CUPE Ontario wrote the following letter to the president and CEO of the Workplace Safety Insurance Board (WSIB) with regard to the closure of WSIB offices in Ontario:
Dear Jeff Lang:
I am writing on behalf of more than 300,000 CUPE members who call Ontario home. We stand in full solidarity with the 466 WSIB workers who will lose their jobs because of your decision to permanently close ten regional and Northern offices.
Make no mistake: our members will pay for these closures. But so will the tens of thousands of injured workers who depend on WSIB every single day, and the local employers who rely on those same services. When you shut an office, you don’t just cut jobs. You are deliberately and callously deciding to cut a community off.
These are stable, family-supporting public-sector jobs in communities already fighting economic instability. They are exactly the jobs Northern communities are working to attract and keep. Eliminating them will degrade service for injured workers, drive up workloads for the staff who remain, and undermine WSIB’s mandate to deliver essential services to Ontarians. It also flies directly in the face of the government’s stated commitment to economic growth, workforce development, and population retention across Northern Ontario.
Injured workers in these communities are already navigating a complex, local reality. Without on-the-ground support, the people who need help most are the ones who fall through the cracks.
The fact that these offices have been closed since the pandemic does not mean they should remain closed. Their closure was a temporary crisis response—not a long‑term strategy for service delivery.
Regional offices were never just buildings. They were centres of expertise, community knowledge, and practical problem‑solving that centralized or fully digital models cannot replicate. Assigning claims through a province-wide queue has been tried before. It failed then for the same reason it is failing now: it strips out the local insight injured workers and employers depend on.
WSIB’s budget is healthy. There is no credible business case for closing these offices or eliminating skilled, community-based jobs. Opening three new high-cost GTA locations while shuttering the regions is not modernization, it is consolidation.
Reopening the regional offices is about restoring the capacity and expertise WSIB needs to deliver quality service and keep the public’s confidence in the system.
We stand with OCEU CUPE 1750, the 466 affected members, and working people across Ontario in demanding that you reverse this decision. If you refuse, we will not hesitate to mobilize the full strength of our membership, in every corner of this province, to fight these cuts.
Yolanda McClean
President – CUPE Ontario
