Sarnia to consider revised Missing Worker Memorial plaza proposal

Creating a worthy memorial for Sarnia’s history of occupational disease will be costly, but it’s necessary, says Sandra Kinart.

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“We need to do this. We need to do it right,” said the spokesperson with Victims of Chemical Valley.

“You can’t just leave it,” she said.

HAS plaza map for the sometimes waterlogged site by Sarnia Bay has been tweaked with input from her group and others, she said, changing some lighting so it doesn’t affect wildlife, adding a north-end arbor element designers said is meant to evoke an embrace, and creating wing-like plates with sculpture information.

A similar proposal came to council in Maybut was deferred after concerns were raised from a committee, pushing for the site’s restoration, that their voices hadn’t been adequately heard.

The committee includes Victims of Chemical Valley, the Occupational Health Clinics for Ontario Workers, Sarnia-Lambton Building Trades, Workers Health and Safety Centre, and the Sarnia and District Labor Council.

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“I think they’ve done a pretty good job of trying to accommodate all of those voices,” labor council president Nick Dochstader said about architecture firm Tillmann Ruth Robinson.

“It’s not that we weren’t happy with what they had presented originally,” he said; “but there were certainly some of the details that folks wanted to see there.”

A trio of meetings was held with the group, designers and city staff between July and October, says a city report recommending the project be referred for 2025 budget deliberations.

Collaboration has evolved “light years” from what it was in the spring, when the committee only saw the plan a week before it went to council and had no opportunity to make changes, Dochstader said.

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“I’m confident in saying I’m happy with how it ended up turning out,” he said.

“They’ve included the folks that had a stake in this.”

The estimated $725,000 project, up from a $690,000 estimate in May, would require adding drainage in the park, Kinart said.

That’s no easy feat given soil contaminated with lead and asbestos was capped there after remediation work between 2014 and 2017.

“It is not the memorial itself, it is what needs to be fixed in the park,” she said about the cost.

But it needs to be done, said Kinart, whose husband, Blayne, died of mesothelioma after workplace asbestos exposure.

His is just one in Sarnia’s history of death from asbestos-related disease at industrial job sites, for which the Missing Worker sculpture by Shawn McKnight was created in the late 1990s.

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It depicts a family in pieces, visible through the silhouette of a missing person, as the viewer looks toward the industrial stacks in Chemical Valley across Sarnia Bay.

Victims of Chemical Valley also was founded many years ago by widows and relatives of industrial workers in the Sarnia area who’d been affected by occupational disease.

From 2000 to 2009, Sarnia-Lambton’s incidence of mesothelioma in men was about five times the Ontario average, according to the Ontario Cancer Registry.

The memorial originally was installed with a pergola and other features further west in the park, and used for years for International Day of Mourning events in April.

It was shifted after the Centennial Park remediation project finished and reinstalled without the fountain, pergola and other aspects.

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City council in 2023 endorsed restoring the memorial.

Kinart said she’s pleased with the plan coming to council.

“I think it’s long overdue, but I am also very pleased,” she said, adding “I think it’s going to be an amazing gathering place” for Day of Mourning events, and for people to remember their loved ones who have died.

“There’s been many,” she said.

Returning April 28 Day of Mourning events at the memorial may have to wait until 2026, Dochstader said, depending on council’s vote and how fast construction can happen.

Park remediation work and the COVID-19 pandemic kept the somber ceremony away from the park for years. Plans to return in 2023 were scuttled at the last moment, when drainage issues with the grounds became apparent.

Ideally the ceremony could return in 2025, Dochstader said.

“But realistically, I don’t know if that’s going to happen.”

With files from Paul Morden

[email protected]

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