When my brother and his 84 co-workers were killed off the north eastern coast of Canada in 1982, we were left largely without support to pursue our legal suits. President Obama's inviting the Deepwater Horizon Families to the White House is far from the empty posturing that some critics claim. It is a clear sign that the people suing BP for damages will be supported in their lawsuits by the most powerful office in your land.
The reasons the Ocean Ranger Families received relatively little support are partly cultural and partly political. Canadians are culturally more reluctant to sue and we traditionally award dramatically lower settlements (we don't tend to calculate "loss of society," pain and suffering or hedonic damages generally the way American courts do). We resist quantifying things and don't connect law suits with a kind of democratic access to direct justice in the same way Americans seem to. I suspect Canadians presuppose there is a strong social welfare net on one hand and robust criminal sanctions on the other -- neither is true in the case of the most blatant corporate wrongdoing.
What this meant following the Ocean Ranger loss is that Mobil, ODECO Diamond Offshore Drilling (one of the largest operators in international oil), Mitsubishi, and Schlumberger combined to pay out between $25,000 and $270,000 for Canadian men with no dependents. In all, these companies paid out a total of around $20 million Canadian. These men were mostly like my brother -- in their twenties and happy to be employed at home on the East Coast; many also had wives -- also in their twenties and small children.
Of the 84 who died, 56 were from Newfoundland -- an island in the north Atlantic that had once depended on the cod fishery and had turned hopefully to oil development when the fishery closed due to international overfishing. The Ocean Ranger's loss was traumatic in a small, tight-knit province, but it is very unclear whether it had a substantial impact on the international industry. Far more influential was the flaming out of the Piper Alpha within sight of boats and cameras off the coast of Scotland in 1986 -- killing 167 men by fire and smoke inhalation.
I am currently working on a book, 'The Ocean Ranger: oil, money and the politics of memory,' that considers financial settlements from a symbolic and political angle.
Anyone critical of the more litigious American system should consider, I think, that without our exceptionally modest law suits, ODECO, Mobil, Mitsubishi and Schlumberger would have walked away with absolutely no penalty whatsoever. They were inadequately regulated by Canada, Newfoundland and the US Coast Guard -- all of whom had responsibilities for aspects of their safe operation. The fact is, our governments were simply not ready to have big companies drilling in the harsh conditions of the North Atlantic in winter.
In 1982 we had the cadillac of oil rigs operating in our waters with a largely Canadian crew and nobody forced those companies to have adequate training, safety or even a management structure appropriate to a marine environment -- that thing was a ship, not a land-based drill rig but nobody took note of this until all the men were "missing and presumed drowned". It is probably safer to work on our offshore now than it was then, though last year's loss of 14 workers in the Sikorsky helicopter crash made us all wonder.
Your Deepwater Horizon disaster has everything it needs to finally effect real change in the oil industry: it is highly visible, emotionally upsetting for a wide range of reasons, mortifying for the regulators and financially devastating for BP. I don't think people should get morally outraged by corporate failure to invest in safety if they are not regulated into it: their responsibility is to their shareholders and the only things that will make them divert money from shareholders are, first, the threats of fines and law suits big enough to threaten shareholder dividends and second, high profile political intervention.
Inviting those grieving people to the White House was not just optics from your President. It was a significant and crucial sign of support for everybody with a legal claim against BP. Where regulation fails -- as it clearly did in your splendid Gulf Coast -- litigation must prevail. With any luck, BP will fail at exactly the moment the last settlement is paid out -- bled to death in a kind of capital punishment for the corporate person. That is the way to make the oil industry change.
Susan Dodd is a Senior Fellow at the University of King's College, Halifax, Nova Scotia. Her book, "The Ocean Ranger: oil, money and the politics of memory", is forthcoming from Fernwood Publishing in Halifax, Canada.