Ebook: Still Dying for a Living: Corporate Criminal Liability After the Westray Mine Disaster

In 1992, an underground explosion at the Westray Mine in Plymouth,
Nova Scotia, killed twenty-six miners. Although the owners of the mine
were charged criminally, no one was convicted, largely because it was
deemed too difficult to determine legal responsibility.
More than a decade after the Westray disaster, the federal
government introduced revisions to the "Criminal Code" aimed at
strengthening corporate criminal liability. Bill C-45, dubbed the
Westray bill, requires employers to ensure a safe workplace and
attributes criminal liability to organizations for seriously injuring
or killing workers and/or the public. Yet, while the federal government
declared the Westray bill an important step, the law has thus far
failed to produce a crackdown on corporate crime.
In "Still Dying for a Living, " Steven Bittle turns a critical
eye on Canada's corporate criminal liability law. Drawing
theoretical inspiration from Foucauldian and neo-Marxist literatures
and interweaving in-depth interviews and parliamentary transcripts,
Bittle reveals how legal, economic, and cultural discourses surrounding
the Westray bill downplayed the seriousness of workplace injury and
death, effectively characterizing these crimes as regrettable but
largely unavoidable accidents. As long as the primary causes of
workplace injury and death are not properly scrutinized, Bittle argues,
workers will continue to die in the pursuit of earning a living.Steven Bittle is an assistant professor in the
Department of Criminology at the University of Ottawa.