Alberta toughens work safety enforcement

Safety records of Alberta companies will be posted online starting in September as the provincial government tries to toughen enforcement of workplace safety rules.

Employment Minister Thomas Lukaszuk told a legislature news conference Friday that "the hammer is coming down" on scofflaw employers.

The announcement follows criticism of the province for lax implementation of its occupational health requirements.

Lukaszuk said over the next few months the province is changing procedures to make sure workplace safety directives are more effectively enforced.

"We want to make sure that all employers in Alberta understand what the rules are," Lukaszuk said.

"And then they will be able to make educated choices on whether they want to pursue their practice of non-compliance, so they know what the ultimate consequences will be."

The province has started a pilot project to inspect work sites at night and on weekends, and it will hire eight more workplace safety officers.

Not enough, unions say

But that's not enough, Alberta Federation of Labour president Gil McGowan said.

"Given the fact that we have so many more people working in dangerous occupations, and given the fact that we have such a higher incident rate of workplace fatalities and injuries, we think that Alberta should be above the national average in terms of its number of inspectors," McGowanimplored.

The safety records are to go online in September and be updated every year. They will list the reported injury rates for tens of thousands Alberta companies. There were 110 job-related fatalities last year in Alberta.

The Conservative government pledged eight years ago to publicizeworkplace safety records of businesses in Alberta, but decided privacy rules prevented itfromdoing so. Lukaszuk said he checked recently with experts and found that wasn't true.

In April, provincial Auditor General Merwan Saher lashed the government for permitting a small group of employers to consistently violate occupational health and safety orders.

Those companies were found to have worker injury rates three to four times higher than the provincial average.The auditor general's report found that the government had no way of systematically tracking their violations, and that the Employment Department jiggled stats to make thecontraventions seem less severe.