Victims’ families get $10.7m in Giant settlement

For the eight wives and 20 children left behind after a bomb killed nine miners during a combative labour dispute at the Giant gold mine in Yellowknife, N.W.T., in September 1992, it’s finally over.

More than 12 years after the incident, the Northwest Territories Supreme Court has ruled the survivors will receive $10.7 million in damages from a wrongful-death lawsuit launched on behalf of the families by the Workers’ Compensation Board.

The court’s ruling places blame not only on Roger Warren, the man convicted of nine counts of second-degree murder in 1995 for setting the explosives, but on: Royal Oak Ventures, the mining company that owned Giant and used replacement workers when unionized members went on strike; the Canadian Auto Workers union, which later took over the union that represented workers at Giant, including Warren; Pinkerton Security, which was hired to protect management and replacement workers at the mine site; and the government of the Northwest Territories.

In an unusual step, Justice Arthur Lutz assigned blame in percentage terms. In his 419-page ruling, he said Warren was 26% liable, Royal Oak, 23%; CAW, 22%; Pinkerton, 15%; and the territorial government, 9%.

The ruling found then-Royal Oak President Margaret Witte and CAW President Buzz Hargrove not personally liable.

Hargrove says his union will appeal the decision.

Lutz ruled that none of the involved parties did enough to control the escalating violence that culminated in the bombing.

“It is ludicrous to advance a view, as Royal Oak persisted in doing, that no reasonable person viewing these scenes at Giant was able to appreciate the foreseeability of a death,” Lutz said in his decision.

The damages will be paid to the compensation board to reimburse it for money already paid out to the families. The court also awarded damages of $600,000 to James O’Neil, a miner who was one of the first people to arrive at the scene of the blast.

The collective agreement at Giant ended in March 1992, and a government mediator was brought in to help reach a settlement. By mid-April a tentative agreement had been reached, but about 80% of the mine’s 230 unionized members voted it down. The lines were drawn. Royal Oak locked workers out on May 22, 1992; a day later, workers formed a picket line outside Giant.

About 75 replacement workers were trucked in after the union went on strike. Numerous outbreaks of violence ensued, including several non-fatal bombings and the beating of an officer of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police with a baseball bat when he tried to investigate reports of trespassing.

Many of the replacement workers were union employees who had crossed the picket lines, and this served to exacerbate the situation.

On Sept. 18, at the height of what Lutz termed labour “terrorism,” Warren planted a bag of explosive powder and two sticks of dynamite on a track that carried miners 200 metres underground. The blast killed Vern Fullowka, Norman Hourie, Chris Neill, Josef Pandev, Shane Riggs, David Vodnoski, Malcolm Sawler, Robert Rowsell, and Arnold Russell. Six of them were union members.

Warren confessed to the murders in October 1993. He’s now serving a life term at Stony Mountain Penitentiary in Manitoba.

Royal Oak declared bankrupt cy in 1999, and the Giant mine officially ceased operations earlier this year.