Highline Mushrooms fined $143,750 after worker injury amid shift to robotic harvesting
Nelson Zandbergen
Farmers Forum
ESSEX COUNTY — Highline Produce Limited, Canada’s largest mushroom grower, will pay a $143,750 fine after a worker became entangled in netting material and was critically injured.
The worker was seriously hurt on July 20, 2023, while operating a net washer machine used to roll up and sanitize the reusable growing nets employed at the company’s Highline Mushrooms plant in Kingsville. According to a Ministry of Labour, Immigration, Training and Skills Development investigation, the employee was attempting to realign a net on the machine’s rotating bar — a common task performed by hand — when the worker became entangled in the net on the spinning bar. “This resulted in a critical injury,” the ministry reported.
Justice of the Peace Helen-Nikoleta Karpouzos imposed the penalty Aug. 25 in Windsor court, citing a violation of Ontario’s Occupational Health and Safety Act — failure to implement reasonable precautions, such as guards, procedures or devices to protect workers from equipment hazards. Highline must pay a $115,000 fine and 25 per cent victim fine surcharge of $28,750. Victim surcharge fines go into a program that funds victim-associated initiatives.
In 2019, the company was fined $90,000 after a 65-year-old worker at its Prince Edward County plant suffered multiple serious injuries when his arm was caught in a conveyor and was sliced open. In 2022, a 56-year-old man died after a fall at the same Eastern Ontario facility, according to police reports at the time.
The legal upshot of the latest person injured on company premises comes as Highline pivots toward automation and robotics to grow mushrooms. The company recently announced plans to shutter its aging Prince Edward County plant, in Wellington, as a new robotic facility goes online in Leamington. About 300 people (mostly temporary foreign workers) will lose their jobs on Dec. 12.
