“We’ve come a long way!”

September 30, 2009 on 12:49 pm | In MOL | Comments Off

October 1^st will mark the 30^th anniversary of our Occupational Health and Safety Act in Ontario. We’ve come a long way. This Act replaced the Ontario Factories Act which dates back to 1884. Some of us will remember the 1979 landmark date however few would recall the ‘good old days’ of 1884! It would be hard to imagine the working environment in the factories established across this province in those early years.

 We can only appreciate more and more what the enactment of this legislation, Bill 70, brought into being. We can thank Dr. James Ham, who chaired a Royal Commission in 1975, for his recommendations to create legislation to govern health and safety in workplaces. This gave employers, supervisors and workers legal duties to ensure workplaces were as safe as possible. These duties of the workplace parties are interlocked and support each other and became what is known as the Internal Responsibility System (IRS).

 The IRS is the underlying principle of the Act. The three words are not specifically mention in the legislation. And there is no need to as it really means that all of the workplace parties, from the president to the worker, collectively bear the responsibility for the health and safety of everyone. The good thing is that where the IRS is fully functioning the MOL inspectors have little need to take action in the form of compliance orders or stop work orders.

Bill 70 also established Joint Health and Safety Committees in many workplaces who have since become the cornerstone of the IRS. Bill 208 in 1990 extended the requirement for JHSC’s into more workplaces and also added the need for Certified Members on the committee. These members would be given specialized training to authorize them to ‘stop work’ in special cases where ‘dangerous circumstances’ were found to exist.

 In addition to the above mentioned legal duties, it does contain 3 rights for workers. These include the right to participate, the right to refuse unsafe work and the right to know about hazards in the workplace.

 There have been other amendments to the Act over these 30 years, however for the most part it is a timely document. Section 51 shows its age where it refers to notifying the ministry immediately of a death or critical injury at the workplace ‘by telephone, telegram or other direct means’. We can only assume that texting and email was not common 30 years ago.

 The latest proposed amendment to the Act was introduced in April this year in the form of Bill 168 addressing ‘Workplace Violence’. This Bill has received First Reading, the initial stage of the parliamentary process to enact a law.

 We should all celebrate the evolution of workplace health and safety in Ontario, making it a better place to be!