Dear Editor,

Enclosed, please find a letter sent to the Workplace Safety & Insurance Board (WSIB) of Ontario. It would be interesting to see if other trucking companies are having the same problems.

To whom it may concern:

It is with great regret, disgust and anger that we enclose a cheque in the amount of $1,430.70, to clear the interest on our account.

It is unfortunate that a province so convinced that it couldn’t exist without small business does everything in its power to penalize and destroy companies that are struggling to survive.

We were caught in the act of not paying WSIB premiums for office employees.

We went to court, paid our fine and with a series of cheques paid off three years in arrears, $1,430.70 of interest accrued.

We presently have two full-time office employees and we are charged an outrageous rate of $5.04 per $100 earnings, the same rate as if they were out there driving a $200,000 tractor trailer with 90,000 pounds of freight on our frost-heaved pot-holed highways.

You don’t even need an imagination to realize there is a huge difference between what can happen to a truck driver compared to an office worker.

Truck drivers are out there every day risking their lives and office workers are faced with various degrees of paper cuts, so why the same rate?

We requested an answer to this question from you WSIB folks a couple of times and you wrote back with some words that make no sense, so obviously you don’t know either.

Rose Mary Lundy-Berard and Roger Berard

Dunchurch, Ont. n