It Changes Everything: A Leader’s Story of Loss, Accountability, and Safety - Jeremy Gauthier, Threads of Life

In our latest podcast episode, Perley Brewer sits down with Jeremy Gauthier (Threads of Life - Association for Workplace Tragedy Family Support), who shares a deeply personal and powerful story about a fatal workplace accident that changed his life forever.

Jeremy takes us inside:

The moment he received the call no leader ever wants

The emotional impact on his team, organization, and family

The hard lessons about accountability, leadership, and safety culture

How the experience led him to a journey of sobriety, mental health awareness, and purpose-driven leadership

This is more than a story about safety—it’s about: 

✅ Leadership under pressure

✅ The human impact behind workplace incidents

✅ Why “people first” must be more than a slogan

✅ How small, consistent actions can prevent tragedy

“You don’t think it will happen to you… until it does. And when it does, it changes everything.”

If you’re a leader, supervisor, or anyone responsible for the safety and wellbeing of others—this conversation is a must-listen.

🎧 Listen to the full episode here: https://www.safetyservicesnb.ca/services/podcast/

Transcript

Perley Brewer   0:08
Welcome to today's podcast. My name is Pearly Brewer and I will be your host. Today's podcast guest is Jeremy Gauthier. Welcome, Jeremy.

Jeremy Gauthier   0:17
Thank you so much for having me, Pearly.

Perley Brewer   0:19
So we often have stories on our podcast from family members who have been affected by a workplace accident, but we really haven't had a chance to talk to someone who was directly involved in the accident itself at the workplace. So today we're very happy to have Jeremy join us and talk about what it was like from his perspective.
to have an accident in his workplace. So perhaps to get started, Jeremy, could you tell us where you're from and what business you were working in when the accident occurred?

Jeremy Gauthier   0:52
Yeah, you betcha. I'm from Kamloops, British Columbia, which is in just three hours drive north of Vancouver. And it's a beautiful place to be from, and our weather is quite mild and great. And I was working in the tire industry when this happened.

Perley Brewer   1:11
Now, are you still with the same company or not?

Jeremy Gauthier   1:15
Recently, up until August, I was. So I had spent just short of 15 years with the same company.

Perley Brewer   1:20
Okay, so do you want to start by telling us what happened the day of the accident?

Jeremy Gauthier   1:27
Absolutely. So it was June 29th, 2018. I was tasked with managing this group of young people in the tire industry, making sure that they had everything they needed to do their jobs safely and effectively.
And I wasn't actually working that day.
I had taken the day off to get prepared for Canada Day.
And it was a beautiful, beautiful summer day, and I was out back mowing the lawn.
And I had this pain in my stomach that came out of nowhere that actually set me down in the grass, which is something that's never happened to me before or since. And I walked over to the fence.
Took a sip of water.
I looked at my phone and there was a text message there from a friend of a friend that was in the area where this happened that said, I just heard a rumor, I hope everyone's okay praying for your crew.
And that immediately prompted me to call the shop.
And my 60-year-old coworker, who the only emotion I've ever seen from him prior was mostly anger, couldn't get his words out.
He passed the phone off to another co-worker and he just said, "Stokes is gone."
And I said, tell me what happened, like, what's going on, like, something's really wrong here. And he said, Brendan and another coworker went out on a service call off-site to work on a loader, a front-end loader.
And the loader fell off the jack and killed Brandon instantly.
And it was the most traumatic feeling ever. That pain that was in my stomach came out in the form of a scream that brought out my wife and children and neighbors.
It was a really, really hard moment, and...
And after a minute or so, my wife just scooped me up and took me to where we needed to be, which was with our work family. And we just rolled in there and had to deliver this news because the people that took the phone call weren't able to process that information and even close the shop.
we locked the doors and gathered this group of people together that we considered family. It's A family-owned business, family-run business, and we treated everybody like family. And so gathering those people together was one of the hardest things I've ever had to do and let them know that they'd lost their friend, brother, coworker in the most
abrupt way possible.

Perley Brewer   4:00
So, the accident actually happened off-site.

Jeremy Gauthier   4:04
Correct, it happened probably 20 kilometers away from our shop.
And.
It happened at a customer's yard, so we did service calls on site in a big, it was a, to do a front end loader tire, you need a crane truck. And we always send two employees out there.
And Brandon was the junior of the employees. He had just turned 19 years old.
And as the senior technician just asked him to do some cleaning on the machine, on the surfaces of the machine, Brendan put himself in a compromising position and that's when the loader came off the jack and took his life instantly.

Perley Brewer   4:47
So was there an investigation as far as the Jacks win as to their integrity, that sort of thing?

Jeremy Gauthier   4:53
Yes, so the jack was a 20 ton bottle jack.
And it was basically maxed out under the wheel loader. And for whatever reason, those young men chose not to put the specialty tire cribbing that was in the crane truck underneath the loader that day to secure it, which was
expected and understood that that was what was to be done and they made this choice not to that day and that choice turned out to be catastrophic.

Perley Brewer   5:30
So was there an investigation by the regulator?

Jeremy Gauthier   5:33
Yes, WorkSafe BC was there immediately. It was, it was all very well documented, very difficult investigation to go through. The reality of it, I want to make it very clear right from this, from this perspective going forward. I probably should have done it a little bit earlier.
But regardless of what happened that day, and I'm happy to answer questions about it, I don't want any blame to be put on the technicians out there that day. I don't want any blame to be put on anybody. Ultimately, I didn't provide the leadership necessary to make sure that this didn't happen. That's the reality of it, Pearly. It's

Perley Brewer   6:11
Yeah.
So, so before we get, so before we get into that, was there any prosecution?

Jeremy Gauthier   6:13
It's on, it's on me. Yeah, go ahead.

Perley Brewer   6:20
Related to the accident by WorkSafe PC.

Jeremy Gauthier   6:22
No.
There was no prosecution, no, there was. That's actually a pretty unique story in and of itself. The investigation went on for some time, as these things tend to do.
And through the process, it was determined that we were operating within the bounds of reasonable safety and had some things in place, and we were fined $8,000.

Perley Brewer   6:51
Mhm.

Jeremy Gauthier   6:52
which is an astronomically low amount of money for what went on.

Perley Brewer   6:57
Yeah.

Jeremy Gauthier   6:57
And that created outrage in our community because these are public hearings and public fines. And it would have, it would have been our preference to, or just, it just didn't make sense. But I mean, ultimately we were taking some safety precautions, just not the ones that would have saved Brendan's life.

Perley Brewer   7:20
So the few days, or the day of the accident and a few days after, what were they like for you as a manager at the location and for your fellow employees?

Jeremy Gauthier   7:31
Well, it took a, it took a crew of 12 and immediately reduced it by five or six. So we, this was on, this happened on a Friday right before the Canada Day long weekend. We closed until the following week. We reopened and only had half the employees we once did, which is completely understandable. It was
Far too much, far too heavy for anybody to bear.
And it was basically just, we were just left with the people that had to work to support families and pay mortgages and whatnot. And that's, I think, probably pretty normal. And it was just difficult. The people that were there, we had community members coming in asking what happened out of curiosity or offering condolences, but that just
As anybody who's lost somebody knows that that just typically makes things even harder.
we had a new hire that we had scheduled to start that week, and he showed up and walked right into the middle of a storm that he had no idea. He was from out of town, so he didn't know. But yeah, just the emotional toll that this took on a group of people. I mean, we all worked 50 hours a week.
trying to accomplish this thing for this family business that we all loved. And it was, it was just so hard. We spend more time there than we do with our families in a lot of cases. And it's, you become close. As a manager, I've always managed from my heart or with my heart on my sleeve, just inviting people in.
and making them part of this.
This thing in the interest of accomplishing the goal, but also...
human connection is a very important thing to me. And to be honest, that's something that I abandoned for approximately a year post-incident, just having a hard time bringing people that close, because when you lead with your heart, it opens you up to the most beautiful things, but it also has the opportunity to be
the most heartbreaking and we experienced that.

Perley Brewer   9:34
So what all went through your mind after the accident from the point of view of could you have done more? Should the organization have done more? What was going through your mind?
But.

Jeremy Gauthier   9:45
Yeah, in that, in that moment in time, it was just, it's the stages of grief, so it was very angry in the beginning. Quite a bit of anger was happening within, but you can't show that when you're, when you're trying to lead people. Just, yeah, what could we have done differently? Should I have not taken that day off? If I had
been the one that dispatched that call when things have been differently, things have happened differently, constantly second guessing all these things that happen and just trying to figure out, like, how could this, this isn't supposed to happen to us, this isn't supposed to happen to anybody. You never in a million years think that it's going to happen to you.
Personally, I came up in the tire industry not as someone involved in management. I came up in the tire industry all the way from the very bottom through entry level technician all the way up to senior management. And so I've been underneath wheel loaders that were just suspended by a jack thinking I'll get in and out quickly.
I've been, we've all taken or waged these, wagered that we would get in and out quickly. It's not common practice anymore, thank goodness, but in the moment in time, we've all been.
And.
gambling with our safety and it has to stop and that's sort of the mission that I'm on now is to make sure that...
Yeah, you don't think it's ever going to happen to you, but it certainly can, and when it does, it changes everything.

Perley Brewer   11:19
When you say it changes everything, what all did it change?

Jeremy Gauthier   11:23
Mm.
It instantly changed how we operated from a safety perspective. So this happened in 2018 and I stayed until 2025. And so going forward, every single I was dotted and T was crossed. Every single safety protocol was followed to the letter plus some. It was.
A lot of people say safety first, but most people involved in safety don't really love that term because it has to be people first. And if you operate from a people first perspective, Safety happens as an as a byproduct of that, and it's the absolute number one priority. And so the things that changed is we started saying no to jobs that
That were even remotely dangerous, doing risk assessments before we even thought of dispatching A technician to the site or doing the work onsite.
The safety protocols that are in place are there for an absolute reason, and we followed them, but also took them even more seriously. Because there's no amount of revenue that can bring Brendan back. There's no amount of...
goodwill that's earned through doing things that aren't safe. And in the tire industry, that's unfortunately fairly commonplace. And I think a few industries will do things that are borderline in the interest of getting the job done or pleasing the customer. But ultimately,
It's not worth it.

Perley Brewer   12:55
How did it change you as a person?

Jeremy Gauthier   12:58
This is the very beginning of my sobriety journey.
So, we all, after we sat everybody down and...
explain to them what had happened. Nobody wanted to be alone. So we just did exactly what we do every time we get together. We went down the street to the pub.
and just watching all these people that I love and care about, trying to cope, being angry, asking questions, and then of course being at a pub, alcohol was present and accounted for. And just for some reason, something just clicked inside of me. My children were young at the time.
Just seeing what was happening, it was absolutely necessary for what for somebody to.
To maintain, because it's such a heavily emotional thing.
I just chose not to drink. I said, I told myself one month, no alcohol in that moment in time. And it ended up being, the first attempt ended up being two months. But yeah, it was the very beginning of my sobriety journey. So alcohol was a factor in my life. Marijuana was a factor in my life. And hard drugs had been a factor.
prior to that, earlier in my life. So just starting this path of sobriety, it started that day. And it's been amazing. It's been an amazing journey, just getting to that point.
It's changed me as a father. It's changed how I parent. It's changed how I've been as a husband. Sobriety is not for everybody, and it has its fair share of scary moments as well. And it segments your friend group a little bit more than you would think it does. But ultimately, it's been the most rewarding.
Part of this whole journey is just...
seeing things clearly for what they really are, and taking accountability for my own actions.

Perley Brewer   14:57
So how did it affect your family?

Jeremy Gauthier   15:02
Yeah, it was, I don't know that I was the most present father there for a period of time, probably for a month or so after this all happened, just kind of operating on autopilot. But we have two wonderful children. We have a daughter who's older at the time. She would have been 8.
and her son would have been 6. And our son has some developmental disabilities, has a rare genetic diagnosis, and he requires quite a bit of extra care. And if you take a look back historically, that care fell heavily to my wife, who's an absolute
absolutely wonderful lady, and she took the lead on that, but she wasn't getting any help from me, being that I was working 50 or 60 hours a week.
consuming alcohol and marijuana regularly. I just was not ready to be a parent of a child with a disability. And this changed that entirely. So after a little bit of healing and some counseling, because we can get into that, because that's important too, I've become such a much more present father.
and a much greater participant in our children's lives, specifically our son who requires a little bit of extra care and taken that burden a little bit off of my wife or shared it so that we're working towards the goals together. It's helped my marriage, it's helped me as a parent, it was my goal to make sure that this didn't happen for
Nothing.
This happened for a reason.

Perley Brewer   16:32
What about...
What about the employer? You know, you talked about it being a family business. What was their reaction to this? A lot of people talk about family businesses, oh, we're all family. Did that come through or what did you find from them?

Jeremy Gauthier   16:50
They were great.
They did everything they possibly could to support me and our crew in this time, and...
It's.
It's kind of hard to quantify in this moment, but they, it truly, as you say, a lot of people say it's a family business. This was true of it. We celebrated wins together. We would regularly go out for wins with the guys and just make sure that everybody felt present and accounted for. And while that was difficult through this process,
we forged through and ownership was great. It's, yeah, they took me in as one of their own. They were, they were so good to me and they gave me the space and the time that I needed to make sure that I could take care of the people that were closest to me.
on the front end as well.

Perley Brewer   17:45
So, what led you to become involved with Thirds of Life?

Jeremy Gauthier   17:49
Threads of life. Well, that's interesting. So I started...
sobriety is a really interesting thing because you need to develop some new hobbies is what I found. And one of the new hobbies that I developed was reading and writing.
I've never been a big reader my entire life, and so I decided I was going to teach myself how to read efficiently again. And I did that, and then after reading quite a few interesting books, I decided I would try my hand at writing.
And one Sunday, I just sat on the bed and filled an entire legal pad full of my thoughts, and getting that.
Getting what was going on in my head off my heart and off my mind was very therapeutic. But when I read it back, it sounded a lot like information that should be shared with people to make sure that this never happens again.
And my brother is a writer, and is the, was at the time the director of marketing for BCIT, and he put me in touch with somebody that speaks for a living.
And we had a conversation and he said, you should definitely share this information. It would be beneficial.
And we have a local trades university here in Kamloops called TRU, Thompson Rivers University. Great program. And having a friend that works in the commercial transport mechanic program, I just reached out and he said, yes, you can absolutely come speak.
went there, shared this information with some young people, and then was doing a walkthrough at their, through their trades program administrative office.
And a lady named Heather said, have you ever heard of Threads of Life? And it was complete happenstance. And I said, oh, no, never heard of it. And they had had someone present there years before, which tells you what the impact of those are.
And so I immediately went home and looked it up and sent an e-mail off. And I suppose the rest is history, but I can give you the Coles Notes version of it. It's an exceptional organization.
They took me in, even though I'm not a direct family member.
It didn't matter; it's for persons affected by workplace injury, illness, or fatality.
they have culture down to a science. They know exactly, they know exactly how to meet people where they're at, and they come through on that promise every single time.
My first instance, my first event for Threads of Life was something called Family Forum.

Perley Brewer   20:28
Mmh.

Jeremy Gauthier   20:28
And it was in Calgary, Alberta, and I went into this room full of people who had lost a father, mother, brother.
sister, sibling, it was very connected and I didn't feel this thought in my mind was that I didn't belong in this room because of my distant affiliation with the person that had passed.
But that couldn't have been further from the truth.
It's.
Absolutely.
The best support organization for anybody who's been through something like this.

Perley Brewer   21:08
So, what are you doing these days?

Jeremy Gauthier   21:13
So yeah, I started my, I started a business in 2025 where I do speaking engagements, so keynotes and workshops around safety, mental health, and addiction in the workforce. So my background is very much in addiction, very much in safety, and very much in mental health.
And I make sure that this message can be spread in such a way that it can be impactful for people in a number of different fields. There's a number of different takeaways. So I do that. And then I do some consulting for small businesses that were in a similar situation where they thought they had things under wraps.
or had their safety program buttoned up to a certain extent, but it's most often not. Upon further review, if you take a closer look, especially with small business, it's the first thing they let lapse. It's the first thing they trim the budget from. And so
I have the ability to go into an organization and tell them a story of why they shouldn't, for starters, and secondarily, just how important it is for workplace culture to have these things set in stone and consistent. Because if it's not consistent, you're better off just not doing it. Maybe not.

Perley Brewer   22:36
So let's switch over for a second. We'll come back to Health and Safety in a moment. You talk about mental health. When you're talking to an audience about mental health, what's your message?

Jeremy Gauthier   22:48
Yeah, the message is that strong positive mental health is much easier to attain than we've perhaps been led to believe.
The best instance I can give you is that I'm not...
particularly skilled individual in terms of, I'm not a student, if you will. Never had been a particularly successful student, which is, I always make the joke, that's how I ended up in tires. But it's really an interesting journey this has been, just finding what that path looks like. So mental health or self-care.
has been huge. So the answer to your question is the message is self-care.
So, if you take care of yourself first, you have the ability.
to increase your output on an exponential level that is hard to imagine. So most of us were raised with this self-care model, which is you give and give and give and give, and whatever you have left at the end of the day, that's for you.
If you just take that and flip it upside down and start with you, whatever that looks like, because we would never tell anybody how to do their own self-care. But if you prioritize yourself, you increase your capacity to give. You increase your capacity for safety, for
Yeah, your fuse is lengthened. Everything changes. It's wild, but it has to be done consistently and it doesn't happen overnight.

Perley Brewer   24:21
Okay, next area then, sobriety. Put your message on sobriety.

Jeremy Gauthier   24:27
Sobriety, like I said, it's not specifically for everybody, but...
The message basically is similar to that of self-care. So I think addiction.
I talk about those two things back-to-back. I talk about self-care first because it's the most important, and then addiction is second also for a reason because addiction is often the absence of self-care.
And, by that, I mean it's just the easier way to do it.
So, if you, sorry, go ahead.

Perley Brewer   24:58
Premier.
From your experience in the industry, is addiction a big issue?

Jeremy Gauthier   25:07
Absolutely, absolutely. There's, that's the message. So it's great. There's so many things that.
that we have in our society now, whether it's alcohol or marijuana being on pretty much every corner store in the country to the at this point, or fast food being on every corner as well. The easy way out is front and center.

Perley Brewer   25:23
Yeah.

Jeremy Gauthier   25:34
But although there's so many things, substances we can be addicted to, or these guys right here, these little pocket computers that we're addicted to.
I really think the biggest addiction is negative thought.
And so that loops it all back to mental health. We have this ability to choose how we think.
And it can be.
It can be controlled. It's one of the interesting things. So you know that 97 or 98% of all workplace accidents are preventable.
Right, and the other percentage is largely natural disaster.
So that means most of them are preventable, right? They should never happen, but they continue to.

Perley Brewer   26:12
Yeah.
Yeah.

Jeremy Gauthier   26:17
Well, I like to take the flip side of that. I'm one of those interesting people that believes in the other side of the coin or the paradox, if you will. So if the opposite of an accident is a success and the opposite of preventable is a certainty, then I would stand in front of an audience or a small group of people and make the argument that
Ninety-eight percent of your success can be certain, but it requires intentional action the exact same way that the accidents require intentional action to be prevented.

Perley Brewer   26:50
Okay, so if you're talking to a group of employers, supervisors, people in the management of organizations, what are the key points that you want to make to them? What sort of intentional things should they make sure that they're doing to keep their employees safe?

Jeremy Gauthier   27:09
So, you'll always, you'll always hear me use the acronym SCALE, which stands for Small Consistent Actions Lead to Excellence. So whatever you do, do it consistently. Have a plan, execute that plan with intention.
So what I mean by that is, if it's monthly safety meetings, if it's your documentation, it doesn't get a day off. It can't have a day off.
Schedule that time, be intentional about it.
But the core message is, if you start by being intentional for yourself, those things won't be a burden.
Those things will happen if you set the if you set the tone with yourself.
everything changes down the line. So everything that feels hard becomes just part of a pattern when done consistently. And it doesn't take as long as you think to make those changes. You can do it.
pretty simply, as a matter of fact. And so we offer some different ways to do that by empowering people to be participants in it, by asking for input from people how they would like it to be delivered, because oftentimes health and safety programs can be dry or not taken seriously.
But there's been a lot of research around having them to be a little more employee-led.
and mental health focused, because occupational health and safety has this branch called wellness now, and having that as part of everything is really making a positive shift in that.

Perley Brewer   28:47
So to finish off our podcast, Jeremy, what would your message be to people who would be listening to this podcast and say, well, yeah, they hear your messages and yes, they're good, but it's never going to happen here at our workplace. What would you say to them?

Jeremy Gauthier   29:05
I would say, as much as hard as it is to hear, it starts with you.
If that's what you believe.
Then, that's exactly what you'll get if you want to affect positive change; it starts within you, and if you want...
If you want to have a safety culture.
that you feel great about, it's absolutely within your reach. Just start.
just put one foot in front of the other and go. And it's okay to fail. I make the, I draw a graph on the board if there's a white board in the room. I'm 5 foot 8. I know I look 6'2 in this camera apparently, but I'm 5 foot 8. And
On one side is height and on the other side is growth. And they show me face planting on the graph because even if you fall flat on your face, it's 5 foot 8 of forward progress. Don't be afraid to fail.
Just do it and keep doing it until you have it how you want it, and it won't take as long as you think.
So, one foot in front of the other, do it consistently.
You can absolutely make anything happen. My mother's not here, right? So I can tell you that I'm not an exceptional human being, although she would argue to the contrary. Everything is within your grasp. You can accomplish amazing things in this life one step at a time.

Perley Brewer   30:33
Well, look, Jeremy, it certainly sounds like you're doing amazing things right now when it comes to promoting a variety of topics, wellness, sobriety, obviously health and safety as well. Thank you very much for joining us today and sharing your message with our listeners. We very much appreciate it.

Jeremy Gauthier   30:52
It's been my absolute pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.

Perley Brewer   30:57
So I'd like to again thank Jeremy for being on today's podcast. For our listeners, stay safe and have a good week.