What He Was Carrying That Morning

He set his alarm for 5:47

He'd meant to set it for 5:30, but his daughter had been up twice in the night and he was tired in a way that 17 minutes wasn't going to fix. He hit snooze once. Got up. The kitchen was still dark. He made coffee in a travel mug — black, two sugars, the same way he'd made it every morning for nine years and stood at the window for a minute watching nothing in particular while the kettle finished. Didn't eat. He never ate this early. Texted his wife from the truck — love you, see you tonight and pulled out of the driveway at 6:14, already 14 minutes behind.

The drive was 52 minutes. He took the same route he always took. He doesn't remember most of it.

By 7:40 he was on site. By 7:52 he was in his harness. By 8:06 his crew was setting the first lift of the day. He'd worked with two of these guys for over a decade. He trusted them. They trusted him. The morning was going the way every morning went, coffee, weather, who slept, who didn't, what the foreman wanted done before lunch.

Somewhere between 8:06 and 8:11, his brain, the brain that had slept four and a half hours, that was running on caffeine and muscle memory and the kind of low-grade fatigue that doesn't feel like fatigue, made a small misjudgment.

One of 1,042.

That's the number of Canadian workers who died from work-related causes in 2024, according to the AWCBC-sourced report published this month by Tucker and Keefe. Roughly a third from traumatic injury. Roughly two-thirds from occupational disease. Every one of them had a morning. Every one of them had a 5:47 alarm and a travel mug and a text they sent or meant to send.

Steven Bittle, the University of Ottawa criminologist who has spent his career studying how Canada actually counts its workplace dead, would tell you 1,042 is almost certainly an undercount. His research suggests the true number could be several times higher, workers killed driving to or from work, occupational disease deaths whose treating physicians didn't take an occupational history, claims suppressed by employers worried about premiums. The real toll is bigger than the report can measure. The report knows this. It says so on its own pages.

April 28 was the National Day of Mourning. Yesterday.

The instinct on a day like that is to talk about the families, and we should, and the dedication page in this year's Tucker & Keefe report names them with photos and ages and brief descriptions. Sean Tucker, the report's lead author, has said the dedication page exists because "these are people we're talking about — people who went to work, and there was a traumatic event, and they never came home." You should read it. It does the families angle better than any blog post could.

But there's a question I can't stop asking, and the day after Day of Mourning is when I think it belongs.

How many of these 1,042 deaths came back to a brain that wasn't ready for the task in front of it?

Not impaired in the way our policies define impairment. Not testable on the way our testing programs test. Just tired. Stressed. Distracted. Carrying something undiagnosed. Operating in the gap between how a person feels and how a person actually performs.

That gap is wider than most safety programs acknowledge. The research on this is decades old and not in dispute. Charles Czeisler at Harvard Medical School has shown that 17 hours of continuous wakefulness produces cognitive impairment equivalent to a blood alcohol concentration of 0.05%. Twenty-four hours is equivalent to 0.10%, above every legal driving limit in Canada. The worker who got four and a half hours of sleep and is on his second coffee at 8 AM is not legally impaired. He is functionally impaired. He cannot tell the difference. Neither can his crew.

Sleep is the most studied piece of this, but it's not the only piece. Untreated sleep apnea. Undiagnosed cognitive conditions. Acute stress from a fight at home, a sick parent, a financial scare. Early-stage neurological conditions that haven't been caught. Medications that interact with shift work. Substances used to sleep, used to wake up, used to manage pain that won't otherwise quit. None of these show up on a standard pre-shift check. Most of them don't show up on a standard drug and alcohol test either, because that's not what those tests are designed to find.

We don't know the number. The data isn't built to tell us. But every safety leader I've asked privately gives me the same answer: more than we'd like to say out loud.

The hardest part of this work isn't that these deaths happen. It's that most of them were foreseeable to someone, somewhere in the system, on the morning they happened and the system didn't have a way to catch it in time.

The man at the start of this piece is composite. He isn't real. But every detail in his morning is drawn from cases I've read, conversations I've had, and field data on how cognitive readiness actually fails in safety-sensitive work. He is generic on purpose. He is also, statistically, more than one of the 1,042.

Yesterday we mourned them.

Today the question is what we're willing to change so next year's number is smaller. Not whether we care, caring isn't the constraint, clarity is. The constraint is that we have built safety systems designed to catch the things our policies can name, and the things that are killing workers most often live in the space our policies don't reach yet.

That space has a name. Cognitive readiness. The visibility gap between testing moments. The brain a worker brought to work that morning, and whether it was the brain the work required.

That's the conversation worth having on April 29.

If you're a safety leader and the question above has been on your mind, we've put together a 15-question cognitive readiness scorecard you can run on your own operation in about five minutes. You can read it here Mental Readiness Scorecard

— Logan Tannahill, Shift OHS