The Decibel - The construction industry’s opioid problem

Episode Date: December 8, 2025

For families, the tragedy of opioids is beyond measure. The opioid epidemic has claimed tens of thousands of lives in Canada and has been recognized as a public health crisis, but it’s also an economic one – and it disproportionately affects workers in key sectors like construction and the trades. As Ottawa ramps up its push to build major projects fast, could the ongoing toxic drug crisis slow it down?Today, Globe reporter Jason Kirby joins the show. As part of our Poisoned series, he spoke with workers, companies, unions and health researchers to understand the grip the crisis has on the construction industry and what’s being done about it.Questions? Comments? Ideas? Email us at [e-mail] Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

He loved people. He could charm almost anyone in almost any situation. That's Rob Fairchild, and he's talking about his younger brother, Michael. He was a very talented musician. He loved to paint watercolors. When he was out west on the pipeline and apprenticing, he had these notebooks that he would fill with his little small paintings and sketches. Michael Fairchild worked as a welder. He helped build projects across the country. across the country, from pipelines to pubs. And according to his family, he took pride in his work.

On August 6th, Michael was scheduled to work a shift on a welding project in downtown Ottawa. But he never showed up. He died the day before from a suspected overdose. His death was one of an estimated 18 opioid toxicity deaths that day across Canada. as he became, you know, an older teen and adult, he started experimenting with a lot of substances. And I think it was like an unconscious self-medication. Michael thrived in the trades. But as the years passed, the work took a toll.

When you're welding, you're climbing things, you're bending down, you're squeezing into tight spaces, you're hauling things around, lots of heavy cables, you know, and you're pulling yourself up ladders. Then as he was into his 40s, he's working with, you know, young guys who are almost half his age. And they're in their prime of their lives. And so he's trying to mask it all the time. There were days where he could hardly, like, raise an arm over his head, and he would just hide it at work. So he was done with a lot of pain fairly constantly.

Rob says Michael's eventual addiction to opioids was fueled by the workplace culture. Where you just don't show your pain, you don't show your weakness, but you do try to take what you can to deal with it. The opioid epidemic has killed tens of thousands of people in Canada and has been recognized as a public health crisis. but it's also an economic one

and it's disproportionately impacted workers in construction and the trades. These workers are crucial to Canada at a time when the country is ramping up major infrastructure projects as well as trying to build more housing. And with a push for more people to enter the trades, unless more is done to counter the epidemic, advocates worry things could get worse. Today, Globe staff reporter,

Jason Kirby is here. He spoke with workers, companies, unions, and health researchers to understand how opioids are affecting the sector and the collective economic cost of so many lives cut short. I'm Cheryl Sutherland, and this is the decibel from the Globe and Mail. Hi, Jason. Hi. So we just heard about Michael Fairchild's life, and it's a story. story that shows the tragedy and personal toll of the opioid epidemic. And often when we talk

about this epidemic, we're looking at the personal loss. But Jason, today we're going to talk about the economic loss. Why is it important to look at the financial side of this? Yeah, it's obviously not the first thing that comes to mind when you're talking about the opioid crisis. You know, the globe's looked at this from a lot of different angles as part of our poison series that's been going on over the last year. But, you know, you can't really separate the two, the personal losses, the society losses and the economic losses. They're intertwined.

There is an economic side to this story, and there's a number of reasons for that. One, the opioid crisis does have very real costs for the justice system, the health care system, but also for a lot of victims, you know, contrary to what a lot of people think when they think about the opioid crisis, they think, well, you know, a bunch of people addicted on the street. You know, it's terrible for them, but there's no real greater loss to society. And yet, what we've come to realize over time is that quite a significant share of those people who have died as a result of the opioid crisis were employed quite recently before they died, or right up until the moment they died in the case of Michael Fairchild.

And there's an economic loss to that. You know, there's all sorts of different ways. crazy, you can measure it, but basically what we're trying to get a sense of is what is, what do we all lose when someone loses their life to the opioid crisis? Yeah, and it can be uncomfortable to think about, you know, a life lost through the economy. But in fact, like, there is a reason for this because, you know, policy, politicians, like we do look at things. Money talks. And once you start to understand just how much the economic burden is, that starts to wake up

policymakers and politicians to take action in a way. that they hadn't before. So why look at the economic fallout caused by opioids specifically and not, you know, say alcohol? There actually is a lot of research out there on the economic costs of alcohol and tobacco and that's the Canadian Center on Substance Use and Addiction.

They've been maintaining this database that looks at all of this kind of stuff. Like what are the economic costs to the justice system to the health care system and disability insurance and all this? And, you know, and if you do look at their number, what you do see is that, you know, alcohol and tobacco by far have the largest economic costs burden for the Canadian economy and Canadian society. But one of the things they look at

is lost labor productivity, basically. And, you know, that word productivity is just like kind of repels people when they hear it. But what we're talking about is the lost output from people who die as a result of the opioid crisis in particular. What is lost by them dying earlier than they otherwise would have. And that's what really kind of makes opioids different than those other substances. Because whereas somebody dying from cancer or liver disease tends to be older, the opioid crisis has really, really impacted younger people, younger workers in their 20s and their 30s and 40s.

And they still have a long time of potential earnings ahead of them and work that they would have been doing. And so what you actually see is if you just look at the lost labor productivity, opioids have overtaken all other substances and are now that have the highest burden cost on the Canadian economy far more than these other substances. And so, you know, this is not an exact science. You're trying to determine, you know, not everybody would have been working. Some are working.

They would not be making the same amount of money. So there's lots of calculations that kind of go into this. But this is what this exercise kind of is that some researchers have done to try and just understand the value of that lost output. Okay, so let's get into it. How do we measure the impact on Canada's economy? The way the Canadian researchers have looked at this is, like I said, looking at

the lost labor productivity. And this is basically looking at foregone earnings. A researcher at the University of Alberta, he was a graduate student at the time, Alexander Chung, and I spoke with him. So what Alexander had done is he'd drawn on BC data that

showed that, you know, two thirds of opioid victims were employed within the last five years of their lives. And kind of using that and figuring out what some of those occupations were that they worked in, he drew out estimates that for those who died between 2016 and 2019, you basically resulted in lost productivity of about $8.8 billion. You know, the Canadian Center on Substance Use and Addiction, they'd also done their own research, like I said earlier.

And they looked at a longer time period, 2007 to 2012. and over that time frame, they determined the opioid use robbed the economy of about $41 billion in lost productivity. Okay, those are big numbers. They're huge, huge numbers, yeah. What do we know about what's been going on in recent years? Yeah, so these studies, it kind of ended in 2020 and 2021, but we also know that during, as a result of the pandemic, there was a very significant jump in the number of opioid deaths

in Canada. And so I wanted to go and basically do some analysis. using their data, drawing on the data from these studies, and applying what we do know about deaths since then. And what I found was that when you add in the more recent quite large increase in the number of deaths, the burden on the Canadian economy jumps to about $60 billion. And you can quibble with $100 million here, $100 million there. The point is that it's a very significant cost that comes from this.

And, you know, this is tens of thousands of lives. So that's $40 billion in lost productivity over 14 years, so 2007 to 2020. And then $20 billion in the last four. I think's got a lot worse. There was a very significant increase from 2021, 2021, 2020, 2023 in the number of deaths. Now, the number of deaths have started to come down, which is fantastic. Unfortunately, we're still much higher than we were prior to the pandemic in terms of the number of fatalities in Canada that are connected to opioids.

How big of a problem is this compared to other places? Like, do we have any points of reference? Yeah, I mean, the United States is the closest point of reference. And the United States has been doing a lot of research about the economic burden of the opioid crisis there. They were hit earlier and harder than Canada was. We've now basically, you know, when you look at it at a per capita basis, we're on par with the United States. So North America kind of stands apart from the rest of the world this way. We've been hit in a way that a lot of other countries haven't.

But there is some really interesting research that's come out of the United States where, you know, there's been this mystery of why is the labor participation rate in the United States? Why has it been falling really since like the turn of the millennium? It's been on a downward trend. And it's been this kind of puzzle that economists have been trying to figure out. And some researchers have basically determined when you drill down and look, at kind of a county by county level, those counties where there's a higher rate of opioid prescriptions have also seen relative larger decrease in the labor participation, particularly

amongst men. I mean, the opioid crisis, 75% of deaths have been amongst men when you actually look into some of the specific industry data where it's particular occupations that are hit. Those are all predominantly male occupations. opioid use has basically taken a lot more young men out of the economy. We'll be right back. So let's drill down to talk about where we're seeing a huge impact. Of the Canadians who were currently or recently working when they died,

how many were working in the trades? Yeah, we have no national numbers on any of this. And so what you end up having to do is go and take these regional studies, regional research, and kind of extrapolate for the national thing. But we do know that in Ontario, one study found that of those people who died who were employed at the time of the death, about one third worked in the trades and construction. Similarly, there's some BC data that's a little bit more up to date that shows that of those who were employed at the time of their death, about half were employed in trades, warehouse, transportation, this kind of broad

occupation category. I mean, those numbers sound pretty high. Do we know why the problem is so big in the sector? Yeah, well, there's a number of reasons. I mean, one of the things is it's very physical, it's physically demanding, there's a lot more injuries, there's a lot more, you know, relative to the size of the number of people working in construction, the number of people who die in construction, you know, the rate is far higher.

And so part of it is that. It's the nature of the work. There's a lot of work in construction. It's done in remote camps, you know, things like building pipelines and power transmission grids and mines and things like that. And, you know, you have a lot of people going out to these camps. They're remote. They're getting paid very well, kind of isolated in these places.

There's nothing to do, you know. They're supposed to be dry camps, but people smuggle in drugs. And so you end up with addictions kind of developing there. And interestingly, you know, I found this quite surprised. I didn't appreciate this. A lot of workers who may go into these camps and have smoked pot or, you know, marijuana would be their drug of choice. One of the problems is marijuana stays in the system longer. And if you are going to be tested for drugs that could jeopardize your job, you move away from using marijuana to drugs that exit the system faster.

Cocaine is one of those. You know, this was the path that Michael took. You know, he started using, and a couple of others talked to me about this as well. they shifted from marijuana to cocaine some moved on to crack and then actually you end up in this cycle this is kind of common that people using crack followed by opioids that would kind of bring them back down off of that crack high so that they can go back to work when their breaks are over so there's those things and then there's just the workplace culture that's it's a tough guy culture there's a kind of sense of not admitting that you're injured or there's a stoicism that's you know, mask, this kind of masculine bravado that's kind of in that industry as well. So they take drugs to kind of mask those injuries and so that they can keep working. And so then you take that kind of like that stoicism and you mix it at a time where you've got this massive supply of toxic fentanyl that's come together and combined to create this crisis.

So Jason, what does this look like on the ground? Like what have you heard from people about what this epidemic looks like, say, on a construction site? I mean, one of the things you hear from, I spoke to some employers and one of the challenges they have is workers just not showing up or workers coming and falling asleep on the job. One guy I talked to is like, yeah, you just see somebody sleeping and he's not sleeping. He's taken probably opioids and they've fallen asleep as a result. Michael used to call it, oh, it's just the nods. That was his term to describe it.

I just got the nods. And then there's just the potential for when you've got guys falling asleep, you know, they're handling heavy machinery. There's, you know, it's dangerous. There's theft that comes along with the addictions in some cases. So I spoke with one owner of a construction business and I was trying to get a sense, you know, how much do you think this is added to costs? And he kind of estimates that, you know, substance use and mental health issues now probably add up to about like 1% of the total cost of the industry facing. But there's no real hard numbers on this. It's just that, you know, they'll say things like, well, you know, if you hire 10 guys to work on a project, only 5 might show up.

So maybe you need to hire 15 to account for that. And, you know, it's just kind of like this insidious way that it's changing that work environment. Have we seen any efforts from employers or unions to address this issue? Yeah. I mean, what you have seen in the last few years from construction unions and some of the industry players is, you know, an emphasis on having naloxone kits at sites so that when there is somebody who's experiencing an opioid overdose, naloxone can be administered. And we probably are seeing the result of that because, like I said earlier, the number

of deaths has been declining. So things like that have been happening. There's also some groups kind of like developing peer-to-peer support systems. There's one in BC called The Forge that's launching. it basically taps construction workers, guys in the trades, who've had experience with addiction and mental health issues. They get trained up as counselors and they're there so that, you know, somebody who might not be willing to reach out to their family members or certainly not their employers now has somebody, you know, that they can reach out to and who's gone through, you know, what they are going through themselves. Yeah. Has that been helping? It's hard to say whether it's helping at this point because these kind of programs are just getting off the ground now.

I did speak to one of the guys who will be working with the Forge in BC and he shared that, you know, very similar to Michael. He used crack. He used opiots. He told me that, you know, if I'd have had a program like this that I could reach out to this kind of peer-to-peer program, I think that I would have done that and got on that journey of getting clean a lot earlier. Okay. Are there any other changes that people want to see, like bigger changes? perhaps that would help with this issue? Yeah, I mean, there's a, some folks have, I talked to stress that basically the workplace

insurance systems that we've got right now and the approach that the general practitioners take is about getting workers back on their feet really quickly. So that's, okay, prescribing a couple of weeks off after an injury and powerful pain medicine. And in that time frame, you know, an addiction can easily take hold. So what they'd like to see is less emphasis. on that, more on physiotherapy and not just having naloxone kits there, as one guy said, that's the most basic band-aid you could put on this. There's also others who really emphasize that so much of the language around this kind of

focuses on the worker themselves, developing an addiction and then, you know, as if it's entirely their fault. Whereas in a lot of these cases, a lot of this starts with injuries, you know, on the work site. And so they want to see that kind of responsibility shifted to more workplace safety as opposed to an onus carried by the individual. Okay. We're talking about this while Ottawa makes a historic push to build major projects quickly. And Canada is already struggling with a construction worker shortage. So how does this epidemic factor into that?

Yeah. I mean, if this was a crisis before, now we're embarking on this massive infrastructure building campaign, kind of in response to the trade war. the home construction campaign, and all of this is going to require huge numbers of workers. I mean, there's some estimates that as many as 500,000 new workers will be needed in trades and construction by 2030, and that's on top of another 250,000 plus who are going to be retiring because a lot of workers are older, so you're going to need to replace those workers. So add those things together, and we're talking many, many hundreds of thousands of workers coming into the industry and we need to get a handle on this because what you don't want is

this to just continue and new workers coming into the in the sector being caught up in these cycles so whether it's sort of dealing with workplace safety or the approach that's taken to injuries or just having peer-to-peer you know counseling services any any of these things are going to become even more important just by the sheer volume of of workers who going to be entering the sector. Yeah. Just lastly here, Jason, you spoke with Michael Fairchild's family a lot for this piece. And we know that the lives lost to the epidemic show up in Canada's economy and on job sites across the country.

But what did Michael's family think of his lost potential? Yeah, because I said to them, I'm taking this approach. I'm looking at like what is the economic burden of this? What is the lost potential? And Rob immediately was like, yeah, yeah, I can tell you right now, lost potential. I could see it in my brother. I don't know a moment of my life where he wasn't here. I mean, I don't have any conscious memory of that.

I think when I think about the lost moments and lost opportunities, it's seeing him being able to see his son grow up and being the dad that he ought to be. He should be there with his wife and child, you know, barbecuing and spending time with the family and doing these things that he loved and continuing to work. You know, Rob said, you know, he would drive around with his brother and his brother loved pointing at all these different projects

that he'd worked on in the Ottawa area years before. And this was, you know, after his son, his proudest, you know, kind of achievement was these projects that he'd worked on. This was kind of his legacy and his contribution. My brother's welding helmet, he got that earlier this year when he started this job in Ottawa. And when I picked it up from the union hall, I turned it over, and on the inside,

he'd written his son's name in black capitals. And, you know, yeah, and that's what's been lost. I really want people to get the help they need. It's a drum out to keep beating to anyone who'll even nod politely, but just please, please, please get help. Jason, thank you so much. Thank you very much. That was Jason Kirby, a staff reporter with the Globe.

That's it for today. I'm Cheryl Sutherland. Our producers are Madeline White, Mikhail Stein, and Ali Graham. David Crosby edits the show. Adrian Chung is our senior producer, and Angela Pichenza is our executive editor. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll talk to you soon.