This is not legal advice! What you are getting here is just general legal information. It is not a substitute for advice from an actual lawyer about your specific situation. If you need legal advice, we urge you to find a lawyer who can help you.
The Yukon Workers’ Safety and Compensation Board is an organization that gives benefits and supports to people who’ve been injured at work. These benefits can include replacement of lost wages, coverage of health care costs, and permanent impairment awards. The WSCB is governed by the Workers’ Safety and Compensation Act.
Facts about the Workers’ Safety and Compensation Board
- The Workers’ Safety and Compensation Board functions like an insurance provider. Employers pay premiums to the WSCB for the people who work for them. As a result, those people are entitled to benefits if they suffer a workplace injury and employers are immune from being sued in civil court in relation to those injuries.
- About 96% of Yukon workers are covered under the Workers’ Safety and Compensation Act.
- Every year, about 900 claims are filed with the WSCB by Yukon workers. Of those, roughly 25% are ruled ineligible.
- Only injuries due to post-traumatic stress disorder or involvement in a traumatic event are covered by the WSCB.
- Sources: Workers’ Safety and Compensation Board Annual Report 2023, Association of Workers’ Compensation Boards of Canada
If you’ve been harmed by sexual harassment at work, you might think the WSCB will help you.
- Maybe after you were harassed, you took time off work and so lost income.
- Maybe the harassment damaged your mental health, and you ended up needing to spend money on medication for anxiety or depression.
- Maybe the harassment had such an effect on you that you had to leave an industry and ended up needing to retrain for a new type of work in a different field.
Those are the kinds of expenses—replacement of lost wages, medication costs, retraining costs—that the WSCB often covers.
However, historically, the WSCB has mostly handled claims related to physical injuries suffered by workers in male-dominated fields like construction, manufacturing, and uniform occupations like policing and firefighting. If you slip at work and break your ankle, or are struck by a falling object, or are injured in a fire or explosion: that is the kind of situation the WSCB was designed for and has a lot of experience handling.
But if the injury is to your mental health, the WSCB only offers benefits and supports when you have experienced post-traumatic stress disorder or a “traumatic event,” which it defines as “exposure to actual or threatened death, serious injury or violence.” The WSCB states that “mental stress is not considered to be a work-related injury.”
Your options could include making a complaint to the Human Rights Commission or taking legal action.
