Danick Dumont blames himself for not wearing goggles the day his life changed.
“If I could go back, I would wear them in tabarnak my glasses,” says the teenager from Saint-Lin-Laurentides.
“At that age, nobody wants to wear them,” adds his mother, Cindy Turcotte, in an attempt to make him feel less guilty. Young people don’t think anything can happen to them. »
Like many other young Quebecers, Danick was able to easily land a well-paying job that did not require qualifications at a time when the province is struggling with a labor shortage.
In the summer of 2021, when he was 16, Danick put up commercial fences for a Laval contractor. At an hourly rate of $18 for 40 hours a week, Danick is hyper motivated by his job. He liked the salary, but also “the job”. “Being outside all the time was fun,” he says.
“I didn’t need to wake him up even though he had to leave very early in the morning. He was preparing his lunch the night before, always in a good mood,” says his mother.
At the start of the school year that year, the teenager has no intention of returning to high school, where he is in a special class for students with learning difficulties.
“It was not motivating,” says the young man with the build of a football player.
He then toyed with the idea of entering a school for adults, but he hesitated to leave such a paying job.
On September 9, in the morning, Danick must replace the fence of a school in Verdun. When he is busy stretching a metal wire with the help of his boss, the latter cuts off an excess end.
His boss took him to the nearest hospital, but given his age and the seriousness of the injury, the teenager was quickly transferred by ambulance to the Montreal Children’s Hospital.
“If I lose my eye, shoot me,” he said in shock to his younger brother running to his bedside.
Danick was 12 when his father died of cancer after two years of suffering.
“That’s when Danick’s life went downhill,” his mother said. It was rough to see his father wasting away, then to lose him. He doubled grade six rather than follow his friends to high school, she says. He started hating school.
This return to the hospital plunged the whole family back into very bad memories.
During his first week of hospitalization, the teenager had to remain lying on his stomach, head down. He will stay in the hospital for a month. Although the staff was nice and attentive, he insists, “it was hell.”
At the time, Danick didn’t know if the doctors would be able to save his eye. He lived in hope.
The teenager will be operated on September 16 – “the day his dad died”, says his mother.
Unfortunately, hope will be short-lived.
Today, Danick sees only with his left eye.
“At first I resented everyone; to me, to my boss,” says Danick, who recently turned 18.
In the apartment he shares with his mother and younger brother, the traces of this anger still remain.
Upon returning home, in bouts of rage, the teenager kicked down doors with his fists.
The one who played elite “double letter” hockey recently went back to playing for a less competitive (“single letter”) team.
However, an event on the ice brought out this anger that continues to inhabit him.
During a game, a player from the opposing team threw a mean-spirited remark at him about “his crooked eye”. Danick responded with his fists and was suspended for four games.
The teen spends most of his days — and nights — in his bedroom playing video games. “I started gaming like crazy. It’s really become addictive,” he says, sitting next to his girlfriend and his mother at the kitchen table in the apartment.
The two women do not contradict him.
A year and a half after the accident, he has frequent follow-ups in ophthalmology. He may need to wear an ocular prosthesis.
Danick doesn’t know what he wants to do with the rest of his life. His mother encourages him to enroll in vocational training next fall.
“Going back to school is pretty much the thing to do, I think,” the teen said uncertainly.
If Danick agrees to tell his story, it is to make other young people aware of following all the safety rules at work. His boss was wearing eye protection. He should have done the same, understands the teenager today.
“My son is a warrior,” his mother says, looking at him tenderly. He will pass through. He is made strong. »
In Quebec, at present, there is no minimum age for access to employment, unlike five other Canadian provinces.
That’s why we see more and more, in the midst of a labor shortage, 12-year-old children ordering their favorite coffee from the drive-thru. Or a 13-year-old busy in the kitchen of a popular rotisserie.
All they need is parental consent to work (mandatory for under 14s).
Expressing concern about the safety and school perseverance of children in a context of scarcity of personnel, the Minister of Labor, Jean Boulet, must table a bill this month to better regulate the work of young people.
A report by the Labor and Workforce Advisory Committee (CCTM) – which brings together unions and employers’ associations – has just recommended that the general age of access to employment be set at 14 years old, with some exceptions.
This committee also proposes to limit the number of working hours to 17 hours per week (including weekends) during the school year. Monday to Friday would be a maximum of 10 hours, except on holidays.
More than half of secondary 1 students now combine work and studies, compared to only 13% in 2022, according to the Survey on the psychological health of young people aged 12 to 25 conducted among 18,000 young people from four regions of Quebec by the CIUSSS de l’Estrie-CHUS made public earlier this winter. It is 20% of young people in the first cycle [1st and 2nd secondary] who indicate that they work more than 15 hours a week, again according to this survey under the responsibility of Dr. Mélissa Généreux, medical consultant at Public Health in Estrie and responsible for the investigation.
“We notice that work is taking up more and more space in the lives of our young people,” says Dr. Mélissa Généreux. However, it is not because we have a shortage of labor that we must sacrifice our youth. »
Without wanting to “demonize the work of young people”, we note that among teenagers who work more than 15 hours a week, the interest in school is less great and their mental health is worse, she specifies.
“If, as a teenager, you work a lot, you go to school full time and you spend the rest of your time on the screens, inevitably, you sacrifice social activities and hobbies to the detriment of your physical and mental health . After all, there are only 24 hours in a day,” continues Dr. Genereux, who says she is very concerned about this imbalance.
The Minister of Labor and several experts from the world of education have argued for the need to better regulate the work of young people, precisely to ensure that work does not interfere with school perseverance.
However, the Association des restaurateurs du Québec is calling for an exemption in the bill that will be tabled shortly so that people under 14 can continue to work in restaurants.
The CCTM has also suggested painting a better statistical portrait of the work of children subject to compulsory school attendance in order to better identify its evolution, particularly with regard to the number of workers in this age group, their age and their sector of activity.
The introduction of the bill comes as crashes jumped 392% for 14-year-olds and under, 221% for 15-year-olds and 17% for 16-year-olds from 2012 to 2021, according to data from the Commission for standards, equity, health and safety at work (CNESST).
Additionally, there have been five work-related deaths involving a youth under the age of 19 since 2014.
The sectors with the most workplace injuries among young people are retail trade, accommodation and food services.
202 young people under the age of 16 were injured in 2021, compared to 56 nine years earlier, according to CNESST data.
“We have to make sure that we don’t put 12-year-olds, 13-year-olds to work in restaurant kitchens or in sawmills. […] We cannot accept that,” Minister Boulet told the media after reading the CCTM report, without committing to having all the recommendations included in the bill.
Workplace accidents among children under 16 have jumped, according to the CNESST, but this linear increase is not observed in the province’s emergency rooms, at least according to an audit conducted by La Presse with four major hospitals (CHU Sainte-Justine, Montreal Children’s General Hospital, Sacré-Coeur Hospital and CHU de Québec).
“Workplace injuries among young people vary far too much from year to year to show an increase,” said Montreal Children’s General Hospital trauma researcher Glenn Keays. He hypothesizes that better awareness of the importance of reporting work accidents may explain the increase in CNESST figures. However, it is not necessarily serious injuries that require consultation in the emergency room.
Thus, 43 young people were treated in the emergency room of this Montreal hospital in 2022, compared to 55 the previous year. “The record year is 2021, but I also saw 40-45 injuries per year in the 1990s”, nuances the one who is also coordinator of the Canadian Hospital Information and Research System for Trauma Prevention.
Workplace injuries among under-15s are rare (9%). The vast majority occur among 15-17 year olds (91%). In the 1990s, injuries among under-15s were more common (15%), says Keays.
There are twice as many burns among people aged 15 and over, observes the researcher. “It’s probably because you don’t let a 12-13 year old make burgers or work in kitchens,” he said.
Injuries vary by type of work. He sees head injuries in teenagers who work in shops; they slip on the freshly cleaned floor and bump their heads. In warehouses, these are heavy machinery injuries.
Regarding the bill that will soon be tabled, the researcher believes that age limits should be set, for example for the use of heavy machinery in warehouses. “It’s really rare, injuries in the under-15s,” he insists. That being said, some injuries require a great deal of care and rehabilitation. It is worth legislating to reduce these injuries. »
At Village Vacances Valcartier last summer, a teenager under the age of 14 who worked as the campground’s outdoor operations attendant was seriously injured “in the head and upper body” while doing maintenance. of the site with other young workers.
Ten of the team’s thirteen new hires that summer were underage.
The teenager was standing in the cargo box of a quad bike (side by side), which contravenes the Act respecting off-road vehicles. During a 90 degree turn in a curve, he lost his balance and was ejected from the cargo box. He fell to the ground before being hit and crushed by the trailer hitched to the vehicle.
None of the eight young people who were in two UTVs that day were wearing seat belts or helmets. The driver of the vehicle in which the teenager was injured had not received specific training on the safe operation of the quad bike. He was also not of legal age to drive it.
Of the company’s staff that summer, just over 175 workers were under the age of 14. For more than a hundred of them, the employer had no signed parental authorization, which is against the law, this survey also revealed.
Other recent tragedies involving young people at work: A 17-year-old tree pruner lost his life after being hit by a branch during a tree pruning operation in Trois-Rivières last fall.
Also, earlier this winter, a 16-year-old employee of an IGA grocery store died – hit by a snow removal truck in the parking lot of a Laval shopping center – while pushing grocery carts.
