In front of the CNESST offices in Montreal, workers’ voices filled the space. We gathered there, as the Immigrant Workers Centre, alongside UTTAM, CSN Construction, and the Alliance syndicale de la construction. We did not come only to lay flowers or recall names. We came to say clearly that these deaths are not fate. They are the result of a system.
In 2025, 257 workers were killed on the job in Quebec. In metropolitan Montreal alone, 43 workers died. These numbers were not read as statistics. They were heard as an accusation. Each number carries a life, a face, a family waiting for someone who never came home. And still, the same system that produced these losses continues as if nothing happened.
In front of the CNESST, this was not symbolic. It was charged with anger. Workers spoke about construction sites turned into daily danger zones. About speed ups. About pressure to produce at any cost. About oversight being reduced instead of strengthened. No one spoke the language of accidents. Everyone spoke the language of responsibility.
At the center of this anger is the government attack on full time health and safety representatives. These workers stand between life and death. Their presence on sites is not administrative. It is protection. Removing them means more risk, more injuries, more deaths.
What the government proposes is not reform. It is the reorganization of danger. It shifts responsibility onto workers themselves, in a system where many cannot refuse unsafe work, especially migrant workers tied to employers through closed permits and fear of deportation.
Here, the reality becomes clear. Migrant workers, who make up a large part of the workforce in dangerous sectors, are pushed to the front lines without protection. Their precarious status forces silence. It forces acceptance. In this context, death is not an accident. It is the outcome.
Workers’ Memorial Day is often presented as a day of mourning. But what happened in front of the CNESST was something else. It was a shift from mourning to confrontation. From remembering the dead to naming the causes.
The message from the street was simple. Those who build this society are not disposable. Their lives are not a cost of doing business.
The government must back off its attack on health and safety representatives. Their presence on every construction site is the minimum protection in a system that continues to fail workers.
This was not just a gathering. It was a reminder. Justice does not come from above. It is taken through struggle.
Until then, workers will keep speaking louder than silence.
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