More than a dozen recommendations made to shore up safety practices
The Department of Labour and Advanced Education’s Occupational Health and Safety Division is responsible for investigations and inspections related to workplace safety. It conducts worksite inspections to ensure compliance with the Occupational Health and Safety Act (OHSA), as well as carrying out investigations into serious workplace-related incidents.
Lapointe’s office found the department adequately responded to serious incidents, but reported evidence found in inspection files was insufficient to determine whether inspections were being adequately carried out.
The information available illustrated inconsistencies within the department’s practices.
The department does not set inspection targets for inspectors, such as the amount of time that should be spent on targeted industries, the report found. Only 27 of the 100 most high-risk workplaces — as calculated using information from the Workers’ Compensation Board of Nova Scotia (WCB) — were inspected in the last year. Lapointe recommended the department set inspection targets to ensure efforts are concentrated on high-risk industries.
The report found variation in inspectors’ reports. Some were comprehensive, while others only included the bare minimum of information employers needed in order to address deficiencies. Of the 3,754 orders issued between April 2012 and March 2013, more than one-third were not complied with by the date required. Lapointe recommended the department develop and implement checklists to create consistency among inspections and in inspectors’ follow-up procedures.
In total, Lapointe’s office made 16 recommendations related to occupational health and safety. The majority of these recommendations are simple solutions that will provide consistency, Lapointe said.
"Some of these things can be done to improve the quality of the work very quickly," he said. "By simply improving the work the inspectors are doing… it could have a multiplier effect. It spreads out so that people don’t need an inspector coming in telling them how to do things, they talk to their colleagues and I would hope the result of that should be that you have fewer accidents and fewer deaths."
Lapointe said this ownership of occupational health and safety is crucial, as the government is only a guiding force in worker safety.
"The primary responsibility for workplace safety does have to lie with the workplace," he said. "The government’s role is a regulatory and leadership role. It can’t, and in fact shouldn’t try, to manage. Everyone has a role to play."
Kelly Regan, minister of labour and advanced education, is taking the OHS role her department plays seriously.
"We are already addressing a number of them right off the bat," Regan said of the report’s recommendations. She said issues regarding compliance are being considered the most urgent, with the department going so far as to hire five new safety officers in an effort to make inspections more targeted.
"We’re also in negotiations with the public prosecution service to add an additional prosecutor to our roster," she said. "We want everybody in the workplace to be thinking about safety every day. We want people going home to their loved ones at night."
The province also recently launched a five-year workplace safety strategy. The new strategy — developed in partnership with the WCB — aims to make Nova Scotia the safest place for workers in Canada.
John Brookfield, the health and safety representative for the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) Nova Scotia, said safety campaigns need to focus on employees if they want to be successful.
"Of course, the government and employers need to play a role," Brookfield said. "But any truly successful attempt is going to have to also involve the workers in a workplace, whether they’re unionized or not. The workers often are far more aware of the hazards that are faced on the day-to-day in the workplace than the employer and government enforcers."
He agreed with Lapointe’s recommendation that the procedures surrounding inspections need to be more methodical. He went on to say the department needs to be methodical in its pledge to pursue criminal charges for occupational health and safety accidents, sending a clear message to employers.
More than anything, Brookfield said, the focus needs to be on prevention.
"We want to see that there’s a robust approach to prevention on the whole across the entire province. It’s not just the catastrophic accidents — the ones that make headlines — that Nova Scotia workers are suffering from," Brookfield said. "We want to make sure that every worker in Nova Scotia has the opportunity to go home whole at the end of each and every working day."
The auditor made the following recommendations for the Department of Labour and Advanced Education:
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Auditor's report: 16 OHS recommendations
• establish inspection targets for OHS division to ensure staff focus on higher-risk industries
• evaluate inspection results against annual plans to determine if targets were met
• better communication between the department, Nova Scotia Business Registry and the WCB so information on new businesses can be obtained regularly
• develop and implement inspection checklists
• have recipients sign inspection reports as an acknowledgment of receipts of the reports and related orders
• require evidence of compliance with orders for violations that pose serious health and safety risks
• monitor, and ensure approval is obtained and documented in the files, for extensions to compliance order dates greater than 60 days
• comply with policy concerning manager review of investigations
• comply with policy so two officers attend the preliminary investigation of a workplace fatality
• develop and implement policies and procedures that provide guidance to inspectors on follow up and enforcement of outstanding orders
• establish a complaint logging and tracking system to ensure all complaints are recorded and investigated in a timely manner
• develop and implement performance standards for response times to incidents and complaints
• monitor whether inspectors are updating the activity of information system as frequently as
required
• use a time tracking system to develop performance standards for planning and monitoring
• review system information capabilities to determine what information should be collected in order to fully utilize the system for analysis and decision-making
• implement a file review process for inspection and investigation files that include documentation of the review and sign off by the manager.
