Contractor safety audits go deeper as insurers raise the stakes

Insurance companies, not provincial labour ministries, are becoming the most influential enforcers of contractor and supply chain safety in Canada, says Trevor Harness, director of health and safety and director of education and training at Total Safety Management, an Ontario-based occupational health and safety consultancy. Harness told Canadian Occupational Safety the shift is reshaping how his firm audits subcontractors and redesigns unsafe supply chain operations for clients.

Harness, a former law enforcement officer, said Total Safety Management works as a one-stop shop for employers, offering consulting, full health and safety coordination on retainer, and training across 34 courses. Contractor management and supply chain safety make up a growing share of that caseload, an area increasingly shaped by insurers' growing role in awarding and policing contractor work.

Sub-trade audits go beyond the paperwork

When a general contractor asks Harness to vet a subcontractor, he said a training certificate is only the starting point.

"I do sub-trade audits where I look at companies, whether they're electricians or plumbers, and they can show you tickets if they have them for their guys," Harness said. "But I go deeper than that. I need to see policies, I need to see safe work procedures. Because if you're not doing things safely, we can't afford to waste the time and the money on taking a chance on you."

That deeper screening mirrors how one building maintenance company vets and monitors its own subcontractors, an approach Harness said is becoming standard among clients that rely heavily on outside labour.

Insurers emerge as the new enforcers

Harness said enforcement power in occupational health and safety (OHS) is shifting from the Ministry of Labour to insurance carriers, especially for contractors needing proof of coverage to win work.

"Your insurance company is probably more of a concern to you because if they say you have no insurance and you're in the construction business, you can't work, because you have to provide proof to general contractors and everybody else," he said.

One client's insurer discovered that Workplace Hazardous Materials Information System (WHMIS) four-step and five-step training was mandatory under Ontario's Occupational Health and Safety Act. "The insurance company didn't even know that WHMIS four-step and five-step were all mandatory. So they turned the tables when they found out that it was, and they said either you get all your people trained up, and one of them has 160 employees, or you won't be insured by us," Harness said.

He expects the dynamic to become law. "I forecast that within five to eight years at the most, it's going to be law, and it's not going to be the Ministry of Labour that comes after you. It's going to be your insurance company. Regardless of the size of your company, you're going to have to prove you have a full-time health and safety person, a part-time person, or a third-party company looking after your safety," he said.

A warehouse rebuilt around safety

One recent supply chain engagement, Harness said, started with a warehouse client's forklift accidents. "They had an issue in their warehouse with forklift accidents, and they were heading towards probably a serious injury," he said. "So in this case, I went in and we did an organized walkthrough, then blind interviews with people that I choose, a member of the Joint Health and Safety Committee (JHSC), a member of admin, a manager. And no names are taken."

The review produced a 12-page report with four pages of recommendations, Harness said, after he found workers using cell phones while walking through forklift aisles and inventory bins stacked five high in a disorganized receiving area. "I don't know if you're familiar with aircraft carriers, but they use colour codes," he said. "So we implemented that: where are these people supposed to be? They had designated areas, and they wear specific colours of personal protective equipment (PPE). So on a fast glance, safety managers and supervisors can say, well, why are those five people over there when they're not supposed to be? Because that's a dangerous area."

Harness also added a traffic control course for drivers who lacked backing-up skills and introduced incident tracking so the joint health and safety committee could monitor trends. The client's near-miss rate fell from roughly 60 per cent to about 20 per cent after the changes, he said, a company-reported outcome from that engagement rather than an industry-wide figure. The same layout thinking now informs efforts to cut forklift-related injuries at other distribution sites, Harness said.

Harness said the lesson holds whether the risk sits with a sub-trade, an insurer, or a warehouse floor: documentation alone will not hold up. "It's not as simple as we've talked about, where somebody says, oh, it's this," he said. "You've got to look at the bigger, all-hazards approach."

This article is part of our Monthly Spotlight series, which in July focuses on Contractor Management & Supply Chain Safety.