Ontario courts continue to slam companies with huge fines for violations of the Occupational Health and Safety Act.

Wal-Mart Canada Corp., for example, was hit with two fines totaling $120,000 in less than a month; a $45,000 fine on June 23 and a $75,000 fine on July 16.

The $45,000 fine resulted from an incident that occurred on September 27, 2008. A worker was operating a forklift outside a Wal-Mart store in Barrie, to place skids of bottled water near the main entrance. While doing so, the forklift struck and injured a customer’s feet.

A Ministry of Labour investigation found that the worker did not have full view of the forklift path of travel and its load.

In that case, the company pleaded guilty to failing to ensure that the operator of material handling equipment has a full view of the intended path of travel of the equipment or its load, and to failing to make sure material handling equipment is only operated as directed by a competent signaler who is stationed in full view of the operator with a full view of the intended path of travel of the vehicle and its load.

The $75,000 fine resulted from an incident that occurred on January 19, 2009, when a worker employed by a Wal-Mart store in Welland climbed a ladder to get five boxes of toys from a shelf. As the worker began to climb back down with the boxes held in one arm, he missed a step at the bottom of the ladder and fell, injuring his arm.

A Ministry of Labour investigation found that the worker carried the boxes in such a way that his or her safety was endangered by not keeping the required level of contact with the ladder.

Wal-Mart Canada Corp. pleaded guilty to failing to ensure that materials required to be lifted, carried or moved were lifted, carried or moved in a way that did not endanger the safety of any worker.

Also on July 16, Concord-based Welded Tube of Canada was fined $140,000 for an incident that occurred on July 31, 2008, in which a worker was injured as he prepared a two-and-a-half ton bundle of steel tubes and sent them down a conveyor to be processed for shipping. That worker and a co-worker then began to make a mechanical adjustment in the path of the conveyor. The bundle of tubes needed to be rearranged, so it was sent back on the same conveyor, where it struck the worker and injured his leg.

A Ministry of Labour investigation found that the conveyor was not protected by a guard to prevent access to the path of travel while it was in motion.

Welded Tube of Canada pleaded guilty to failing to ensure that a machine with moving parts that may endanger a worker is equipped with a guard or other device which prevents access to the moving parts.

And on July 9, 2010, grocery store operator Metro Ontario Inc. was fined $100,000 for an incident that occurred on January 18, 2009. A worker at the company’s North Bay location was using a band saw to cut beef in the meat department, when his hand slipped, and the saw’s blade partially amputated some of his fingers.

That Ministry of Labour investigation found that the machine’s blade was improperly guarded, and Metro Ontario Inc. pleaded guilty to failing to ensure the saw was equipped with a guard that prevented access to its moving blade.

In addition to the huge fines levied in the cases above, in each case the court imposed a 25% victim fine surcharge, as required by the Provincial Offences Act, which is credited to a special provincial government fund to assist victims of crime.

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.

In yet another accident demonstrating the danger of working near overhead power lines, workers at a construction site in Dieppe, New Brunswick had a close call when their dump truck struck some lines. Thankfully, this time no one was hurt.

The accident occurred as two dump trucks were being used as part of a road construction project. The operator of one dump truck situated his truck underneath the power line, and when a hydro line lifted the box of his vehicle, it contacted and snapped the line, and the snapped line  landed on a smaller dump truck, which caught fire.

WorkSafeNB is conducting an investigation into the incident to determine if there were any infractions under the Occupational Health and Safety Act. The workers were employees of Cherryfield Contracting Ltd, which was contracted by the City of Dieppe for the construction work.

Despite the fact that there were no injuries, every precaution was taken to put out the fire, so that all workers remained safe. In fact, firefighters refused to put out the fire for about an hour because the power line was still live.

This incident happened less than two weeks after an employee of Ken Miller Excavating in Brockville, Ontario was electrocuted when his boom truck struck the power line at a construction site, as he delivered concrete sections for storm sewers.

As just about any company who’s experienced them can tell you, workplace accidents can be devastating to your company.  Besides the obvious hit to the bottom line when they bring your  operation to a standstill and force your company to pay a fine, the results can be even more tragic, such as when they involve serious injury or even loss of life. The number one priority of any business should be to avoid accidents, and one of the best ways to do so is to conduct periodic safety audits.

A safety audit should examine the entire work area and should cover all activities required in that workplace in order to optimize safety, to make sure everything is up to government standards and complies to the company’s safety policy.. Everything should be checked and all workers should be involved, and encouraged to put their best effort into making sure that nothing is missed.

There are obviously many ways to approach safety audits. But there are a number of elements that should be included in any workplace safety audit.

First, you need a plan. Gather all relevant company safety information, and define the scope of the audit. Then assemble an audit team to review all company policies and procedures, legislation, standards, guidelines and practice codes relevant to your workplace. Be sure the audit team is equipped with all special tools, equipment and safety gear to conduct the audit effectively and safely, and put in place escort arrangements and make sure the team familiarizes themselves with the site before the audit. The team should also know all the key role players, clarify the audit objectives and nail down the approach to be followed during the audit.

The audit team should then review all incidents and accidents that occurred during the audit period. This is an essential aspect of understanding the uncontrolled risks in the workplace they plan to audit. They will also have to review documents, interview staff and conduct physical inspections to determine whether or not all safety management system elements are correctly implemented.

A truly successful safety audit should involve every employee. While it’s true that outsiders can provide some perspective that everyday workers might miss, the workers themselves are often the best judges of what is and isn’t safe, and they will know what needs to be changed. Often, workers are reluctant to participate in such audits if they feel they are being second-guessed or their opinion isn’t being properly respected, so be sure to encourage their participation in the process, stressing the importance of the audit and putting them at ease about their participation.

The value of a safety audit is that it evaluates workplace safety in real time. And once a report is issued, take it seriously, and correct areas of weakness as soon as possible. Many times, the audit report will recommend more comprehensive training and this should be scheduled quickly.

No company can sit on its record when it comes to safety, and periodic audits should be part of your overall safety strategy. Without a regular check of your system, weaknesses will develop and the likelihood of an accident will increase greatly.

Two Ontario companies, Ken Miller Excavating and Anchor Concrete Products Ltd, were issued a series of orders following an accident in which the boom of one of their trucks came into contact with overhead power lines and a worker was electrocuted and killed.  The worker was assisting boom trucks delivering concrete sections for storm sewers, but the exact circumstances surrounding the accident are currently under investigation by the Ministry of Labour.

Almost as soon as the worker was taken to Kingston General Hospital, where he was pronounced dead, Ken Miller Excavating was issued a series of orders requiring the company to provide documents related to: its health and safety policy and program; procedures regarding work done in close proximity to electrical conductors; its emergency plan; and of course, its safety training and workplace safety procedures. A stop work order was also issued on a 10-tonne off-loader, which was to undergo inspection to determine whether it can handle its rated capacity. The Ministry of Labor also issued three orders to Kingston-based Anchor Concrete Products Ltd, requiring documents related to its training and health and safety policy and program. Both companies were also ordered to provide a written report of the circumstances of the occurrence to the ministry and any applicable union.

According to an alert issued last May by the Electrical Safety Authority (ESA), fatal accidents involving equipment contacting overhead power lines is not uncommon in Ontario, and in fact have accounted for half of all electrocutions in the province over the last eight years.  The ESA recommends that workers follow a few safety precautions when working near overhead power lines:

• Always conduct a hazard assessment and know where a power line is before you start work.
• If it’s at all possible, once you locate a power line, try to work away from it. If this is not possible, stay as far away as possible, and remember; the higher the voltage, the farther away you need to be.
• If possible, call the local electric company and have them cut the power while work is ongoing.
• Mark the areas around the power lines with cones and/or signs to warn other workers of the danger.
• If a vehicle or other piece of equipment contacts a power line, stay in the vehicle and radio for help.

A new report released by The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, an independent, non-profit research organization, calls into question the federal government’s efforts to ensure the health and safety of workers under their jurisdiction.

The report, Success is No Accident: Declining Workplace Safety Among Federal Jurisdiction Employers,  which can be found here, was issued after an exhaustive investigation, including interviews with labour affairs officers (LAOs) and federal  health and safety inspectors, and included in-depth analyses of key statistics, such as workplace injuries and fatalities. The report suggests that while the provinces have been quite successful with measures to bring about safer workplaces, the federal sector seems to be lagging, and their workplace injuries seem to be on the rise.  For example, while fatality and injury rates in the provincial sector declined 25% between 2002 and 2007, federal injury rates increased 5% over the same time period.

The report highlights the significant numbers of disabling injuries in the transportation and postal delivery sectors, and attributes these statistics to a failure in federal health and safety enforcement, specifically overburdened LAOs. According to the report, in 2008 only 128 LAOs were responsible for monitoring and inspecting the federal workplaces for more than one million workers. As a result of this chronic understaffing, only 16% of federal workplaces classified as very high risk were subject to two inspections per year and only 10% of those classified as high risk received the one inspection per year mandated by Labour Program guidelines.

The report details important systemic differences in the way federal workplaces are regulated to account for the disparity, and it recommends greater proactive enforcement and harsher penalties for federally regulated employers. The report notes that prosecutions in the federal jurisdiction under the code are relatively rare and occur primarily after very serious, often fatal, workplace accidents.  Not only that, but when they do actually prosecute and convictions are obtained, the penalties imposed are far smaller than those imposed in provincial jurisdictions.  Also, while decisions in provincial cases are prominently published, federal prosecutions are often difficult to find.

A 90-day construction site safety blitz by the Ontario government that was conducted between January and April of this year uncovered a lot of problems, and the Ministry of Labour has promised to respond aggressively to the problems and will implement a host of new measures  to improve safety at construction sites.

The blitz revealed a construction industry rife with safety violations. Inspectors targeted high-risk companies and issued 784 stop work orders for fall-related hazards, 3,421 orders for fall-related hazards, 1,120 fall-related contraventions associated with stop work orders and 121 summonses for fall-related hazards.  More than half of the orders issued were for violations related to missing or improper use or maintenance of guardrails, scaffolds and fall protection systems, and close to 80% of summonses issued were to supervisors for a lack of adequate supervision. The level of non-compliance was so high, ministry officials have called the situation “unacceptable” and “simply inexcusable.”

The problems inspectors found ran the gamut, from worker training and records deficiencies, unsafe ladders, stairs and window cleaning. Most of the fall-related orders issued spanned the entire construction sector, from industrial and commercial to institutional and residential building projects.

Going forward, the province, which has already doubled its number of full-time inspectors to 430 since 2005, will increase enforcement, with inspectors targeting construction sub-sectors that demonstrate a higher rate of non-compliance and going after employers who repeatedly flout the law. In addition, the ministry will launch an awareness campaign urging people to report unsafe practices, and they have added a toll-free hotline for people to call if they spot what might be an unsafe labour practice in any Ontario workplace.

In addition, a panel has been set up to review worker safety in Ontario. Their recommendations are expected this fall.

Sudbury building supplies company Evans Home Building Centre has been hit with five compliance orders from the Ontario Ministry of Labour, after an employee was electrocuted while delivering a load of roofing shingles to a customer’s home.

The incident occurred on September 30 at about 10:20 AM, when 51-year-old worker Daniel St Jacques was making the delivery to a home on the north end of Sudbury, and his boom truck made contact with an overhead power line and caught fire. It is unknown whether St Jacques was inside or outside the truck when it made contact, but some police on the scene speculate that he was electrocuted when he attempted to reenter the vehicle.

Of the five compliance orders issued by the MOL, four of them related to the boom truck’s future repair and inspection, while the fifth concerns documents that Evans Home Building Centre will be required to provide to the labour ministry, including; training records for employees who operate delivery equipment; the boom truck’s inspection records; St Jacques’ time sheets for the days leading up to the incident; and any relevant company safety policies.

According to the MOL’s own statistics, there have been more than 70 electricity-related deaths on the job in Ontario within the last decade, and that “metal ladders, raised dump-truck bodies and crane booms have been implicated in a number of electricity-related injuries at construction sites.” While the ministry does not keep specific statistics on incidents involving boom trucks coming into contact with power lines, a similar incident did occur in August, 2007, when two employees of Rockway Building Supplies were delivering shingles to a home in Guelph. One worker who was standing outside the delivery truck touched the vehicle and was thrown to the ground almost a metre away, when a conveyer used to move the shingles off the truck touched an 8,000-volt power line.

That worker survived, but Rockway Building Supplies subsequently pleaded guilty in September of 2008 for failing, as an employer, to ensure that no object was brought closer than three metres to an overhead electrical conductor with a rating of between 750 and 150,000 volts, contrary to Section 188(2) of the Construction Projects Regulation under the Occupational Health and Safety Act. As a result, that company was fined $45,000, in addition to the 25% victim fine surcharge.

In the wake of a four-day inquest into the death of 65-year-old worker Ulderico Iannucci, who was killed three years ago in an accident at the Thomas Fuller construction site behind Parliament Hill in Ottawa, a six-member coroner’s jury has made six recommendations for safety measures to be used when operating a backhoe.

The accident happened on August 19, 2005, as Iannucci was using the rear bucket of the backhoe to compact trash. The machine suddenly engaged and crashed through a chain link fence before hitting a curb and careening toward a stone and wrought-iron retaining wall, on which several other workers had been sitting. Iannucci was standing and apparently trying to regain control of the machine at this point, when the front bucket and tires crashed through the stone wall, which sat atop a steep escarpment above the Ottawa River. The machine seemed to “stall” for a moment, as the rear wheels gained traction and sent the backhoe over the edge. Iannucci tried to escape from the backhoe’s rear window before it disappeared over the cliff, eventually landing on a public walkway below.

A forensic pathologist testified that the cause of Iannucci’s death was multiple traumas to the head and chest with a near separation of the brain and spinal cord. Most workers characterized Iannucci as a safe and conscientious worker, but while he was licensed to operate a boom truck, a supervisor noted that he did not have, nor was he required to have, a license to operate the backhoe.

Among the recommendations made by the coroner’s jury are; a requirement that backhoe operators be required to take a provincially certified operator course with an emphasis on safety procedures; a requirement that construction companies ensure all employees have the required certification to operate backhoes; that an emergency kill switch to disengage power be installed in all backhoes; that the seats of backhoes be put in a locked position and the operator’s seatbelt be fastened before the machine can move forward; and that the backhoe’s transmission must be in neutral before the boom can be operated.

The chief coroner of Ontario distributes the jury’s findings to people, agencies or ministries of government that may be able to implement them, but a coroner’s jury recommendations are not binding.

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Perhaps they should be.

The striking United Steelworkers union is promising to hold Vale Inco Ltd. officials personally responsible if any worker is injured or killed on the job when production resumes at some mining operations in which workers are currently on strike.

Last week, Vale Inco announced its intention to restart several operations so it can produce copper concentrate for sale during the strike. It is the first time in the company’s 60-plus years of unionized mining that it has resumed even partial production during a labour dispute.

If necessary, the union will invoke the Westray Bill, and make corporate executives personally responsible should unsafe conditions develop. That bill, formally known as Bill C-45, was passed back in 2003 and amended the Criminal Code of Canada that makes corporations responsible for failing to protect the health of their employees or the public. The amendments came in the wake of 26 worker deaths after an explosion in the Westray coal mine in Nova Scotia in April 1992.

The judge in charge of the public inquiry in that case blamed the tragedy on a series of safety lapses at the mine, to which provincial authorities repeatedly turned a blind eye. Just before the explosion, Westray workers had appealed to the USW because they knew the workplace was unsafe.

The USW charge that Vale Inco is putting workers’ lives at risk with its plans to resume partial production. They have held repeated meetings with Vale Inco to discuss the company’s plans.