What the Magna-owned factory says about Ontario’s heat laws

It was hot by nature inside the Perth, Ont. foundry, owned by automotive giant Magna International. Huge aluminum ingots were melted down and cast into parts for cars and trucks, a process that generates intense heat.

Warm weather amplified the problem. Inside Grenville Castings, the upcoming Canada Day weekend had sparked fear. A heat wave was looming in the forecast, and the factory ran shifts 24/7, without breaks for weekends or holidays.

A worker reached out to the Ministry of Labour’s health and safety hotline, pleading for help, as others had for many years.

“Yesterday we had an employee taken out by ambulance and this weekend I’m afraid for our people,” the employee wrote.

“Please send someone before the weekend heat wave so no one is severely injured or killed.”

No ministry health and safety inspectors arrived at the plant that weekend, records show. So when the brutal, record-breaking heat wave descended, it was Harvey, a human resources manager with less than a year on the job, who faced a decision.

A supervisor called her at home Saturday to report that some areas of the plant were more than 60 C, she wrote in a later legal filing. Multiple workers were physically ill, he told her.

So Harvey made the call: shut it down.

“People were going to die,” Harvey said in an interview. “It was just too damn hot.”

Magna disputed Harvey’s claims about the temperature at the plant in its own legal filing, calling her decision “extreme” and “unilateral,” made without consulting superiors or considering alternatives. 

Both parties agree that, soon after, Harvey was fired.

By the end of that summer, Grenville Castings, a factory with fewer than 500 employees, would rack up more heat injuries than almost any Ontario workplace.

Heat stress on the job is threatening more and more workers worldwide, as heat waves expand and intensify because of climate change. It’s a public health crisis and an economic millstone: extreme heat already wipes out hundreds of billions of dollars in labour productivity every year.

A recent Star investigation showed that critical workplace injuries in Ontario spike on the hottest days of the year. Toronto experienced far more superhot days this summer than historic norms, and unusually hot weather lingered into October.

Extreme heat directly causes illnesses such as heat stroke, but also raises the risk of heart attacks, kidney problems and even sudden injuries, as heat stress degrades workers’ physical fortitude and mental acuity.

Labour Minister David Piccini has insisted the government’s existing rules to protect workers from heat are “robust.”

The story of Grenville Castings challenges this assertion. Provincial inspectors repeatedly ordered the company to fix its heat stress plan, and slapped Magna with more than 125 orders to rectify health and safety violations in less than eight years. But heat injuries — and injuries of all kinds — proliferated anyway, until Magna shuttered the factory in 2019.

The saga of Grenville Castings’ final years — revealed through hundreds of pages of internal ministry investigations, injury records, workers’ accounts, and the legal dispute between Harvey and Magna — exposes the gaps in Ontario’s workplace heat protections, and suggests workers across the province remain at risk as climate change tightens its vise.

Grenville Castings was once a successful family-run business, eventually operating three foundries in towns southwest of Ottawa. But the company struggled as it passed through a string of new owners, finally entering creditor protection during the 2007 Great Recession until it was sold again.

When Magna International, the Fortune Global 500 automotive giant, announced it had acquired the Perth facility in 2011, the town was jubilant.

Mayor John Fenik told the local newspaper that Magna’s acquisition was “a big deal and great news story for the Town of Perth.”

Inside the factory, some workers noticed a shift.

“Grenville Castings was a good company. They looked after their people. When Magna took over, that started to slip, there’s no question about it,” said Ron Davis, who worked at Grenville Castings for 44 years.

Magna did not respond to detailed questions for this article.

Records from the Workplace Safety and Insurance Board (WSIB) show that injuries dramatically multiplied in the years Magna owned the plant.

In 2011, the year Magna acquired it, Grenville Castings had 15 accepted injury claims.

In 2018, the last full year the plant was operational, Grenville Castings had 192 accepted injury claims, a rise in injuries that far outpaced a rise in staffing.

Those included 22 incidents related to heat. Jordan Pretty, an LP operator, suffered one of them.

LP operators such as Pretty did an essential job. The factory’s business was selling car parts to automotive manufacturers such as Ford, General Motors and Tesla. LP operators made those parts by introducing molten aluminum into a mould, creating a casting.

It was one of the hottest jobs in the plant: molten aluminum had to stay above approximately 800 C to make a casting. Pretty, then 27, said he always made sure to drink lots of water. But one day near the end of his shift, “I just couldn’t move anymore. I was cramping so bad,” he said.

A friend brought Pretty to Perth’s hospital, where doctors tried to get him to lie down. He couldn’t, he said: the cramps were too severe.

“The pain was so bad, I felt like I was going to throw up,” he said. Doctors used two bags of saline to rehydrate him intravenously, he added.

Though Grenville Castings’ injury rate is eye-popping, it may still be an underestimate, since it wouldn’t include any injuries among temporary agency workers. Grenville Castings did hire temporary workers, according to a Magna legal filing. Injuries to temporary agency workers typically show up on the employment agency’s WSIB record, not the work site’s.

Longtime employees describe a revolving door: the punishing production pace and unsafe work environment drove staff away, only to be replaced by workers even less experienced and more likely to get hurt, they said.

“They were bringing in people that weren’t skilled, weren’t trained, weren’t used to heat,” said Davis, the employee of 44 years.

“We were, as managers, trying to deal with those people to try and accommodate their needs as much as possible.”

Grenville Castings was also struggling financially. Leeanne Harvey was hired as part of a “turnaround team,” as she describes it, in the latter half of 2017.

Harvey said she was quickly enamoured by the camaraderie and skill she saw on the production floor. But she was stunned by the working conditions, which she said were “deplorable.”

“The people there, they were my heroes. And they were treated like dirt.”

As the injury rate rocketed, so did calls for help.

Worker complaints to the Ministry of Labour’s workplace health and safety hotline, obtained through freedom-of-information laws, describe an array of problems.

One worker warned about the condition of the factory floor. A ministry inspector visited in response and found the floor “broken up,” with a “pothole” that created a tripping hazard for workers carrying vats of molten metal.

Another complained that new employees did not have proper training on how to stop and lock machinery before carrying out dangerous jobs, such as changing saw blades.

“Production group says just to throw them at it because there (sic) temporary workers anyways,” whose injuries wouldn’t affect Grenville Castings’ WSIB rates, the worker claimed.

The next year, a worker was injured on a band saw, ministry records show.

Yet in the deluge of complaints, few issues were more persistent than concerns about the heat.

“Employees are being told that they cannot take any extra breaks with the heat wave,” one worker reported in 2013.

“Caller maintains that the Employer has taken away heat breaks,” a hotline staffer noted five years later.

“Grenville Castings in Perth has a heat stress policy but is not following it,” a worker emailed from an anonymous account in 2017.

A plea soon arrived from the same anonymous account, alleging more safety violations.

“Why is the MOL not helping us?” the worker wrote.

“Please actually do something.”

Ministry of Labour inspectors visited Grenville Castings repeatedly to respond to complaints and injuries, records show.

These inspectors are the front-line officers who enforce the province’s occupational health and safety laws. They can enter a workplace without notice, question any person connected to an investigation and demand any document.

If they find a violation, they can issue orders that require employers to comply with the law, including fix dangerous equipment, create better safety plans, or even issue a “stop work” order if they believe employees are in immediate danger.

Over the roughly eight years Magna owned Grenville Castings, inspectors issued more than 125 of these orders, records show. In the last full year the plant was operational, they issued an average of more than one a week.

The injury rate nevertheless rose rapidly. That final year, the equivalent of 40 per cent of full-time employees had an injury claim accepted by the WSIB. (The injury rate can include more than one claim by the same worker, as well as workers claiming an occupational illness from prior years.)

A spokesperson for the Minister of Labour did not address detailed questions about this story.

“Ontario leads North America on safety in the workplace — and our government continues to take action to protect workers,” Michel Figueredo wrote, citing requirements for naloxone kits and proposals for defibrillators at construction sites.

“Under the Occupational Health and Safety Act (OHSA), employers are legally required to take every reasonable precaution to protect workers — including implementing measures to reduce the risk of heat-related illness.”

In September 2017, an inspector who frequently visited Grenville Castings was present as the Ministry of Labour prosecuted Magna for a violation of Ontario’s health and safety laws, one of the most punitive measures in the government’s arsenal.

The charges related to an incident that happened two years earlier, when a 23-year-old LP operator was cleaning a machine in which molten aluminum had overflowed. As the young man tried to pick metal fragments from the machine, another worker turned it on, pinching the worker’s finger and thumb between two moving gear parts.

The worker was taken to hospital by ambulance, where he got six stitches to his index finger; his thumb was eventually amputated at the first knuckle.

In Perth’s courthouse, Grenville Castings’ assistant general manager pleaded guilty to one charge on behalf of Magna. Lawyers for Magna and the provincial prosecutor for the Ministry of Labour then submitted a fine they had jointly agreed to: $50,000.

The maximum fine at the time was $500,000; it has since been raised to $2 million for corporations, which Figueredo said are the “strongest workplace safety fines in Canada.”

In explaining some of the mitigating reasons for the fine that was issued, the Ministry of Labour’s lawyer accepted and repeated a claim made by Magna’s lawyer: that Grenville Castings “has a very comprehensive health and safety program.”

This assertion is hard to reconcile with how often the ministry’s inspectors, including the one present in the courthouse that day, were called to the factory.

In the summer leading up to the guilty plea, he and his colleagues had visited Grenville Castings more than half a dozen times, records show — including to investigate two other critical injuries.

In June 2017, an inspector was paged in the middle of the night. He arrived at Grenville Castings at 2 a.m. to investigate a grave injury that had happened in the hottest part of the factory. The worker was hospitalized, records say. Though it was indoors and after midnight, a Grenville Castings health and safety co-ordinator recorded the temperature at 34.9 C.

As inspectors investigated the incident, an occupational hygienist brought in by the ministry — an expert in identifying and measuring workplace hazards — toured the area where the injury occurred. The hygienist wrote in her notes that it was “very hot” and saw “workers with soaked shirts/sweat.”

The hygienist found Grenville Castings’ heat stress plan was inadequate, and ordered the company to fix it. The plan did not discuss monitoring temperatures in the workplace, and it did not set out “clear and concise directions” to be taken depending on how hot it got, she found.

The hygienist recommended that Grenville Castings consult a heat stress plan that is widely used in Ontario. This plan is based on the humidex, a measurement most people understand from the daily weather report: it captures what heat actually feels like by combining temperature and humidity. Under this plan, workers continually exposed to a humidex above a certain threshold can only continue working with medical supervision.

The company complied, records show. But by the end of the summer, there were already signs the new plan wasn’t working.

At least one other worker suffered a heat-related injury in August, according to WSIB data. In September, the ministry hotline heard from the worker who claimed that Grenville Castings “has a heat stress policy but is not following it” and the plea to “please actually do something.”

“We have a big chance of having a fatality which isn’t going to be a 50k fine this time,” that worker wrote.

When Leeanne Harvey arrived at Grenville Castings, there was plenty of work to keep a human resources manager busy. But she had signed on with the company in December, and said she was ignorant of the plant’s heat stress problem until the weather warmed up.

Then one day she was called to the cafeteria.

She said she saw a worker who was “completely pale, like there was no colour left in him. And he was really having trouble breathing.” His eyes were rolling back in his head as other workers tried to cool him down before the ambulance arrived, Harvey said.

She worried he was going to die: “I’ve never seen somebody with heat stroke before.”

When the supervisor called her on Canada Day weekend to report widespread heat illness, she said, the incident was fresh in her mind.

“I was so concerned it was going to happen to somebody else.”

That weekend, workers were at the mercy of converging threats: inadequate protections and the global climate crisis.

A stretch of concurrent heat waves gripped much of the Northern Hemisphere in the early summer of 2018, killing 66 people in Montreal, fuelling forest fires in Siberia, and melting roofs and roads in the U.K.

Scientists later concluded it was “virtually certain” such an intense, widespread heat wave “could not have occurred without human-induced climate change.”

When she heard it was 60 C inside the plant, Harvey said, her thought process was simple: “People cannot work in those conditions,” she said.

Hundreds of employees were sent home that day, by Magna’s account.

When Harvey arrived back at work the following Tuesday, she said she was chastised by a superior. Harvey went on medical leave the next day.

In her absence, workers contacted the ministry health and safety hotline repeatedly with concerns about the heat, in addition to the worker who had flagged fears before the long weekend.

“Complainant has concerns that the heat stress policy and program are inadequate … some workers are now on the verge of vomiting,” one hotline staffer recorded.

“Caller has concern about the employer not letting workers take the heat stress breaks,” another wrote. Grenville Castings was more concerned about production than workers’ well-being, the caller alleged, because “too many heat stress breaks were taken in the past.”

The ministry inspector who responded to the initial complaint returned with the same hygienist who had visited Grenville Castings the summer before and found its heat stress plan inadequate. She toured the plant and reviewed humidex readings from the past few days.

The company’s heat plan was again found to be inadequate, specifically for LP operators and other workers in the hottest parts in the plant. Magna was ordered for the second time in two years to fix it.

This time, the hygienist suggested using a more detailed set of thresholds for heat exposure. This plan forgoes the humidex for a more complex measurement called the Wet Bulb Globe Temperature, or WBGT. Measuring WBGT requires specialized equipment, but includes factors such as air movement and radiant heat to more precisely capture environmental conditions.

A health and safety co-ordinator at Grenville Castings did try to carry out these changes, compliance records show. The co-ordinator said the company adopted the WBGT tool, brought in 30 new cooling fans and a 100-ton air-conditioning unit, and gave workers cooling vests.

But in a followup visit in August, the hygienist found that the company had failed to comply with the ministry’s order to protect workers from heat.

Grenville Castings wasn’t enforcing use of the cooling vests while working, because the workers reportedly “don’t like” them. The hygienist also found that temperatures in the plant weren’t being consistently measured, weren’t being consistently posted, and the new plan mixed up the humidex and WBGT.

The hygienist and the health and safety co-ordinator went back and forth for several weeks trying to correct the company’s plan. Only in October, well after summer’s end, did the hygienist indicate that Grenville Castings had complied with the ministry’s order.

By that time, workers at Grenville Castings had finished the summer with more WSIB claims for heat illness than almost any other employer in the province — second only to Canada Post, which at roughly 28,000 Ontario employees is more than 50 times larger.

Harvey returned to work in early August, as the new heat stress plan was being revised. Three weeks later, she was fired.

The same health and safety laws designed to protect Ontario workers also prohibits employers from punishing anyone who upholds those laws. Dismissing, disciplining, intimidating or penalizing anyone for upholding the law is considered a “reprisal,” and is unlawful.

Harvey filed a complaint with the Ontario Labour Relations Board claiming her termination was a reprisal. She asked to be reinstated and paid back wages.

Magna’s legal team responded with a different story. The “extreme” plant shutdown was part of a pattern of “problematic behaviour” that Magna said began months earlier.

The company claimed Harvey frequently arrived at work late, missed teleconferences and meetings, and came to the meetings she did attend unprepared.

What immediately precipitated Harvey’s firing, Magna claimed, was an encounter in which she told the general manager of the plant, in front of other staff, that members of his team “hated him.”

Magna also disputed the working conditions Harvey described that Canada Day weekend — and specifically her claim that the temperature exceeded 60 C.

The company provided a different set of measurements using the WBGT, the more complex environmental measurement the ministry had recommended. The WBGT in the factory that weekend, Magna claimed, ranged from 31 to 49.8 depending on the area of the plant.

Two facts undermine Magna’s claims about the temperature.

One is that heat measurements were also recorded by an independent third party: the ministry’s hygienist.

In a report dated five days after Harvey’s shutdown, the hygienist recorded “a Humidex of 60 C measured at melter 2 earlier today” — values similar to what Harvey described, except using humidex instead of raw temperature. The hygienist also noted “Humidex readings frequently reaching 45 C and above.”

The second is that an expert who reviewed Magna’s WBGT values for the Star said that they were either “deadly,” or, more likely, Magna had made a mistake.

Extended exposure to a WBGT of 49.8 “will kill you,” said John Oudyk, an occupational hygienist at the Occupational Health Clinics for Ontario Workers and one of the province’s top experts on heat stress in the workplace.

Though Magna did not respond to questions about the WBGT values the company claimed in this legal filing, the likeliest explanation is that the company confused the WBGT with the humidex again.

In the end, these counterclaims were irrelevant. The two parties resolved the matter through mediation, Harvey said, after she accepted a payment and signed a “gag order.” She is violating that gag order now, she said, because Magna “couldn’t have been more wrong.”

As a result of that settlement, the tribunal never ruled on another reason Magna offered to reject Harvey’s complaint. To claim a reprisal, Harvey would have to be upholding a section of Ontario’s workplace health and safety laws.

But Ontario’s workplace health and safety laws don’t say anything specifically about heat.

Two summers ago, the Ministry of Labour identified heat as an accelerating threat.

“Due to changes in our climate, extreme heat events are a growing health risk to workers in Ontario,” the ministry wrote.

“Heat stress is a significant cause of occupational illnesses that may also lead to death.”

This assessment was part of a government proposal to create new heat stress regulations that would, for the first time, introduce heat exposure limits that would apply to all Ontario workplaces. As it stands, under what is known as the “general duty” clause, employers are required to “take every precaution reasonable in the circumstances” to protect workers. The ministry typically uses this clause to cover heat, but it does not lay out thresholds for how hot a workplace can get or actions to protect workers if they do.

But after a period of consultation, those changes never materialized.

In May of last year, on the cusp of what would turn out to be the hottest summer ever recorded globally, Piccini, the province’s labour minister, stood in the legislature to defend his government from accusations it had not done enough to strengthen protections for workers from heat.

“We’ve got strong protections in the Occupational Health and Safety Act,” Piccini said, referring to the province’s primary law to protect worker safety.

“We work with our prevention council. We work with labour groups across Ontario. There’s also an element of common sense.”

After a summer of intense heat, the province has not moved to revive its proposals for a stand-alone heat stress regulation; the law remains silent on the subject of heat.

That sets the province apart from the U.S., where former president Joe Biden’s administration similarly proposed heat protections for workers last year. Observers expected Donald Trump to kill the plan once elected.

But the Trump administration has forged ahead on the heat proposal. Public consultations moved forward this summer, with one senator calling the protections “a matter of life and death.”

In October 2018, after the hygienist was finally satisfied with the heat stress plan at Grenville Castings, she wrote to the inspector to say she would like to revisit their program again the next spring, “given the ongoing issues they have.” But there would soon be no workers left to help.

Magna closed Grenville Castings in June 2019, eliminating hundreds of local jobs.

A spokesperson for Magna told the Star in February that Grenville Castings was closed because it was “no longer financially viable.”

“The work performed at the facility was subsequently moved to other Magna manufacturing facilities to optimize our operations and maintain efficiencies,” said Dave Niemiec.

In response to a lengthy list of followup questions about the safety record at Grenville Castings and other details contained in this story, Niemiec said: “I don’t have anything new to share with you other than what I did back in February.”

While it is unlikely to have been responsible for the plant’s demise, Grenville Castings’ health and safety problems cost the company.

At the time, the WSIB had a program that rewarded employers with fewer than expected claims with a rebate on their premiums, and penalized workplaces with higher than expected claims with a surcharge.

In the two years before Magna announced the plant’s closure, Grenville Castings paid surcharges totalling more than $1 million, among the highest amounts paid by Ontario companies in that period.

Whatever impact these surcharges had, the struggles of its small factory in Perth did not weigh down Magna’s wider success.

The company posted record sales of more than $40 billion in 2018, an achievement highlighted by Magna’s CEO at the time, Don Walker. Walker himself ranked third on Canada’s list of richest CEOs that year, taking home more than $26 million in total compensation, according to a report published by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.

WSIB claims show that the workers who suffered heat injuries at Grenville Castings that same year earned on average less than $18 an hour. The disparity between Magna’s profits and the treatment of the workers who earned it for them still rankles Harvey.

“They were doing it on the backs of people making very little,” she said.