HAPPY VALLEY-GOOSE BAY, N.L. — The mayor of Happy Valley-Goose Bay and the Member of Parliament for Labrador are calling on the province to tighten and enforce the rules regarding essential workers at the Muskrat Falls site.
Wally Andersen, mayor of Happy Valley-Goose Bay, told SaltWire Network they had been concerned for weeks about the issue but when some Nalcor workers breached the company’s protocols around travel from the island on April 6, it came to a head.
"It's completely unacceptable. We were given those protocols by Nalcor and told people those would be followed and they weren't."
Workers were supposed to travel directly from the airport to the mega project, but some stopped at residential homes in the community, which Nalcor said was due to a miscommunication on their part.
A statement from Nalcor attributed to CEO Stan Marshall said at the beginning of the month the workers were told it was OK to travel to pick up their belongings and since that time, the travel protocol changed; the workers weren’t aware they were not following the current travel protocols for the project.
“This should not have happened, and I apologize for this mistake,” Marshall said in the statement.
Andersen said it angered the people in town and for him, sorry isn’t good enough.
“I don’t know if an apology here is going to cut it. The bit of trust we’d built up to try to give our people a bit of comfort that there were protocols in place, that was broken. It’s unacceptable. How do we know it won’t happen again?”
Labrador MP Yvonne Jones said, for her, the incident on April 6 destroyed any trust she had in the crown corporation. She is joining Andersen in appealing the province to cut down on the travel of non-essential workers to the site.
The only people at the airports should be people travelling for medical reasons, transporting essential goods, or essential workers such as medical personnel and police, she said.
“Other than that, all these non-essential workers need to stop. We cannot allow Nalcor to continue to do what they’re doing.”
Nalcor has announced that it will have 80 workers at the site doing 14-day turnarounds. Andersen wants a list of all the companies who are considered an essential service and someone from the town there to make sure the workers are essential.
He and Jones said the province needs to make sure all these positions are essential and cannot be filled by local workers.
“They’re abusing the protocols that were put in place by the province and by their own company,” she said. “They’re abusing the essential service order they were granted by not just taking essential workers but basically taking whoever they want.”
Premier Dwight Ball was asked about the issue in the daily briefing on April 7 and said they were working with the MP and leaders in Labrador to find a solution.
“Our objective is to make sure only essential workers fly to those sites,” he said. “Some of the questions around people who are cleaning and other services, such as security, these are things we’re following up on now.”
Evan Careen is a Local Journalism Initiative reporter covering Labrador for the SaltWire Network
