Canada's Safest Employers Awards names 2026 winners nationwide

Canadian Occupational Safety named the winners of the 2026 Canada's Safest Employers Awards at a gala in Toronto on Thursday, October 22, recognizing 23 organizations and individuals for workplace health and safety leadership across the country.

The ceremony capped two days of the Canadian Safety Summit, part of COS Live, with winners ranging from national manufacturers to individual safety leaders earning the recognition for the first time.

Winners span sectors from mining to manufacturing

Canadian Occupational Safety has run the awards program annually since 2011, and this year's 23 categories spanned sectors including mining, oil and gas, construction, logistics, and the public and non-profit sectors. Four individual honours were handed out alongside the employer awards, including the BGIS Award for Safety Leader of the Year and the Minerva Award for Rising Star of the Year, won by Alayna Uhrig of Kiewit Construction Services ULC.

Siemens Canada Limited claimed the Best Environment Management Program award and, through its Smart Infrastructure Buildings division, Canada's Safest Employer in Services Sector. The company has repeated as the environmental category's winner since Canadian Occupational Safety reported on the 2024 Canada's Safest Employers Awards winners, when it also took that honour.

Other repeat strength came from Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada Inc., which won the Bruce Power Award for Canada's Safest Manufacturing Employer – Industrial, and Weatherford Canada Ltd., named Canada's Safest Oil & Gas Employer. Smaller and newer organizations also broke through: Hancon Mining Division Inc. was named Canada's Safest New Employer, and Creative Options Regina won Canada's Safest Non-Profit Employer.

Winners credit teams, not individual effort

Stacia Gunn, Health, Safety, Environment and Quality (HSEQ) Manager at MacKinnon and Olding, won the BGIS Award for Safety Leader of the Year, succeeding last year's Safety Leader of the Year winner at Ledcor Industries Inc. Gunn said the honour belongs to the people she works with as much as to her.

"I'm so unbelievably grateful to my team at MacKinnon and Olding," Gunn said moments after accepting the award. "They have worked so unbelievably hard to really make sure that the workers are at the forefront of safety ... we do this with them, not for them."

Gunn said she felt the weight of the recognition. "It feels heavy. I am humbled by this, without a doubt," she said. "There's a lot of amazing people in this field, and why I'm here is because I've been challenged by those people ... what's amazing now in my current role is I get to push the next generation to be better."

Pronghorn Controls, a Calgary-based electrical and instrumentation services provider that was a silver recipient when Canadian Occupational Safety announced the 2016 Canada's Safest Employers winners, won this year's Workplace Safety and Insurance Board (WSIB) Award for Canada's Best Health & Safety Culture, sponsored under the WSIB's mandate to foster a stronger national safety culture. President and chief executive officer Yves Tremblay said the win would fuel the company's next push.

"Winning an award like this is just such a momentum builder for all of us to inspire ourselves to take things to the next level," Tremblay said. "In the safety world, you got to get up every day, pull your socks on, and do it all over again."

Tremblay said the company treats both failure and success as teaching moments. "When things go wrong, we rub our faces in it. We learn from it. We get after the immediate causes and the root causes. We take it really seriously," he said. "But on the other side, it's just great to celebrate successes every once in a while too and build the momentum that way." He brought a delegation of safety leaders from across Pronghorn's service territory to the ceremony, ranging from employees born in 2002 to long-tenured veterans.

Sponsors point to technology and prevention

Wayne Arondus, chief executive officer of the Manufacturing Safety Alliance of BC, the not-for-profit safety association for the province's food and beverage processors, accepted the MWG Apparel Award for Canada's Safest Utilities and Electrical Employer. "Shocked, but truly honoured. It's fantastic," Arondus said, crediting a three-year push by his team to "make BC the safest place to live, work, and play."

"We support all the food and beverage manufacturers in the province of BC, and it was crazy, but we just stayed focused on helping industry," Arondus said. "This is a nice capstone to that work we've done."

Geotab served as the ceremony's event partner and, through Geotab Vitality, sponsored the Geotab Award for Canada's Safest Fleet, which went to 4Refuel. President and CEO Steve Lockington said fleet safety sits at the centre of Geotab's mission. "I think fleet safety is one of the core pillars at Geotab, and it's especially important both for Geotab but also for Geotab Vitality in looking at driver health and safety," Lockington said, adding that the company leans on "behavioral science, gamification, AI, and other methods to engage and motivate those individuals that ultimately lead to safety at the end of the day."

Lockington also pointed to growing industry interest in autonomous and self-driving vehicles across trucking and ride-hailing. "Our data at Geotab can definitely help these companies to understand how the vehicles are operating on the roads every day, and not just their vehicles but every other one that's out there," he said. "But it's going to take time to come, and we've seen that with everything from electrification to now automated autonomous vehicles."

Full list of 2026 Canada's Safest Employers Awards winners