Workplace accidents--Westray's legacy

An inquiry into the cause of the explosion revealed that senior executives, including the President of the corporation, had been grossly negligent in complying with health and safety standards. Moreover, the inquiry disclosed "a story of incompetence, of mismanagement, of bureaucratic bungling, of deceit, of ruthlessness, of cover-up, of apathy, of expediency, and of cynical indifference". Although executives of the Westray organization were charged, they were never prosecuted or convicted. As a result, despite serious workplace safety violations committed by Westray's management, no individual or the corporate employer was ever convicted of criminal negligence or even an occupational health and safety offence. One key legislative development in Bill C-45 is the expanded scope of corporate liability. Traditionally, Canada has employed a common law "identification" theory as its basis for corporate liability, which assigns liability to a company when certain senior employees, namely the "directing minds" of the corporation, commit a crime. In a corporation, the directing minds are those executives empowered to exercise decision-making authority over matters of corporate policy, such as directors and senior officers. Bill C-45 codified and broadened the common law approach to corporate liability in two ways. First, it expressly extended the common law approach from corporations to organizations. "Organization" includes a "public body, a body corporate, a society, a company", taken from the existing Criminal Code definitions, but adds "a firm, a partnership, a trade union or an unincorporated association". Second, Bill C-45 expanded the class of individuals whose conduct can result in criminal liability for the organization, to include "representatives" of an organization, namely directors, partners, employees, agents and contractors.