EnableLink

When EnableLink, the Canadian Abilities Foundation’s website, was officially launched, we knew it would make a difference. We were not unfamiliar with the struggles of the injured worker community – we’d heard compelling personal stories over the years from those who had contacted our organization for help – and we knew that this population could benefit greatly from getting connected to disability-related resources.

So, when the newly inaugurated Chair of the Ontario Workplace Safety and Insurance Board (WSIB), Glen Wright, devoted himself to improving the system, we were enthusiastic about developing our website to help meet the need. It was, after all, Glen Wright’s vision to create EnableLink as an electronic bridge linking injured workers to each other and to the range of programs and resources available within the broader disability community. The Canadian Abilities Foundation was proud to launch EnableLink in 1999 with funding support from workers’ compensation boards across Canada.

This issue marks seven years since Glen Wright’s original conversation with Patrick Watson in the pages of ABILITIES, in which he shared his vision for the WSIB, a giant corporation that had been plagued by systemic problems. A great deal has changed in those seven years. Wright has left a lasting legacy with the WSIB. (But he has left not unscathed; he has faced some challenging criticism in recent media, ultimately making the decision to resign.) In this issue, he speaks to Watson about his commitment to injured workers over the past seven years, and the circumstances surrounding his recent resignation.

In this issue, we also celebrate five years of EnableLink. It has grown and changed – but it is still Canada’s one-stop shop for disability information and resources. It still offers a smorgasbord of articles, product and service leads and disability organizations. And the welcome mat is still out! Visit EnableLink at www.enablelink.org.

Five Years of EnableLink:

RESOURCES FOR INJURED WORKERS
- Message board, chat room, articles, links, news and organizations targeted to injured workers
- New message board has been established specifically for those who have experienced electrical burns
- Total unique authors on the Injured Workers message board: 733 at presstime
- Total unique threads at presstime: 1,328
- Average number of new messages posted per day: 18
- Total messages at presstime: 5,758
Special thanks to Raindog, Jim, Concerned, Ajay, AW, Sparky and all the others that help make the Injured Workers’ Message Board a productive, friendly, information-sharing environment.

STATISTICS
- 3 years after the launch of EnableLink: 19,000 visitors per month
- 5 years after the launch of EnableLik: over 40,000 visitors per month

CONNECTIONS
EnableLink holds an organized, searchable array of chat rooms, message boards, classifieds, articles, links – and all of it is disability related!

ACCESS GUIDE CANADA
This online community and travel guide offers accessibility details about lodgings, attractions, transportation, restaurants, parks, shopping venues and more. Choose your destination, click and go! Need a hotel room with a bath seat? A restaurant with Braille menus? A theatre with assistive listening devices? You’ll find it here – and new listings are being added every week! We welcome input – feel free to add your own favourite hot spots!

ABILITIES ARCHIVES
ABILITIES online! This section of the site makes it easy to search through back issues of our magazine, with hundreds of articles available on a wide variety of topics.

EVENTS CALENDAR
EnableLink’s Events Calendar showcases upcoming conferences, presentations, theatre productions, recreational opportunities and other events of interest to people with disabilities, their families and professionals.

PATRICK WATSON IN CONVERSATION WITH GLEN WRIGHT
Former Chair of the Ontario Workplace Safety and Insurance Board


“During the long eight years of the Tory government in Ontario, the only opportunity for input we had into any policies was down at the WSIB – and Glen [Wright] played a major role in keeping those lines of communication open during very difficult times… He clearly worked hard and was always open to differing points of view.”
— Wayne Samuelson, President, Ontario Federation of Labour

Patrick Watson: The last time we spoke together for ABILITIES magazine, there were a number of items that you were particularly interested in. How do you feel about where the Canadian Abilities Foundation has gone since then?

Glen Wright: I think it’s done great work in a lot of areas associated with injured workers and the disability community that need these services. It’s hard to get organized – there are so many different pieces to it. But EnableLink stands very clear. We at the WSIB were concerned about our capacity to communicate with injured workers beyond sending them a cheque. It’s huge numbers of people. How do they get information, and how do they communicate with each other? It wasn’t well organized. There were a number of organizations that did some of this, but they were geographically spotty, and these problems existed across the country.

EnableLink is getting about forty to fifty thousand discrete visitors a month, and a lot of those are injured workers with disabilities who are talking to each other. Plus it benefits the whole community. The Canadian Abilities Foundation had started on this concept and had some of the work done, so it actually worked very well for us. The Canadian Abilities Foundation was a wonderful non-profit organization dedicated to these issues, and EnableLink provided a very efficient vehicle for us. We couldn’t do it ourselves – it would be seen as propaganda. We wanted to create an environment where they could have this communication, and not have it dominated by a corporate compensation board, and have open accessibility, with people able to get information that had been developed for the broader disability community.

The Canadian Abilities Foundation did a marvelous job of building EnableLink, making it attractive, friendly, accessible. Then we pitched it, and it was supported by virtually every compensation board across Canada, because they all saw a great opportunity. It’s not an intimate relationship, but it’s been a very productive relationship, because we’ve got that vehicle out there and I think it’s very good.

We’ve created the Injured Worker Outreach Program, which will fund each community to put in a computer system and give the injured worker community some office space, so they have that EnableLink connection.

PW: Glen, the article that came out in The Globe and Mail around the time of your leaving the Workplace Safety and Insurance Board accused you primarily of derelict or semi-corrupt things. The first thing that they went after you for was your $2,800/month apartment. Deal with that.

GW: The apartment’s always been a part of my arrangement, and that’s historically been the case for people who take these jobs from out of town. The fact is, these are temporary jobs, and crown corporations have traditionally done that. Being from out of town, part of my arrangement was to have an apartment.

As things progressed, I ended up appointed as both president and as chairman. I was given the base salary of the president – not both salaries. Also, if I had been appointed permanently as president, I wouldn’t have expected an apartment. It’s more associated with the chairman’s job. But it was a temporary assignment. Inside the WSIB, it’s been standard practice for years that when they move employees on temporary assignment they supply them with housing. So I don’t understand why it got the perspective that it got.

PW: Well, maybe the number looked big. I mean, what if you had just stayed in a hotel for the days you had to be in Toronto?

GW: Well, I’m staying in a hotel now and the cheapest rate I could get downtown today was $200 a night. On a monthly basis, it would certainly be more than $2,800. I was working four or five nights a week – my workload was so heavy, especially in the last year, that a moderate day for me was 12 hours. I could have saved the province money and worked a lot less, but the task that I was challenged with was a bureaucracy that was not serving its customers and the public well. In 1995, research done by the government showed that the WCB was in trouble with injured workers, it was in trouble with health care providers, and it was in serious trouble with the employer community.

PW: So your mandate was to try to turn that around?

GW: Yes. I’m one of the first, if not the only person, that’s ever been put in as chairman who’s had a serious professional background in the area of insurance. When I got there and saw the challenges, it was an incredible task. It’s a $3-billion enterprise with 4,400 employees. I spent a lot of time with stakeholders: the injured worker community, unions and the employer community. If you don’t meet with real employers and real injured workers, you don’t know what the problems are. So I would go very long days trying to get a handle on strategic direction, and trying to fix the major problems in the place. We were turning out very bad product. Over the years we converted to a whole lot of new systems. Over 3,000 of the roughly 4,400 employees changed jobs, in six months. We completely redesigned the place.

The system had dehumanized injured workers. Once in the system, by the way it was organized in 1995, you would have approximately seven different adjudicators, by plan, in two years. You would have to re-explain yourself to every new person who took your file. You were baring your soul – it’s very personal. We weren’t doing a good job on counselling, we weren’t giving people the things they need, we weren’t paying for all the drugs that they needed. I spent a lot of energy, and a lot of hours, looking at those and listening to people so I would understand what the gut problems in the place were.

PW: You’re saying “we did,” but another person might have said, “they did.” You’re talking about stuff that happened before you got there.

GW: That’s what I found when I got there. We made the transition so that you had the same adjudicator, by and large, for your term as an injured worker. We also reorganized the claims by industry sector rather than postal code. For example, now all the mining claims are handled by people who just do mining claims. Each of the adjudicators has visited a mine, has been down a mineshaft and knows how it works. When they talk to an injured miner, they understand the context. That was hugely missing. A lot of injured workers didn’t think we understood them. And we didn’t understand them.

We put service delivery teams in. Then we added a customer service rep to talk to the employer, to make sure that the bookkeeping and all the regulations are being followed and understood. And then we put in place a nurse case manager to be an advisor to the injured worker, to make sure they’re getting good, proper health care in a timely and appropriate fashion. That improved things dramatically, to the point that Ipsos-Reid found that 68 per cent of injured workers are happy with their treatment, way up from where it used to be. And in the employer community, it’s now almost 80 per cent.

PW: Another accusation in The Globe and Mail was about your hiring, without tender, a communications consultant.

GW: Karen Gordon actually was my employee at the Board. I hired her three years ago. Her previous job had been a vice-president for a pharmaceutical company, in communications. She worked for me just short of two years as a full-time employee. We reorganized the office and reduced our expenses, and Karen went on a contractual part-time arrangement. It was quite a bit less expensive for us. So it accomplished my objectives and reduced our costs. Well, it ends up being touted as an untendered contract for somebody connected to the party. It’s all positioning. [The Globe and Mail] failed to mention that she had been a full-time employee and went to part-time status.

PW: We could get into allegations about the security alarm thing and some other details. I’m not sure that that’s in the public interest, because you’ve given a very good account of the general issues that we’re dealing with here. But there’s one thing around that story that puzzles me, and that is why you didn’t do something about it publicly, instantly. Is there not action for libel? Did you investigate that?

GW: I looked at it, but the problem is that the media buy ink by the barrel. The fact is that Karen Gordon worked for me and she had a contract. There was security work done on my house. I did have an apartment. It was the context of it. I thought, the people important to me know that that’s not how I am. I thought that going after them on any issues like that just perpetuates it – once again, they rewrite the story.

The security system is an example. They just said, “He had it done.” The fact was that I didn’t decide what should be done. I’d gone for most of my service with my own personal basic security system. There were specific incidents associated with security risk. They brought in the head of security for the WSIB and outside experts, and they did a risk assessment on those individuals involved, and they then made their recommendations to me as to how they could protect myself and my family. This was directly related to the work I had done at the WSIB, and an employer has a responsibility to employees and to others to protect them. So I allowed them to amend my security system. At the end of the day, I hope what’s not being said here is that people in public life won’t be protected if it’s required.

PW: I have the impression from a couple of things you’ve said that you’ve had your fill of being in public life. What spoiled it for you? Was it the actual work, or was it what people said to you politically and about you politically, after it was all over?

GW: I am passionate about the work. We’ve made great gains, but there’s a ton left that has to be done. There was an image created some years ago that the system was full of cheaters. We went out and got the cheaters. We had one of the largest fraud units of its nature in Canada, and we prosecuted. We prosecuted employers who cheated and we prosecuted employees of our own who cheated and we prosecuted injured workers who cheated.

But there are lots of injured workers who have lost their livelihood. There are huge things that need to still be done. There are people who are on partial disability who should be on full disability. The rules are so complex, Patrick, that you cannot explain them. So, I think, simplification, better benefits, better accounting, better finances, all those things are work in progress.

Now my regret is that everybody in the system once again will do the good bureaucratic thing, which is you keep your head down, you follow process, and you won’t get in trouble. I tried to encourage the system to look at getting good results for injured workers, and sometimes process doesn’t produce that. If you don’t take risks, I don’t think you reform and change and get the best out of your institutions. I wouldn’t say that I expect WSIB to regress, but I’m fearful that its forward momentum will slow. I am afraid that the spirit of change and the spirit of reaching out for more successful solutions could slow down.

PW: Where do you go from here, personally and professionally?

GW: I’ve been approached by some businesses connected to the insurance and disability area. There seems to be a fair bit of interest from people who would like to employ my knowledge and skills. I’m 54, I’m still quite enthusiastic about working, and I don’t think I’ve had any higher or more rewarding personal experience than to see the look on people’s faces when you actually fix stuff around the WSIB. It was a good experience. I’ve had a reasonably successful career, but the profits at the end of the week never looked as exciting as actually making something better in a system that everybody was starting to think was impossible to change.