Interview Transcript:
Sebastien Sheldon: I’m here with Alec Farquhar, who is an injured worker and occupational disease advocate, and is the former director of the office of the worker advisor, the Ontario Ministry of Labour occupational health and safety branch, and the occupational health clinic for Ontario workers. Alec, why don’t you tell me about your relationship with John and how you met him?
Alec Farquhar: So, I heard about John long before I met him. I’m pretty sure I heard about him in the eighties, when there was such a ferment of organizing injured workers and occupational disease victims right across the province in many parts of our economy. So, I believe I heard about John from folks that I knew, who had visited Peterborough, met John, and seen how committed he was to identifying carcinogens and other harmful substances in the workplace and bringing the issues up. And I think I personally met him later in the nineties. At that point in time, I would have been the director of the office of the worker advisor. And likely it was when the first cases from Peterborough started making their way up through the system, and I believe at least some of them came to the office of the worker advisor, so that’s how I would have known about them.
Sebastien: And when you met John, what was the quality in him that impressed you the most?
Alec: So, what’s really impressive about John, is first of all he’s an ordinary working-class person, who is largely self taught, who is just tremendously sharp and intelligent and analytical and organized in his thinking. So, he impressed you as somebody who had an encyclopedic memory, who had things organized in his mind in terms of the history of his workplace, what was wrong about it, who had gotten sick from it, what work they had been doing. So, you saw somebody applying their mind to a complex multi-decade situation and never sort of losing sight of the vital points of it. And the second thing about him, was somebody who wouldn’t back down, who spoke truth to power, whatever the consequences, and stayed principled, start to finish.
Sebastien: And when John applied himself to this work and when he showed his commitment, what impact do you think that his work ultimately had on injured workers who had been exposed to chemicals at the GE plant?
Alec: So, I didn’t know John from the beginning of when he was doing his work, but I know a lot about the impact he had back then, so I’ll speak to that a little bit. My impression is that he was an often-lonely voice at the beginning. He was one of the people who was saying the emperor had no clothes, and it was for this big factory employing thousand of people, on which the whole city depended. So, he was saying things people didn’t want to hear. And as anyone who has been involved with occupational disease knows, the human cost of it doesn’t often come right away. It’s often delayed, several decades even. So, something you’re exposed to as a young person in a new workforce, where most of the people are young to maybe middle age at the oldest, very few of them are getting sick even when the conditions are really bad. So, if you’re drawing attention to that, you’re threatening peoples’ jobs, you’re threatening the flow of millions of dollars into the local economy. So, my impression is that early on he was the loneliest. By the time I met him, there was quite a group around him, and a whole lot of people who had retired were starting to get sick. It hadn’t crystalized in people’s minds or I guess we’ll say in the public’s consciousness the way it has of course since then. But there were enough people who’d already started suffering health impacts, that John had a little more momentum and a group around him and in essence he was speaking for more people. He was still in a minority position. So, I think by the time I met him he was more sort of on the small pea political stage, he was more linked to his coworkers, to the retirees, to community members, and more broadly to activists and experts from across the province, so he was more of a known force by the nineties. Then after that he became really the retired person who was an endlessly valuable resource for anyone who wanted to dig deeper into the [occupational] disease cluster and learn more about it and have that institutional memory that would allow other people to put all the pieces of the puzzle together.
Sebastien: Thank you very much. I want to thank you for your time, I want to thank you for your insight, this was a wonderful interview, thank you very much.
Alec: Thanks very much Sebastien.
End of Interview