Ontario’s Ford government says it plans to relocate the head office of the Workplace Safety and Insurance Board (WSIB) to London if re-elected this summer.
The plan was unveiled Tuesday by Monte McNaughton, the province’s minister of labour, training and skills development, who was in London for a pair of announcements, including one relating to the construction of a glove manufacturing facility in the city.
The move will require the amendment of the Workplace Safety and Insurance Act, which the province says restricts the WSIB’s head office to Toronto, home to some of Canada’s most expensive real estate.
Speaking with reporters, McNaughton said the current WSIB offices, which span more than 600,000 square feet in the Simcoe Place tower in downtown Toronto, costs the board, funded by employer premiums, more than $30 million annually.
“We need all regions of the province to be participating with these good, well-paying jobs. Moving the WSIB to London literally will move thousands of jobs here. Possibly it will create local jobs as well,” McNaughton said.
“The WSIB themselves will obviously do the details of the move as far as looking for space, but we know it’s going to be more efficient.”
McNaughton said the plan to move the WSIB would be highlighted in the Ford government’s upcoming budget, set to be unveiled on Thursday. The provincial legislature is set to adjourn immediately after the budget is tabled.
Grant Walsh, chair of the WSIB’s board of directors, said it wasn’t clear how many employees were expected to make the move to London, noting “the employees are hearing about this today at the same time you are.”
“We want to waylay any concerns. We want the people to feel secure in their jobs, and we don’t want to force people to relocate in Ontario,” he told reporters.
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Roughly 3,000 people worked in the WSIB offices before the COVID-19 pandemic. Many staff still work from home, Walsh said, with some coming into the office for two or three days out of the week.
“We’re planning that this change … will cause us to reevaluate the work-from-home situation. There are certainly people in Scarborough, in Pickering who don’t particularly want to relocate their family to London.”
The relocation comes in response to a review of the WSIB’s operations conducted in 2019, which recommended that it look at ways to decentralize to save costs and be more efficient, the government says.
It also comes as part of the province’s Community Jobs Initiative, which aims to ensure provincial agencies aren’t concentrated all in the downtown core of Toronto, and to save taxpayer money. The province says it plans to look at moving other agencies to other locations across Ontario.
Walsh said the WSIB occupying such expensive real estate didn’t “seem to be in sync with our vision and mission.” The WSIB provides wage-loss benefits, medical coverage, and support to workers who are injured or fall ill on the job, the agency’s website says.
“The money that we have is not government money. It’s the money from 330,000 employers. And we want to use it as efficiently as possible to support the workers of Ontario,” he said.
The WSIB owns its current building with a partner, and has a 75 per cent share in the property. Selling it or leasing it would be beneficial to those hundreds of thousands of employers, Walsh said.
The board also has three years remaining on a lease in the tower, he said, so a high priority will be to find major tenants interested in taking over the space.
The announcement comes months after Jeff Lang, a London businessman and former London Police Services Board member, was tapped by the province to be the WSIB’s President and CEO in a three-year term that began Feb. 1.
“London has a rich history when it comes to insurance, but also there’s a financial benefit to London. We know that rental properties are cheaper than Toronto,” McNaughton said when asked why London was chosen.
London Deputy Mayor Josh Morgan said he and Mayor Ed Holder were excited to learn about the news, saying it comes at a time of significant growth for the region.
“The headquarters of WSIB represents thousands of long-term, high paying, white-collar jobs coming into our city,” Morgan said.
“With the City of London’s size and with its growth rate and the opportunities here, it makes sense that a city like ours would be host to a major government corporation.”
This is the second WSIB-related announcement to come from the province in the last week.
The government announced on Wednesday that it would raise compensation for workers who are injured on the job — a proposed change that won’t take effect until after the election.
— with files from The Canadian Press
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