Alberta Works to Beef Up Safety Enforcement
Following criticism that the provincial government has been lax with its investigations of problem employers, Alberta is shaking up its occupational health and safety department.
The shake-up began earlier this month, when executive director Dan Clarke left his post. The government is now advertising for a replacement, and it sees the replacement as part of a structural overhaul of occupational health to make it focus more on compliance and enforcement of safety rules in the workplace. It hopes to have a new executive director by the end of the summer.
There are many who would say it’s about time. Alberta currently has one of the highest rates of worker deaths in Canada with 166 deaths in 2008 alone. This past April, an auditor general’s report said the department was lax on enforcement and even suggested they had hidden the true number of companies that refused to make safety improvements. The review showed that the department had suspended compliance orders filed against dozens of companies with high injury rate for no apparent reason. But when they looked more closely, they discovered that many of them were suspended just to make its own statistics look better, and in a number of cases, the compliance orders were reopened in the next fiscal year with no evidence that the companies took any action to improve worker safety.
The auditor general also found that in many cases, companies that ignored safety violations were still getting rebates from the province under a program that rewards firms with good worker safety records. Violations that went unchecked for years ran the gamut, ranging from a lack of hearing and eye protection to fire and explosion hazards.
Alberta Employment Minister Thomas Lukaszuk has promised to announce more details with regard to the overhaul in the coming weeks.
Tags: Alberta Occupational Health and Safety, Due Diligence, health and safety training, heavy equipment safety, Occupational Health and Safety Act, Safety, Worker Safety, Worker Training, workplace accident, workplace health and safety, workplace safety
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