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I N T R O D U C T I O N
Every year, workplaces across Canada are scrutinized for the rigour of their safety programs, the sincerity of their leadership, and, most critically, the degree to which employees genuinely feel protected. Canadian Occupational Safety’s 5-Star Safety Cultures recognition sets the benchmark. It is not a trophy awarded by a panel of judges behind closed doors – it is earned, in no small part, through the voices of the workforce themselves.
The entry process comprised two distinct stages. First, organizations submitted an in-depth application detailing safety initiatives undertaken over the preceding year. Those that cleared this threshold were then sent an employee survey to be circulated internally. Only companies that met a minimum response threshold, determined by company size, and achieved an overall satisfaction rating of at least 80 percent across a range of workplace safety metrics were recognized as 5-Star awardees.
The result is a list of organizations that cannot simply write a good program on paper. They have to live it, day in and day out, in the eyes of the people doing the work.
This report profiles four of those winners: Morguard, Siemens Canada, Top Grade Energy Services, and Sanofi Canada. Each operates in a different sector. Each faces a distinct set of hazards, workforce demographics, and regulatory environments. Yet, a single theme unites them – one that is quietly redefining what the best safety culture in the workplace in Canada looks like.
The most progressive safety leaders in Canada have stopped waiting for accidents to happen. Driven by data, enabled by technology, and increasingly informed by AI, these firms are identifying risks before workers even encounter them. The era of reactive safety is giving way to something more ambitious: predictive, proactive protection built from the ground up.
C O M P A N Y P R O F I L E S
W I N N E R P R O F I L E • R E A L E S T A T E M A N A G E M E N T
Sector: real estate management & investment
Workforce: approximately 1,200 employees across Canada and the United States
Morguard is not a company that measures its safety ambition by provincial boundaries. With properties spread across seven Canadian provinces and roughly 10 American states, Morguard’s OHS manager, Cesar Paredes, has had to build a safety culture capable of speaking simultaneously to different municipalities, different regulatory frameworks, and entirely different working environments.
What makes Morguard’s approach distinctive is its refusal to treat compliance as the finish line. “Our leadership has really understood that safety has no borders,” Paredes says. “Just because it says something in British Columbia doesn’t mean we can’t recommend it in Ontario if it’s a really good initiative.” The cross-pollination of best practice across geographies is not only permitted at Morguard; it’s actively encouraged.
This award marks the second consecutive recognition for Morguard, and Paredes is characteristically humble about what that means. The credit, he insists, belongs not to the health and safety department, but to the workers asking the right questions, engaging with the process, and going home safely at the end of every shift.
At the same time, the sector is grappling with workforce and talent challenges. There is growing interest from women entering inspection, supervisory, and senior roles, yet lingering assumptions about who belongs in technical roles remain a barrier. The push for fair and equitable recruitment and advancement is no longer just a diversity, equity, and inclusion (DE&I) issue; it’s a core performance matter because diverse perspectives strengthen risk assessment and problem-solving in safety-critical environments.
Rose adds, “The key to overcoming these challenges is building a workplace culture that genuinely values diverse perspectives and backgrounds and is committed to a recruitment and advancement process that is not only equitable but also purpose driven.”
This is also why Canada’s top female safety leaders are particularly influential by serving as visible role models and mentors; they are helping to dismantle outdated norms while modelling safety-first mindsets and results-focused leadership.
Their presence underscores the importance of intentional pathways into senior roles: transparent talent management, regular conversations about career aspirations, and access to mentorship, sponsorship, and high-impact projects.
Katie Dolan – Ainsworth
Manager, HSE Programs and Support Services
Province: Ontario
Katie Dolan’s impact over the past 12 months has been both strategic and deeply operational. In her corporate health and safety role, spanning Canada and the US, she focused on standardizing programs across borders so they are not only compliant but also geared toward operational excellence.
“I lead with clarity and expectation,” she says. “The idea behind that is that we have consistent outcomes. If we’re aligning the people and the processes, then ultimately that will lead to consistent outcomes and a consistent process within our business.”
A signature achievement is her leadership of Ainsworth’s centralized and automated subcontractor management platform using Avetta. Dolan explains, “We use the system in a minimal way compared to some of our peers in the market, but I think that’s what makes us different too.”
Dolan drove the consolidation of 10–12 fragmented, often manual processes – spreadsheets, pen-and-paper workflows, and inconsistent local practices – into a single, coherent system. She led the gap analysis, engaged stakeholders from legal, procurement, health and safety, and operations, and then helped configure the platform to meet each group’s requirements while maintaining a unified standard.
She says, “It gives us a place in the market that is comparable to where our growth is going to lead us. It’s not reactive; this is proactive in the sense that we’ve got a standard process in place.”
Her innovation is both technical and cultural. A major part of this has been to reframe subcontractor prequalification as a risk management and safety partnership, not a simple procurement “checkbox exercise,” which has increased visibility into subcontractor performance and weeded out vendors unwilling or unable to meet Ainsworth’s safety expectations. This has led directly to risk reduction for the business and a consistent, coast-to-coast standard.
Dolan’s skills as a communicator and change leader are central to her success. She consciously “overcommunicates,” tailors messages to her audience, and leads with clarity and realistic expectations, emphasizing that progress is not always linear. Her transparent style, coupled with an approachable manner and habit of asking people what they think rather than telling them what to do, has earned trust and accelerated adoption of new programs.
“We do it together, and I make myself available for any questions or concerns. I’m pretty approachable by nature. People tend to utilize that, and I think that’s been the key to success,” says Dolan.
In the broader OHS industry context, her work exemplifies modern, systems-level safety leadership. She has shown how digital platforms can be leveraged to align safety, procurement, and legal priorities.
Looking ahead, Dolan is extending these learnings into the US through branch engagement, workers’ compensation optimization, and injury management initiatives, further amplifying her influence beyond a single region or project.
Catherine Bennett – Compass Group Canada
HSQA Manager, Systems and Policy
Province: British Columbia
Having come from the field, Catherine Bennett keenly understands the “pinch points” and time pressures on managers and frontline teams and uses that experience to ensure new requirements are integrated into existing workflows, rather than added as an extra burden. She consistently designs systems to be accessible, actionable, and sustainable from a frontline worker perspective, instead of defaulting to more audits or paperwork.
Bennett is a central driver in the major project to redesign the company’s safety management system to meet ISO 45001, aligning multiple existing management systems into a streamlined core of best practices supported by SOPs and JSAs. She couples this with careful attention to legislative and best practice changes, ensuring the program remains current and compliant. In parallel, she is leading the transition of the safety program’s SharePoint environment to SharePoint Online, unlocking more automation, better navigation, and improved usability for the field.
“We’ll pilot small things at sites to make sure that we get operational feedback, and if it’s a larger initiative, that’s something we’ll definitely do because we don’t want to roll something out to the business that isn’t going to work,” she says.
Innovation and technology are hallmarks of Bennett’s work this past year. She has helped embed tools such as Origami Risk for auditing and incident/claims management and championed the integration of chatbots so field teams can ask questions and immediately receive guidance on how to implement key safety programs.
She has also been at the forefront of several cutting-edge pilots, including automated heat-stress monitoring that uses beacons to continuously track heat and humidity and push automatic control notifications to units, replacing a manual, half-hourly process that field teams overwhelmingly preferred to automate.
Bennett explains, “The beacon sends out automatic notifications when you hit certain levels to say, ’You’ve reached this humidex rating. It’s time to incorporate these controls. It takes pressure off of operations and sends immediate notifications, and we can monitor it too to make sure that things are being implemented when they should.”
In addition, she is driving a proposal under the National Safety Council’s MSD Prevention Grant to deploy functional movement screening and individualized stretching/strengthening programs to reduce musculoskeletal disorders, one of the most common types of injury.
“If we get the grant, it’ll run for six months, and we’ll be able to hopefully see some improvement in people’s functional movement but also in injury reduction.”
Bennett’s skills extend beyond systems design into communication, engagement, and thought leadership in OHS. She is a frequent guest host on the Encompass safety podcast and cohosts an ergonomics-focused series, using these channels to reach workers directly with relatable, life-focused safety content that bridges home and workplace. She champions adult learning principles – focusing on relevance, the “why,” and practical application – so training respects workers’ time and priorities.
Her emphasis on psychosocial health, ergonomics, and wellness, combined with campaigns, apps, and multimedia communication, reflects a modern, holistic view of safety that elevates the culture as well as the metrics.
“Safety historically can just feel like a checklist, and so the whole point of what I do is to change people’s opinion, and I think we’re seeing that change,” adds Bennett. “It’s trying to cross that bridge and say safety is important inside and outside the workplace.”
Cassandra Boland – Green Infrastructure Partners
HSE Manager, Industrial Contractors
Province: Ontario
Cassandra Boland’s leadership during Newfoundland-based contractor Pennecon’s post-acquisition transition (June 2025) demonstrated a rare combination of technical depth, operational understanding, and people-focused change management.
Tasked with aligning the acquired company’s safety systems with those of its new parent, she reconciled manuals line-by-line, collaborating across teams and functions to ensure continuity with minimal disruption. The outcome delivered not just a smooth transition but a solid, unified foundation for consistent safety practices across the business.
Boland has also spent much of the past year consolidating approximately 30 disparate manuals into a single, company-wide program – cross-referenced to all Canadian jurisdictions and fully compliant for Greenland, including Danish translations – which has delivered tangible benefits: cost savings, streamlined audits, quicker corrective actions, and standardized performance expectations.
She says, “A lot of the small companies weren’t operating to standard. By having the one program, it’s easy to follow audits, monitor, and correct any deficiencies that you see.”
Boland’s credibility is rooted in substantial field experience on some of the most complex industrial projects in Atlantic Canada. Having worked on job sites such as Hebron, North Atlantic Refinery, Irving Tank Farm, and Long Harbour, she designs safety programs that are grounded in reality, not theory. This ’hands-on’ background allows her to effectively bridge the office-field divide, as well as generational gaps in technology and work styles. She introduces change gradually, calibrating her approach for an aging workforce and ensuring that new tools and processes are both accessible and adopted.
Her investigative work further underscores her value to the organization and the wider OHS community. Boland uses the EHSQ performance app TapRooT to investigate step-by-step causes when a high-potential, near-miss, or very serious incident occurs on a worksite. During the sensitive interview process following an incident, she breaks down the incident using the snapchart diagramming tool. This visual mapping enables her to identify root and contributing causes before developing targeted corrective actions and recommendations to prevent recurrence.
Boland is also a powerful force multiplier through communication and standardization. She disseminates lessons learned via mass site communications and toolbox talks, ensuring that an incident or near miss in one location rapidly informs risk controls in others.
What truly sets her apart, however, are her soft skills and commitment to the future of the OHS profession. She adapts her communication from boardroom to tool crib, earning buy-in from executives and veteran craft workers alike.
Beyond her day-to-day role, she mentors students and early-career women through work terms and school outreach, expanding awareness of construction and safety careers and strengthening representation in a traditionally male-dominated sector.
Christy Giberson – Strike Group
Health, Safety, and Environmental/Sustainability Analyst and Instructional Designer
Province: Alberta
A significant achievement that has earned Christy Giberson praise has been enabling Strike Group to grow rapidly, adding approximately one million work hours without compromising safety or resorting to unsustainable over-hiring. Instead, she focused on streamlining and reinforcing core systems so the organization could absorb major demand spikes, including a significant northern BC rotation, while maintaining workforce stability and control over risk.
Giberson’s approach to HSE is deeply pragmatic and field-focused, particularly in how she supports short-term and project-based crews. She personally builds and refines a lean learning management system that delivers only essential, role-relevant content, deliberately minimizing screen time so workers can stay engaged rather than overwhelmed.
This is complemented by a QR-enabled, single-page safety portal embedded in everyday documents, giving instant access to Safety Data Sheets, critical safety forms, and the Employee and Family Assistance Program. In doing so, she removes information-access barriers that often undermine real-world safety performance.
Her programs are co-created with the field, not imposed on them. Giberson actively encourages continuous feedback from site HSE personnel and ‘boots on the ground’ workers, accepting longer development cycles in exchange for procedures that are truly executable under field conditions. This patient, iterative design process leads to higher adoption, fewer workarounds, and safer outcomes where it matters most, on-site.
Giberson’s use of technology is deliberately simple and inclusive, reflecting her skill in change management and workforce engagement. Single sign-on, QR codes, and a centralized virtual safety library make tools accessible even to workers with limited digital literacy. At the same time, she balances tech with in-person monthly safety meetings, targeted stand-downs, and campaigns addressing line-of-fire exposures, hand and vehicle incidents, and seasonal risks like time-change fatigue.
A standout element of Giberson’s contribution to the OHS profession is her integrated focus on psychological safety and mental health. She has elevated mental health to a core safety pillar, driving initiatives such as a November mental health campaign and a February push-up challenge while ensuring EFAP resources are both visible on-site and accessible via QR. In parallel, she coaches leaders on soft skills that foster openness, trust, and genuine support.
Giberson lauds the changes in perception for mental health in the safety industry. She says, “As an industry, psychological safety has been a key topic, which is wonderful, because not so long ago it was ‘suck it up.’”
“We have a lot of people out there who don’t necessarily want to share because that’s not been the mantra that they grew up with, but we are really encouraging, as well as educating, our leadership on the importance of the soft skills,” she adds.
Through this blend of scalable systems, field-driven design, accessible technology, and holistic attention to both physical and psychological safety, Giberson exemplifies the modern safety professional.
Canada’s Top Female Safety Leaders have stood out by ensuring they remain highly attuned to both cultural and technological shifts, prioritizing psychological health initiatives along with user-friendly technological solutions. The characteristics that define 2026’s group are:
1. Trust-building, values-driven leadership
consistently connect day-to-day decisions to a clear safety mission and public protection
model integrity, accountability, and measurable results as non-negotiables
act as visible role models and mentors, especially for women and underrepresented groups, helping dismantle outdated norms
build cultures that genuinely value diverse perspectives because they understand diversity as a performance advantage in risk assessment and problem-solving, not just a DE&I checkbox
2. Systems thinking and smart use of technology
design and standardize safety management systems across sites, provinces, and even countries while staying compliant and practical
use digital tools to simplify work, reduce duplication, and make safety information instantly accessible
shift metrics and processes toward what truly matters (e.g., focusing on severity and high-potential risks instead of just counting all incidents)
3. Deep field awareness with exceptional communication and change skills
understand frontline pressures and build systems that fit existing workflows instead of adding burdens
adapt communication style for different audiences, using plain language, asking for input, and communicating with clarity and realistic expectations
co-create solutions with workers and supervisors, accepting slower development in exchange for real-world usability and higher adoption
use adult learning principles and varied methods to make safety feel relevant and respectful of workers’ time
4. Holistic, future-focused approach to risk and well-being
integrate psychosocial health and mental well-being as core safety pillars
address emerging and evolving risks (climate-related hazards, MSDs, aging workforces, and complex infrastructure) with innovative pilots, targeted programs, and data-informed interventions
standardize emergency preparedness, hazard assessments, and investigation processes so learning from one incident enhances protection across the organization
Canadian Occupational Safety invited OHS professionals from across the country to nominate exceptional female leaders for the sixth annual Top Women in Safety list. Nominees had to be working in a role that related to, interacted with, or in some way influenced the health and safety sector. They must also have demonstrated a commitment to their profession.
Nominators were asked to describe the nominee’s standout professional achievements over the past 12 months, the initiatives and innovations, and contributions to the OHS industry.
To narrow down the list to the final 70 Top Women in Safety, the COS team reviewed all nominations, examining how each individual had made a meaningful contribution to the industry.