Donald Leblanc, 38, died in 2003 while working at the N.S. Englishtown Ferry dock.

Feb. 8, 2003. Englishtown, N.S. Thirty-eight-year-old Donald Leblanc is working a shift at the Englishtown Ferry dock. It's a small, provincially run cable ferry that can carry about a dozen vehicles across St. Ann's Bay near Baddeck.

The staff not only operates the ferry, but also handles other duties, like clearing snow and ice from the ferry ramp. They took over that responsibility three years earlier. It's one of the jobs Leblanc was doing on that morning.

Leblanc – and other Englishtown ferry employees - had received training on how to use the tractor that cleared the ice and snow from the ferry ramp. But the trainer didn't train the employees under snowy, icy conditions – or even on the ferry ramp – because, the trainer determined, it was too dangerous a place to learn.

Leblanc failed his first test and was only allowed to drive the tractor after he barely passed his second test.

But something went wrong when Leblanc was clearing the ramp on Feb. 8, 2003. The tractor slid off the ramp and sank.

There was no life-jacket or survival suit for the operator to wear. There were no chains on the tractor's tires.

"Right out of the blue I knew there was something wrong," Alice MacInnes told an investigator after the accident. She was working with Leblanc that morning.

"His left arm went down and he was waving to me with his right hand to come and get him…I started in with the ramp down thinking that the backhoe was going to go in the water. I could hook it with the ramp, then I couldn’t see the backhoe at all. And it slipped into the water somehow. I pulled the ramp back up because I didn’t know where Donald was and I would have ended up probably taking the top off the backhoe…I got into the pad, put the ramp down, ran down from the wheelhouse, screaming and hollering Donald’s name. I was asking, 'Where are you?' When I looked up, Donald was gone."

Took months to discover body

In less than an hour, police were on the scene. Later, investigators from Nova Scotia's Department of Environment and Labour (DEL) arrive and begin gathering evidence.

It was August before Leblanc's body was found.

From the beginning, something doesn't seem right to Leblanc's brother, Sandy.

"The following day - when they lifted the tractor out of the water - I thought to myself, 'What the hell is this?' There were no chains on the tractor. The chains that were supposed to be on the machine were frozen on the wheelchair ramp to the office on the site. They had never been on the machine that winter."

Sandy Leblanc says he was also concerned about the way the investigation was going to be handled.

The Englishtown Ferry dock. Leblanc's family called for an inquiry into his death and it was expected to resume in May.

"In the first one or two days, I’m meeting all kinds of different officials and stuff within the government, and they’re all giving me their card and offering me condolences and anything they can do. And as they’re giving me the cards, it’s nagging at me…all of you guys are working for the same thing here. That just popped a great big question mark above my head. What kind of investigation are we going to get? We have the province investigating the province."

Late in the initial investigation, a Crown attorney told the DEL officer investigating the accident that there was the possibility that a charge could be laid in relation to the lack of a life preserver or survival suit on the tractor. But the decision on whether to lay a charge would be left with the DEL.

The DEL's report found that nothing the employer did – or did not do – contributed to the accident that killed Donald Leblanc. No charges were laid.

The DEL would eventually reopen its investigation. A different investigator reviewed the file and agreed with the Crown attorney that there was enough evidence to warrant a charge under the Occupational Health and Safety Act for failing to provide a personal flotation device where the danger of drowning exists.

The investigator says there are also unanswered questions about the level of "due diligence" shown by the employer. The new DEL officer does more interviews, conducts more research, points out numerous issues in his conclusions, but his final report also recommended no charges be laid.

Leaning towards inquiry

The Leblanc family demanded a full public inquiry. They didn't get it. They did get a meeting with the province's chief medical examiner. Dr. Vernon Bowes was not informed of Leblanc's death until the summer of 2003, months after it happened.

"I felt that when they came into that meeting that they felt they were going to get the run-around because I hadn’t confided in them my feelings about the whole issue or I hadn’t discussed it with them basically," Bowes told CBC News.

"But at the end, I told them it was very likely that I was going to recommend an inquiry take place."

In the end, the provincial government did call an inquiry, although it did not have the kind of wide-reaching mandate the family was seeking – or that Bowes had recommended. They wanted the inquiry to deal with the issue of whether such workplace deaths should be investigated by an independent body instead of within government – and whether the findings should be made public.

Bowes also wanted the inquiry to look at issues surrounding the recovery of Donald Leblanc's body. For instance, the accident happened around 8:30 in the morning. There was a dive team in nearby Sydney Mines that was familiar with the bay and was ready to begin searching soon after the accident. Instead, the decision was made to wait for an RCMP dive team, which didn’t arrive from the mainland until after 4:30 that afternoon. Those divers were only in the water a short time before they had to stop because of darkness and resume the next day.

Bowes and the family wanted the inquiry to look at the "recovery" operations to see if they were timely, appropriate and of a sufficiently wide scope. But the minister changed the word "recovery" to "rescue," which the family argues only looks at the minutes or first hour after the accident, not the months it took for Leblanc’s body to finally surface.

The inquiry, which opened in Oct. 2005, was supposed to last a few weeks. It was to resume in May 2006.