Slow-Motion Disaster

David Lambert’s father-in-law died digging fluorspar in the Newfoundland outport of St. Lawrence. So did two of his uncles and more friends than he cared to count. Yet when a British company, Minworth, announced plans to reopen the community’s notoriously dangerous mines, Lambert was among the 400 men who applied for one of the hundred or so jobs being created.

A visiting journalist wanted to know why. Why, when the local cemetery was filled with men who had died of lung cancer and other work-related diseases—the legacy of a half-century of corporate exploitation and government indifference? Why, when his brothers’ wives refused to let them go back underground?

“I guess it’s just as well to die with money as live without.”

Jobs or health. Food on the table or a safe place to work. That was the hard bargain that faced countless miners and other workers who built Canada in the days before strong unions, recognition of occupational health hazards...