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.

A supplier and mender of the rolls used in paper-making machines, Xerium Canada, Inc., was fined $60,000 on October 2, 2009, for a violation of the Occupational Health and Safety Act (OHSA) after a worker was injured.

In an incident that occurred on March 19, 2008, workers at Xerium’s North Bay facility were attempting to repair a machine used to mix bonding liquid. The power to the machine was turned off and the protective guards covering the machine’s drive shaft were removed so that they could work. The workers again turned on the machine, but failed to replace the guards immediately. As a result, one of the workers caught his sleeve in the machine’s moving parts.

Xerium Canada Inc. pleaded guilty to failing to ensure that the machine’s driveshaft and gears were guarded to prevent access to their pinch points.

The $60,000 fine was imposed by Justice of the Peace Susan Hilton. In addition to the fine, the court imposed a 25% victim fine surcharge, as required by the Provincial Offences Act. The surcharge is credited to a special provincial government fund to assist victims of crime.

That’s $75,000 total off of the company’s bottom line, because workers forgot to do something deceptively simple that would have taken a few seconds, at most. Building a culture of safety, in which workers are trained to consider every detail before they even flip a switch, is worth every bit of the up-front investment your company puts forward.

Back on July 7, SNC-Lavalin Power Ontario Inc. pleaded guilty to a violation of the Occupational Health and Safety Act (OHSA) and fined $300,000 after an accident in which a worker was killed. Now, a second company, Eastern Inc., a Brantford construction firm, was also fined $250,000 for the same incident.

The incident in question occurred on October 3, 2007, as Lockerbie & Hole was providing general site services for the construction of an electrical plant, in Toronto, for SNC-Lavalin Power Ontario Inc. While installing temporary lighting, an apprentice electrician was electrocuted when he opened a 600-volt electrical panel and contacted the taps of the live transformer.

While a Ministry of Labour investigation found that the company had an electrical lockout policy in place, requiring electrical installations to be done under lockout conditions, there was no record of the worker receiving detailed training in this policy. In any case, the written procedures that were in place made reference to out-of-province OH&S regulations, but not those applicable in Ontario.

Lockerbie & Hole Eastern Inc. pleaded guilty under the OHSA to failing as an employer to take every precaution reasonable in the circumstances for the protection of a worker. In particular, it failed to ensure its lockout procedure complied with the current legislative standards.

The fine was imposed by Justice Geraldine Sparrow. In addition to the fine, the court imposed a 25% victim fine surcharge, as required by the Provincial Offences Act. The surcharge is credited to a special provincial government fund to assist victims of crime.

Altogether, two companies are out $687,500 in fines and surcharges because they overlooked basic safety, and a worker died as a result. How much is worker safety worth to you?

Nova Scotia workplaces be warned; the province is no longer only fining employers after a worker is hurt, and after a court determines there was a violation is found after the fact.

In order to better protect workers before tragedy strikes, beginning in January, the Province’s Department of Labour and Workforce Development’s occupational health and safety division will begin issuing fines when health and safety regulations are violated in the workplace, without necessarily bringing a court case and waiting for a judge’s ruling, which is how things have tended to work in the past.

The OH&S division issues about 4,000 occupational health and safety orders each year, when violations are found in the workplace. Previously, compliance was achieved through education, promotion, enforcement and prosecution. The new system will create an additional form of deterrence, by allowing inspectors to fine violators on the spot. It’s hope that the new system will encourage greater responsibility on the part of employers, supervisors and even workers. Though the workplace injury rate has been declining, in 2008 there were 29 workplace fatalities in the province and 8,000 incidents in which employees weren’t able to work the next day.

Anyone who receives notice of a penalty can appeal to the Occupational Health and Safety Appeal Panel. Penalties imposed on employers and supervisors will be larger than those imposed on employees, but in all cases, the penalty will increase if it is a repeat offence.

Nova Scotia is not the only Canadian jurisdiction with such a program in place. British Columbia, Manitoba, New Brunswick and the Yukon already have such penalty systems in place.

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.

Multinational food conglomerate Bunge has been hit with $70,000 in fines as a result of a serious worker injury at an oilseed processing plant in Toronto in 2008.

The incident that led to the fine occurred on March 28, 2008 last year, when a tanker truck was being loaded with edible oil at the Bunge facility. While the worker was still on top of the truck filling the tank, it rolled out of a loading bay. The movement of the truck caused the worker to fall more than 3 metres to the concrete floor below, whereupon the raised tanker trailer’s wheels ran over his arm and his leg.

After an investigation, Bunge Canada was charge with and pleaded guilty to violating the Occupational Health and Safety Act; specifically for failing to take the “reasonable precaution” of having a system of signals in place for allowing tanker-trailer drivers to pull away from a loading dock.

The fine was imposed last week by Justice of the Peace John Cottrell and comes with a required 25% cent victim fine surcharge, which goes toward the province’s fund to assist victims of crime.

The Bunge plant in question has since been closed.

The province of Newfoundland and Labrador has replaced old, outdated occupational health and safety regulations with a new, greatly expanded set of legislation.

On September 1, 2009, The Occupational Health and Safety Regulations, 2009 (OHSR) will go into effect; all 518 sections of it, up from 187 sections previously. In addition to the new sections in the updated OHSR, there are also updates to existing regulations, to reflect industry safety practices now in place.

The old regulations were 30 years old, and had undergone a patchwork of changes by adding new additions to regulations as they became necessary. The result was a set of regulations that was very difficult to follow, so the province decided to do an overhaul, and create something more user-friendly.

The result is what provincial authorities hope is a regulation that categorizes and streamlines OH&S topics for easier use. Some of the major changes include; requirements to maintain a program to protect hearing in high noise environments; clarification of blaster responsibilities; procedures for access and egress to enclosed spaces; mandatory procedures for checking the well-being of workers working alone; and requirements to comply with the most recent version of a code or standard, rather than a possibly outdated version.

Over the next few months, the government intends to work with employers to assist them with the new rules, and conducting what they are calling a “soft enforcement” period until January 1, 2010. After that, they will be out in full-force. That doesn’t mean employers will be able to ignore the regulations, of course, but they will be a little more “understanding” with the rules changes.

A Brampton kitchen manufacturer has been fined $75,000 for violating the Occupational Health & Safety Act (OHSA), in an incident that resulted in the death of a worker. In addition, two supervisors from a temporary help agency were each fined $10,000 for their involvement in the same incident.

In August 2006, two workers from temp agency Opportunity Labour Agency Services were told to enter a shipping container to cut banding around a stack of plywood. As one of the workers began to cut the bands, the bundle of plywood fell on him. Ironically, these workers had been assigned this work after the task had already been deemed unsafe by other supervisors.

Neff Kitchen Manufacturers Limited pleaded guilty to failing to ensure that the plywood could be removed without endangering the safety of any worker, which is covered under OHSA Industrial Regs., section 45(b)(ii). Two supervisors from Opportunity Labour Agency Services also pleaded guilty for failing to advise the workers of the potential or actual danger posed by this load. As noted, each one was fined $10,000, as well.

The fine was imposed by Justice of the Peace Karen Walker. In addition to the fine, the court imposed a 25% victim fine surcharge on the total, as required by the Provincial Offences Act. The surcharge is credited to a special provincial government fund to assist victims of crime.

The reason it seems as if so many governments are staging “safety blitzes” is because they are. And the reason they do so is simple; it’s because they work.

Think about it; if companies are aware of a safety blitz, they are more likely to get their house in order, so as to pass inspection. That’s a good thing for everyone concerned. But if the companies are unaware of, or don’t care about, the safety blitz, inspectors will catch them violating rules and regulations, which is good for workers, but not so much for companies.

One glaring example of the latter came during a road safety program in Winnipeg this summer. Winnipeg police and Manitoba’s Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance conducted a blitz of heavy trucks (over 4,500 kg) from June 1-5, and July 27-31.

The actual results of the blitz are startling. Winnipeg police released the number on August 6, and they showed that 62% of the 321 trucks stopped failed to pass inspection. Of that number, half — or 32% of all trucks inspected — were immediately pulled off the road for “serious mechanical defects.” In addition, inspectors issued 53 tickets during the blitz. Perhaps the most surprising aspect of these results is the assertion by Winnipeg police that the numbers are not much different than those they usually see.

Manitoba’s Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance plans to send inspectors out on a regular basis, with larger blitzes conducted two or three times a year, so trucking companies may want to keep a better eye on their trucks.