TORONTO, (July 11, 2005) — Did you hear about the guy who was crushed under a front-end loader as he tried to guide the driver backing up? Or the horrific welding accident in downtown Toronto in which two men — a veteran welder and his nephew — were inside a steam tank conducting routine repairs when somebody opened a valve allowing the steam to return. The older of the workers died immediately.

Workplace horror stories like these are pretty typical, and these days
all their gory details can be found on any number of websites.

Just as eye-opening are the stories of what happens to the companies where these injuries take place. With increasing frequency, organizations and their senior officers are being fined and hauled into court. And now new legislation means pretty much anybody in a firm can face criminal charges.

As Today’s Trucking reported when the law was passed, Bill C-45 of the The Criminal Code of Canada says that managers, owners, and anybody who directs another worker can be held criminally responsible when things go wrong. That, says management lawyer Karen Fields of Crawford Chondon & Andree LLP, means pretty much anyone in the company can be charged.

Anybody finding themselves telling staff how to handle a certain situation — as in cleaning up a part of the warehouse — can be personally liable if something goes wrong, says Fields. You could even go to jail.

So far, nobody has been sent up the river. In fact, a Newmarket, Ont., construction accident in which a worker was killed while working on a house’s foundation was the first time a criminal charge had been laid under the new Act, and in March of this year, it was dropped after the accused pleaded guilty to four lesser charges, laid under the provincial Occupational Health and Safety Act.

Still, Fields suggests that there will be more, and they will be more broadly targeted. She says that C-45 uses a shotgun approach to guilt, so not only can an individual be indicted but so can the corporation, the individual corporate members, managers and even, she suggests, “It could go so far as members of an industry association.”

But they don’t have to slap on the shackles and cuffs. Many industry experts agree that companies are being called out by safety inspectors for neglecting to train people on activities.

For instance, in one southern Ontario factory, a loader operator with 25 years’ experience was fined $15,000 and his company $300,000 after an accident that led to a co-worker’s death. As horrible as the death was, the victim was the designated “watcher” and the court found that the accident occurred because the loader operator had never been officially trained for working with a “watcher”.

These days, says professional training consultant Kelly Beaton, who runs Redstone Inc., near Hamilton, Ont., “Everybody’s got to be certified one way or another.”

Redstone specializes in onsite upgrading and training and she says she recently got a call from a local company which had just faced its second $500,000 fine for labour-code breaches. “If a Ministry inspector walks in off the street and you haven’t trained your people on a legislated or mandatory subject like WHMIS/fall protection, or dangerous goods, you will be fined.

“If you have an incident and cannot produce a paper trail or documentation, yes, you can be fined,” she continues. “But if they just see you have no paper trail, they can warn you and advise you to get it in place in a hurry.”

So the question arises: given the new cargo tie-down rules; the mercurial HOS legislation, plus the always changing hazmat regulations and a labour code that’s always in flux, are you certain your people are up to speed and have you kept records of everybody’s training regime?

Beaton says not being able to prove that you’ve trained your people is the kind of thing that’s going to come back and bite carriers. To be diligent means to have a written health-and-safety program.

The policy will sure come in handy if you or — as the Act stipulates — anybody who directs work winds up in court. Or Jail.