A ceremony was held Monday in the Greater Sudbury community of Val Caron to recognize 28 workers who have lost their lives to work-related illnesses or injuries. The event took place at Leo Gerard Memorial Park, where the names were read out one by one and a family member was presented with a rose. Families remember loved ones lost Celine Quenneville attended the event on behalf of her husband, Mike, who passed away three years ago of an occupational illness at age 58. She was accompanied by her daughter. “He worked for Vale and but worked for other mines prior to Vale,” Quenneville said. “On Feb. 17, 2023, we found out he got diagnosed with lung cancer that had metastasized to his brain. Two and a half months later, he was gone.” Ceremony organized by labour council & city The event was organized by the Sudbury and District Labour Council in collaboration with the City of Greater Sudbury. “I’m working with government, labour and industry, that we collectively all do better so that we can stop adding names to this board,” said current Ward 5 councillor Mike Parent. Jessica Montgomery, president of the Labour Council, said the last time a similar ceremony was done was in 2022. One of the names listed was an individual who passed last year, but others were from the last decade. “Anybody’s eligible to be added to the wall if they are from our community or they were working in our community or, their local union is in our community, they’re eligible to be added to the wall,” Montgomery said. More work needed Sean Staddon, a compensation officer with United Steelworkers Local 6500, told CTV News that while improvements have been made to workers’ safety, more needs to be done. “We are seeing a general improvement in workers’ health and safety year over year,” he said. “Unfortunately, we still have fatalities, and we still have occupational disease fatalities. Those numbers haven’t gone down in decades.” Montgomery said there is a project under way to add more names to the memorial wall. “We are hopeful to gather more names next year of those that we have missed,” she said. “But hopefully we’ll get caught up and then only will be at.” Quenneville said she will continue to fight for workers’ safety in her husband’s name. “I was really happy today because one thing Mike asked me to do was to not let this go. To fight, to fight for future generations,” she said. “I’ve got a grandson who could possibly go into mining. My whole family worked in mining. So yeah, for future generations, so that we can avoid this from happening to other families and my own again.”
