‘Grossly deficient’: understaffed workplace-safety program struggled to regularly inspect workplaces, evaluation finds

The federal government’s program that enforces workplace-safety rules for more than 1.4 million employees is understaffed, and cannot regularly inspect workplaces across the country, according to a recent evaluation.

“The number of available personnel is insufficient to support regular inspections across large geographic areas, resulting in uneven coverage,” says the report, published Aug. 13, entitled The Evaluation of the Occupational Health and Safety Program, 2026.

The report examines how Employment and Social Development Canada’s (ESDC) Labour Program administered and enforced federal workplace health-and-safety rules from April 2016 to March 2024.

The Canada Labour Code sets workplace health-and-safety requirements for employers in federally regulated industries. It applies to workplaces such as banks, airlines, railways, interprovincial trucking firms, telecommunications and broadcasting companies, postal and courier services, and the federal public service. As of late 2023, those rules covered about 19,600 employers and 1.4 million staff under federal jurisdiction, or eight per cent of the working population.

The evaluation also found that proactive inspections, where inspectors look for safety problems before a complaint or serious incident occurs, accounted for nearly all workplace safety violations the program recorded in most years. It also found that staffing and funding constraints limited inspectors’ ability to travel to remote worksites.

Marie-Claude Chiasson, a spokesperson for ESDC, told The Hill Times the department currently has 79 active health and safety officers and senior investigators, compared to 93 in 2023-24. This makes for a 15-per-cent decrease.

Furthermore, ESDC spokesperson Maja Stefanovska attributed the difference to normal workforce fluctuations, including retirements, employee departures, and leaves of absence. Stefanovska said the Labour Program continues to recruit to fill vacancies and has not reduced its occupational health and safety (OHS) compliance and enforcement activities.

NDP MP Don Davies (Vancouver Kingsway, B.C.), his party’s parliamentary leader and labour critic, said that explanation doesn't ease his concerns.

“There’s almost no way to emphasize that we are grossly deficient in the number of federal inspectors policing and enforcing occupational health and safety standards in this country across the board. And it’s been that way for many years," Davies said in an interview.

Davies described the situation as part of a broader pattern under Prime Minister Mark Carney's (Nepean, Ont.) government.

“From invoking Sec. 107, violating the right to strike, to not paying attention to workers’ health and safety, across the board, they have just shown a complete lack of interest and concern for workers in this country,” he said, referring to a Labour Code provision the federal government has used to bring strikes to an end.

ESDC’s Labour Program is responsible for enforcing those workplace-safety requirements outlined in Part II of the code. It carries out both proactive inspections and reactive investigations, the latter of which can follow serious accidents, fatalities, complaints, or refusals to work.

In 2023-24, proactive inspections identified 12,494 violations, compared with 136 identified through complaints, according to the evaluation. Road transportation accounted for 4,829 of the proactive-inspection violations for which an industry was identified, followed by air transportation with 2,557. Rail transportation accounted for another 670.

Christopher McLeod, a professor at the University of British Columbia’s School of Population and Public Health and director of the Partnership for Work, Health, and Safety, cautioned that those numbers do not mean proactive inspections are finding nearly all workplace-safety violations that exist.

“It is that most of the violations they identified were found through the proactive inspection process, not that the proactive inspection process found all violations,” McLeod said. “We don’t actually know whether or not they missed violations because those aren’t recorded.”

At the same time, McLeod said the large number of violations found through proactive inspections could signal broader non-compliance, because violations at workplaces that are not inspected may never be identified or recorded.

Evaluation details impact of a workforce stretched thin

Twenty-six of the 29 people interviewed for the report—including program officials, and employer and employee representatives—identified problems affecting inspections, including staffing and funding constraints, training gaps, turnover, and geographic barriers.

The evaluation found a growing share of inspectors had less experience, while experienced staff were being pulled into training, onboarding, and special projects. Gaps in training on sector-specific risks, inspection techniques, and regulatory interpretation contributed to inconsistent inspections and made it harder to address complex workplace hazards. Long travel times also limited on-site inspections in rural and remote areas, particularly in large provinces and regions responsible for multiple provinces or territories.

McLeod said the effectiveness of individual inspections is only part of the picture.

“If it’s only a few firms or a minority of firms being inspected, you’re not going to change the overall dial in terms of improving the industry numbers, even if those inspections are effective when you inspect those firms,” he said.

ESDC's Chiasson said the department prioritizes proactive inspections at workplaces that have not been inspected recently and those considered at greater risk of injury or harm. Information such as past incidents and an employer’s compliance history helps determine where inspections are focused.

McLeod said targeting higher-risk workplaces makes sense when resources are limited, but it also means other workplaces are less likely to be inspected.

“If you have limited resources, you do have to focus on where you have the most impact, but at the same time, you’re making a choice to not focus on industries where risks still exist,” he said.

Chiasson said ESDC has updated procedures, tools, and training for health-and-safety officers and senior investigators, and is working to improve workforce planning. The department is also implementing a National Proactive Strategy intended to make that risk-based approach more consistent, with full implementation expected by March 2027.

Beyond headcount

Inspector numbers are not the only factor that determines whether an inspection actually improves safety, McLeod said. Experience and judgment matter, too, including knowing when to educate an employer, issue an order, or escalate to tougher enforcement.

"The quality of the inspection, I think, is a really important determinant here," he said.

Research on the effectiveness of workplace-safety enforcement also points to the importance of what happens after an inspection. Emile Tompa, a senior scientist at the Institute for Work & Health who has led systematic reviews of OHS enforcement research, said the strongest evidence for reduced workplace injuries is specifically tied to inspections paired with penalties. His 2016 review, co-authored with McLeod and others, found—based on nine studies—strong evidence that inspections with penalties reduce injuries.

The evaluation also found that prosecutions and administrative monetary penalties were underused. It recorded 12 prosecutions between 2016-17 and 2023-24. Since monetary penalties were introduced in January 2021, the evaluation said 50 had been issued to 36 employers. In 2023, one company was found guilty of failing to provide training on safe loading procedures and fined $150,000 after an employee was killed while loading pipes onto a flat-deck trailer. That same year, another firm was issued a $7,000 penalty for failing to develop a fall-protection plan for workers securing loads on flatbed trucks.

In its response to the evaluation, department officials said the federal government’s Comprehensive Expenditure Review (CER), a government-wide exercise to trim billions of dollars from government spending, could affect when and in what order it carries out planned changes.

Asked whether workplace-safety inspection and enforcement capacity should be protected from the spending review, Davies said the government should go further.

“Of course it should,” he said. “And not only should it be protected, it should be expanded.”

Davies argued that the broader projected reduction of roughly 40,000 federal public-service positions from the 2023-24 peak would add further strain to a workplace-safety program he described as already understaffed.

Brittany Smith of the Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada said the union believes it is imperative the spending review does not limit enforcement.

“The CER cannot be an excuse to cut corners on workplace safety,” she said. “Proactive inspections and timely responses prevent harm. They should be protected, not constrained by cuts.”

mponcana@hilltimes.com
The Hill Times