quoted as describing Marshall as “the equivalent of the modern day bounty hunter”.
They also suggest that figures can mean different things to different people. That’s why you should be careful in using them to rush to judgement.