Canada is in the dark about black lung amid a coal mining resurgence

It’s deathly quiet this far underground, except for two things: the steady drip of water, echoing down the dark mine shaft, and the rattle from deep inside Wish Donovan’s chest.

Mr. Donovan, a former Nova Scotia coal miner who spent most of his life below the surface, is used to both sounds. Water is everywhere down here, and so are the constant reminders that his lungs are slowly choking him. At 79, he understands that pneumoconiosis – better known as black lung, an incurable and often fatal sickness – is just a part of life for an old miner.

“Some days are worse than others,” he says, pausing to catch his breath and take a pull on his inhaler as he makes the long walk back to the mine’s entrance.

Mr. Donovan is a guide at the Miners Museum in Glace Bay, where he takes visitors down into the centre’s replica mine shaft, telling them stories of a time when coal was king in Cape Breton, and of the miners who toiled to help make the industrialized world run.

But after 32 years in mining, he can also share the darker legacy of that work. He watched his father slowly die from black lung, a condition caused by chronic exposure to coal dust, which creates inflammation and scar tissue in the lung’s air sacs. He began experiencing problems with his own lungs after about seven years, during a time when he was a supervisor specializing in pulling men out of the rubble when a shaft collapsed.

When it comes to how Canada supports the health of its miners, Mr. Donovan is one of the lucky ones. Since the 1980s, Nova Scotia has provided an automatic benefit – in the form of monthly cheques – to anyone who worked underground for more than 20 years. No other province has such a program, including the western provinces where the vast majority of Canada’s 6,900 active miners work in surface mines, which have been found to also cause black lung. Most miners with a lung disease must prove it came from their job through a difficult workers’ compensation process that can take years.

Although much of the developed world is looking to a future without coal – with the Canadian and U.S. governments earmarking billions of dollars in subsidies for green technologies and cleaner fuel – there remain scores of labourers for whom the effects of the industry will long linger. And while Canada has pledged to phase out coal-fired electricity by 2030, demand for the fuel is actually growing globally, owing in large part to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Coal consumption around the world hit an all-time high last year and, as a result, Canada’s production has been ramping up. In Nova Scotia, the last underground mine in operation – Cape Breton’s Donkin mine – reopened last September after a two-year closure.

But even amid this uptick, which experts predict will be temporary, the long-time neglect of Canadian miners continues. A Globe and Mail investigation has found that cases of black lung are underreported owing to inconsistent or non-existent tracking, the patchwork testing for the disease is inadequate and compensation programs remain widely inaccessible to most of those who need it.

In the past two decades, only a few dozen coal miners in Canada’s biggest coal-producing provinces – British Columbia, Alberta and Saskatchewan – have managed to get a claim for black lung approved, results that also represent our only real way to track the disease in Canada. Meanwhile, in the United States, where a national screening program has tested 40,000 active and retired miners since 2005, signs of the disease have been detected in one in 10 miners. If Canadian miners acquire the condition at a similar rate, the disproportionately low number of black-lung payouts in this country signals a population left to suffer on its own.

And if nothing changes to protect those fulfilling today’s demand, occupational disease experts warn that Canada is doomed to see rising cases of the debilitating lung disease that some thought would become a relic of the past.

For some coal miners struggling to breathe, finally succumbing to black lung sometimes seems like it would be a relief.

John MacArthur, a former Nova Scotia union leader who started working underground as a teenager, says pneumoconiosis has taken away his ability to do most daily tasks. He’s had lung problems for nearly 40 years, he said, and assumes that it will eventually be the end of him.

“It’s not the dying that’s so bad,” said Mr. MacArthur, 74. “It’s the years of suffering that you do before that.”

The old coal miner often brings a newspaper with him when he leaves the house, in case he has to walk up stairs. The paper provides cover: He can stop periodically, pretending to read, when he’s really just trying to catch his breath.

“It’s an embarrassing disease, because I can’t help anybody. I can’t lift a bag of groceries up to the house,” he said. “I can walk maybe half a block before I gotta stop. I just can’t breathe.”

Mr. MacArthur started out as a mucker, cleaning out the bits of coal left behind after the big grinders bore into the earth. He spent years underground in the “deeps” – the furthest reaches of the underwater mines, operating digging machinery. The dust that was stirred up was thick and relentless, as the miners grinded away at seams of sandstone and coal.

It was dirty, difficult work, but Mr. MacArthur is part of a generation of miners who were raised to believe coal was the only way to get the things you want in life. Without it, you’d have no car, no house and no choice but to leave Cape Breton. But he says they didn’t fully understand the toll the work was taking on them – both physically and mentally.

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Over the years, provinces put into place laws requiring Canada’s coal mines to make improvements to ventilation, dust control and masks – but how much any of those measures decreased the risk is unknown, since there isn’t a way to know exactly how many retired miners, or even active ones, suffer from lung diseases related to their jobs.

Canada has no national testing program for black lung and never has had one. Without that, or pro-active, co-ordinated health screening programs, compensation payouts – which are funded by mining companies – are the only clue to the prevalence of the disease in this country.

Nova Scotia’s compensation system accepted 1,648 new claims for lung disease from former miners between 2000 and 2021, largely because of the automatic benefit model for those who spent 20 years underground. Anyone with less time has to prove a link between their lung problems and their job. In 2021, 605 miners were receiving compensation, down from 2,231 in 2000 – a decline that continues as more miners die.

Nova Scotia lung disease claims

All benefit types

Total paid, $ millions

Number of claims

$10

2,500

2,000

8

1,500

1,000

6

500

4

0

2000

‘02

‘04

‘06

‘08

‘10

‘12

‘14

‘16

‘18

‘20

the globe and mail, Source: Workers Compensation Board of N.s.

Nova Scotia lung disease claims

All benefit types

Total paid, $ millions

Number of claims

$10

2,500

2,000

8

1,500

1,000

6

500

4

0

2000

‘02

‘04

‘06

‘08

‘10

‘12

‘14

‘16

‘18

‘20

the globe and mail, Source: Workers Compensation Board of N.s.

Nova Scotia lung disease claims

All benefit types

Number of claims

Total paid, $ millions

$10

2,500

2,000

8

1,500

1,000

6

500

4

0

2000

‘02

‘04

‘06

‘08

‘10

‘12

‘14

‘16

‘18

‘20

the globe and mail, Source: Workers Compensation Board of N.s.

When it comes to compensation programs in the three western provinces, where the bulk of Canada’s active coal miners work, there’s a conspicuous absence of approved black-lung cases in that same time period.

Alberta and B.C., which produce 83 per cent of Canada’s coal, have approved only a few dozen lung-disease claims: 23 in Alberta and 37 in B.C. Saskatchewan’s compensation board approved just seven claims related to respiratory issues from coal miners and rejected eight. While there are shuttered underground mines in the west, most of the employment in the industry is in open-pit mines, which have fewer safety hazards but nonetheless are still found to cause disease, even if less often.

Meanwhile, in the heart of America’s coal country, officials are counting thousands of new cases of black lung and are concerned about rising rates of the disease, which was supposed to be under control decades ago following improved on-the-job lung protection for miners. This revelation came out of the largest study ever done on causes of mortality among U.S. coal miners, which also found miners are developing problems much younger than previously thought, often in their 30s and 40s.

The 2018 report was released by the federally funded National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), which has been tracking American miners’ lung health for more than five decades. As well as finding that one in 10 long-time coal miners had signs of black lung, the agency found that in central Appalachia – where coal is often deeper in the ground and miners must dig through more rock to get to it – that rises to one in five. NIOSH said disease rates are the worst they’ve been in 25 years, leading one of its top scientists to call it an “epidemic” and one of the largest industrial disasters the country has ever seen.

NIOSH’s free, confidential screening for black lung to active and former miners in the U.S. is often delivered from commercial trucks converted into state-of-the-art mobile testing clinics. In some cases, mining companies invite the testers onto their property, but typically the test sites are temporarily set up in hotel parking lots, at union-run black-lung clinics or community centres.

The program, which was created in 1969 after protests by American coal miners concerned about black-lung cases that were being ignored by government, includes lung function tests, chest X-rays and blood-pressure screening. As well as black lung, the tests consistently show U.S. coal miners are also at increased risk for other diseases, including chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and lung cancer.

Their statistics also reinforced the fact that the disease doesn’t care if miners are working deep underground – typical of most mines that operated in Cape Breton – or in the surface mines common in Western Canada.

“It never went away,” said Laura Reynolds, the West Virginia-based supervisor of NIOSH’s coal-worker health surveillance program. “We’re seeing black lung in surface miners. Really anywhere there’s coal mining, there’s disease.”

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Given that mining methods and health and safety protocols are similar between Canada and the U.S., experts say there should be hundreds of new cases in Canada’s western provinces, not just a few dozen. The only conclusion is that the disease is being under-reported, lung specialists say. They warn that a bigger problem is coming, one mining regulators could stop with more rigorous inspections and enforcement, as Canada’s mines continue to pump out coal for buyers around the world.

“You can’t find a problem if you’re not looking for it,” said Dr. Scott Laney, a senior epidemiologist with NIOSH.

Dr. Laney points to the example of Australia, where coal production has been increasing for decades, and where the government has recently approved new coal mines.

The country’s Institute of Health and Welfare began analyzing death records for former coal miners and found black lung was far more prevalent than previously thought. Researchers commissioned to update the country’s occupational disease data discovered hospitalizations were growing, and the number of former miners whose deaths were linked to the disease increased from 99 in 2009 to 140 in 2016, according to the government-funded institute. Those findings prompted the Australian government to introduce new limits on coal-dust exposure in the industry and increased air-quality reporting requirements for mining companies.

Michelle Landry, an Australian MP, said the government had failed to protect coal miners, and called on mining companies to fund a compensation system for affected workers.

“It’s a big failure, an epic failure,” she told reporters. “This is their workers we are talking about, their employees. A lot of these people have worked for generations for the same mining companies. Big profits are made in mining, and I am a big supporter of the mining sector, but I think the mining companies need to step up here and get in and assist these workers.”

Dr. Laney says Canada’s lack of new black-lung cases doesn’t mean the disease isn’t here. More likely, he says, these cases are just invisible to the system.

”Everywhere that mines coal in the United States has black lung. It wouldn’t surprise me if you were to do a comprehensive analysis of the mining work force in Canada, you’d find similar cases of pneumoconiosis,” he said.

Although there is no independent government agency in Canada that applies a national standard to testing miners’ health, there is some monitoring that varies by province. But rather than testing that’s organized by a provincial body, it’s left to employers to determine if a miner has been overexposed to coal dust and should be assessed.

Even then, the testing programs, which are run by the mining companies themselves, are voluntary. Some miners skip out on the tests because they’re afraid of retaliation, said Gary Taje, a retired mining union leader in Alberta.

If they do try to file a workers’ compensation claim for lung disease, many cases are dismissed outright due to lifestyle or family history, Mr. Taje added.

“For the longest time, Alberta just didn’t accept black lung as a workplace disease,” he said. “They’d go out of their way to suggest it was other factors – genetic, environmental or something else.”

Once a miner quits their job or retires, there’s no system to ensure they’re monitored at all, meaning signs of black lung can be missed entirely.

Saskatchewan’s Ministry of Labour Relations and Workplace Safety says lung disease among coal miners is “not within our expertise,” explaining why it’s up to employers, not the province, to monitor miners’ health. Lung screenings are optional for coal workers in the province.

“It is the duty of employers to ensure the health, safety and welfare of all their workers. We are supportive of employers and workers coming together to discuss workplace hazards and risk mitigation,” said Gladys Wasylenchuk, a spokesperson for the ministry.

Alberta says coal miners in that province who have been deemed to have been exposed to coal dust must undergo health assessments every two years, but workers have the right to refuse these tests.

As for British Columbia’s 37 approved claims since 2000, the province’s Ministry of Energy, Mines and Low Carbon Innovation acknowledged some cases of black lung may be going unreported or misidentified – the only province to make that admission.

“It’s difficult to say definitively if this number is an accurate representation of the level of lung disease within the mining industry. It’s unknown whether some cases may have been misdiagnosed or not filed with WorkSafeBC,” spokesperson Tania Venn said.

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Canada’s largest coal company, Teck Resources Ltd. – which earlier this month was targeted for a corporate takeover by Swiss commodities giant Glencore – owns three of the five biggest coal mines in the country’s $8-billion sector. Spokesperson Chris Stannell said Teck makes employee health a “top priority,” and that its screening program is comparable to the federal NIOSH program in the U.S. It also uses exposure-reduction plans, cab pressurization and ventilation, respirators where necessary and air-quality monitoring to protect workers, he said.

British Columbia, Alberta and Saskatchewan’s mining regulators all argue cases are low in their provinces because their coal operations are surface mines. But in fact, since NIOSH began including surface miners as part of their health surveillance program in 2014, they’ve found more than 200 cases of black lung in those types of operations, said Noemi Hall, a research epidemiologist with the federal agency.

The American system has its flaws, too, and is criticized by miners’ advocates for small monthly payments that leave miners still struggling to pay bills. But the U.S. compensates a far greater share of its miners than Canada does. While workers’ compensation in Canada is a provincial responsibility, the U.S. has a federal black-lung program, funded by a levy on coal production, that has paid out more than US$47-billion in cash and medical benefits since 1970 – with more than 30,000 people receiving monthly benefits, including miners and their survivors and dependents, in 2021.

When it comes to Canada’s best compensation system for coal miners – Nova Scotia’s automatic benefit – some union leaders say the requirement of 20 years of work underground is an arbitrary cutoff. Just a few years of coal-dust exposure, they say, can make a miner sick.

Besides their importance to miners for financial reasons, adequate workers’ compensation programs can give governments statistics to measure the health costs of industries. In this way, compensation claims can often be an indicator of a problem that otherwise goes unseen.

“The system is designed to make the worker give up,” said Mr. MacArthur, the former Nova Scotia union leader. “But if these guys can’t get their black-lung claims approved, then they don’t get counted, and the government can say, ‘We don’t have a problem.’ ”

In Cape Breton’s blue-collar company towns such as Glace Bay, Dominion and New Waterford, where the region’s mining history is widely celebrated, the legacy of coal – and its recent return – stirs up mixed feelings.

There are solemn monuments to the hundreds of miners who have died on the job, and they still celebrate Davis Day, commemorating a coal miner killed during a 1925 strike against the British Empire Steel Corporation. There’s plenty of pride in that rugged past, with murals, songs and tributes to the toughness of coal men who would work long shifts, then go out on Saturday nights to spend their paycheques at their local drinking hole.

Now that coal mining has returned to Cape Breton, some are happy to see the trucks once again rumbling out to the Donkin mine on the northeastern tip of the island, servicing the only operating subsea coal mine left in the world. It’s brought about 130 jobs to the area, and some hope it means the local Lingan Generating Station can once again burn Cape Breton coal, instead of importing it from Colombia.

The majority of coal Canada produces is exported, however, and the country is the world’s fourth-largest exporter of metallurgical coal – the kind used in steelmaking – after Australia, the U.S. and Russia.

The company that reopened the Donkin mine in Cape Breton, Kameron Coal, has a track record of breaking laws intended to protect workers’ health. It’s received 27 compliance orders since 2000 related to dust control and ventilation, in violation of the province’s Occupational Health and Safety Act – including 11 fines totalling $22,000, according to Nova Scotia’s Ministry of Labour. The company also operates the Vista mine in Hinton, Alta., near Jasper National Park, which accounts for nearly all Canadian thermal coal exports to China.

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But although it has brought jobs, not everyone is happy to see mountains of black coal once again piling at the mouth of the Donkin coal mine, with its fingers probing deep under the Atlantic Ocean.

“Every time I see that place, it makes me sick to my stomach,” said Joanne Nearing, whose husband, Alonzo Nearing, passed away in 2011 from a heart attack.

Alonzo spent 44 years working underground as a coal miner and was collecting compensation from the Workers’ Compensation Board for pneumoconiosis when he died. He was working in his woodshed, building a jewellery box for his wife, when she found him.

Once he died, his black-lung compensation ended. His family believed his clogged lungs played a role in his heart attack, but their request for survivors’ benefits was denied, which is the default response from the board even though they also automatically give benefits for lung diseases after 20 years working underground. To receive further benefits, families must prove there’s a link between lung disease and a miner’s job.

The board told Ms. Nearing that black lung was “an innocent bystander” in Alonzo’s death. The grieving widow was informed if she wanted to apply for survivor’s benefits, she’d need to request an autopsy and have her dead husband’s lungs examined.

Joanne’s son Kurt Nearing took on his mother’s claim, got a pathologist involved and launched an appeal that eventually won her a small monthly stipend – something that took more than four years of legal battles. Most coal widows, he said, are too grief-stricken to fight the compensation board for something they’re entitled to.

“The deck is stacked against miners and their families,” Mr. Nearing said. “Everyone knows it’s impossible, so they don’t even try.”

Steve Drake’s family history is similarly burdened by the effects of coal. His father, Steve Drake Sr., was a miner who died from black lung, and his grandfather lost his legs in a mining accident.

His grandfather, Bill Drake, spent the rest of his life getting around New Waterford in a children’s CCM-brand wagon. When he died, the Worker’s Compensation Board, which denied his widow survivor’s benefits, asked for his wooden prosthetic legs back. Steve Drake Sr. was so angry he chopped them up with an axe instead.

“That’s why I don’t trust the compensation board,” said Mr. Drake, who was also diagnosed with black lung. “I see a system designed to fight injured workers, not help them.”

Mr. Drake, determined not to spend his life underground, quit mining after 17 years and went to law school – eventually becoming a Crown prosecutor. When his father died, after a long and difficult decline, he spent six years fighting Nova Scotia’s compensation board to get them to acknowledge pneumoconiosis played a role in his death. Mr. Drake had the province’s chief medical examiner look at the evidence, and confirm black lung was a factor, but the board brought in an American specialist to dispute that finding.

Finally, after 10 legal decisions, hearings and appeals, the board relented and an amendment was made to the death certificate. As a trained lawyer working for free, Mr. Drake knew how to fight the system, but he says most mining families don’t have the resources to stick it out that long. He believes the employer-funded workers’ compensation systems in Canada are designed to deny claims to help keep costs down for companies.

“My father’s case is representative of the way they treat so many cases. It’s by design. They put up roadblock after roadblock,” Mr. Drake said. “Most people would have given up long before that. But when they quit, the board wins.”

Kameron’s founder, the late American coal billionaire Chris Cline, told Forbes magazine in 2018 that the Donkin mine in Nova Scotia could generate US$500-million a year within a decade. The company did not respond to questions for this story. The Coal Association of Canada, which represents all mine operators, also did not respond to questions.

With penalties for health and safety violations remaining so small amid such enormous profits, there’s little incentive for mining companies in the U.S. or Canada to clean up their act, said Wes Addington, the director of the Appalachian Citizens’ Law Center, which advocates for sick and injured coal miners.

“We all know how to prevent black lung. You limit the amount of dust that miners breathe,” he said. “But we’ve failed at that. We haven’t effectively enforced the current limits in a way that keeps companies from regularly exceeding them.”

Mr. Addington adds that, in the mining towns that dot Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Kentucky and Ohio, there’s been a sharp rise in cases of an advanced and more deadly version of black lung, called progressive massive fibrosis. “We have levels of severity of disease that are worse than anything we’ve really ever recorded in the United States,” he said.

“For most miners who have it, you’re looking at a reality of your breathing worsening a little bit every day, until you’re no longer able to do anything you used to,” he said. “You become pretty sedentary until you just expire. It’s a pretty horrible way to go.”

Jody Dukart, who represents the United Mine Workers of America’s Canadian branch, and about 1,500 current and retired miners in Saskatchewan, Alberta and Nova Scotia, said a weak regulatory system in Canada has allowed companies to put miners’ health at risk too often.

One simple solution is to end the practice of mining inspectors giving mine operators advance warning when they intend to come, Mr. Dukart said. Without surprise visits, these inspections are meaningless, he said.

“By the time we come, they’ve cleaned it all up and everything is spotless,” he said. “It’s kind of a joke.”

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Saskatchewan’s Ministry of Labour Relations and Workplace Safety says it’s conducted 27 inspections of coal-mining operations since April, 2018, issuing just one compliance order and no penalties. It says records predating that period are unavailable. Alberta has conducted 459 inspections of coal mines since 2011 – when digital record-keeping began – and hasn’t issued a single fine related to dust control or ventilation in that time.

British Columbia also hasn’t issued a single fine related to dust control or ventilation at coal mines in that province since new penalties came into effect in 2017, despite 372 inspections, 155 compliance orders relating to dust and 51 orders relating to ventilation problems since then.

Like Mr. Taje, the retired union leader in Alberta, Mr. Dukart believes too many miners are still hesitant to get screened for signs of the disease because they’re worried it could impact their employment. In many small mining towns, coal is one of the few sectors where someone with a high-school education can earn a comfortable living, he said.

“I believe a huge percentage of the people who work in those plants should be diagnosed, but it’s just getting them there to get diagnosed. I don’t know how we do that,” he said. “People don’t want to know they have black lung.”

Coal dust has always made for dangerous working conditions. In 1992, 26 miners were killed when a dust cloud exploded at the Westray Mine in Nova Scotia, in one of Canada’s worst mining disasters.

But for most miners, the real threat of coal dust comes more quietly, and out of sight, in the form of stairs they can no longer climb or short walks that overwhelm their lungs.

Wish Donovan, the Miners Museum tour guide, is reminded of that reality every morning. He’s out of breath almost “as soon as I open my eyes.”

But in company towns such as Glace Bay, where the mining firms owned the houses, the stores and employed most of the families, people didn’t want to complain, Mr. Donovan said. For years, he watched his father drag himself to his shift at the mine, even as his lungs were failing him.

“You could hear him coming up the hill after work. He’d be coughing the whole way,” he said. “The doctor said his lungs were full of dust. Basically, he drowned. He had no room to breathe.”

Mr. Donovan still remembers the way coal dust seemed to seep into a miner’s body – the bloodshot eyes, the black sweat that used to run from his pores and the “coal tattoos,” permanent marks on miners’ skin from cuts that were stained with dust. Miners knew that even just a few years in that environment was bad for them, but he says they had to be “almost near dead” to get a case taken seriously by the workers’ compensation board.

Mr. Donovan has some good memories of his time as a coal miner. It was a brotherhood of workers who looked after each other in the deeps where the dust was sometimes so thick you couldn’t see through it. Still, he forbid his sons from following him underground.

“I didn’t want them in the mines,” he said. “I told them to get an education and go someplace else.”

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