An Alberta safety consultant says overlapping subcontractor platforms can cost solo operators over $15,000 a year in duplicate paperwork
A one-person oil and gas contractor, only a few months into business, recently had a payment held back after a subcontractor management platform flagged his safety documentation as out of date. On closer review, he was required to maintain three separate subcontractor software accounts, each with its own policy wording requirements, according to Cori Carroll, CRSP, who co-founded Coastal Safety Consulting and the safety software company Flowforms nearly a decade ago.
“He had a holdback from one client because his subcontractor software wasn’t up to date,” Carroll said. “And the more I talked to him and explored, he had three different subcontractor softwares that he was required to use, and each one of them required their own policies and little nuances for each one. You would think you build a safety manual and you just upload it, but that’s not what happens.”
Same hazard, three different safety manuals
Carroll said the shift has been gradual but significant. “Five years ago it used to be like, you upload your insurance and we require $2 million, or this guy says we require $5 million, and that was it for the subcontractor process. It’s not like that anymore. It’s basically like, we want your policy to specifically say this, and if you can’t make it say that, then you’re going to fail.”
For the contractor in question, the mismatch between requirement and reality was stark. “He’s trying to write a benzene policy when he doesn’t go anywhere near benzene, because it’s a requirement for one of the subcontractor software,” Carroll said. She described a second case involving a client with a 100 employees with an established safety program: one platform required a dedicated policy manual solely to satisfy its own compliance process, and meeting a separate platform’s requirements “took me two full days to upload and change our policies.”
The problem, she said, is that the people setting these requirements aren’t accounting for who ends up carrying them. “People who are making these requirements, they’re not understanding the trickle-down effect that’s happening and how it is causing an undue hardship to these very, very small operations.”
When checklists replace hazard assessments
Carroll’s proposed fix runs opposite to more paperwork. “What would make more sense for that person is a really strong hazard assessment, maybe some site-specific orientations on the spot when he’s getting to site,” she said, rather than policies filed months before a contractor ever reaches the job. “We don’t necessarily need all of this C-suite sort of administration on top of it. Yes, we need administration to prove due diligence. But surely we can simplify it.”
Artificial intelligence is accelerating the gap between paperwork and practice, not closing it, Carroll said. “What I’m currently seeing is one person’s AI bot talking to the other AI bot, and then they just kind of go back and forth, and it gets so overtly complicated that it really takes a human being to step in.” She was blunt about the end result: “There’s absolutely these really complicated, hallucinating safety manuals out there.” Her advice to small business owners is correspondingly simple: “Keep it very, very simple, because everything that’s written in that policy and procedure, you are held accountable to.”
She argued that human review, not automated checkboxes, is what actually protects workers. “If a human’s reading someone’s hazard assessment, which is even more useful, you’re going to be in a much better position to actually improve workplace safety outcomes than just having this checkbox.”
A fix that doesn’t cost more
Credential equivalency offers one path forward. Ontario’s new administrative monetary penalty framework now carries penalties of up to $100,000 for public-sector buyers that fail to treat accredited safety management systems, including the ISO 45001 international standard and the Certificate of Recognition (COR), as equivalent during procurement, following Ontario’s earlier move toward treating ISO 45001 and COR as legally equivalent for municipal bidding.
Carroll said cost still matters more to contractors than recognition alone. “I think what a lot of these contractors might want to see is something that’s not necessarily costing money.”
In the meantime, she’s trying to close the gap herself. Her Calgary office is launching Shop Talk, a free safety session held every second Thursday: “It’s completely free. It’s hosted by me,” she said, describing it as “my way of paying it forward.” She pointed to another Alberta-based safety professional offering free fractional safety services to manufacturers as a model worth following. “It’s going to take some of us in the industry to have all this expertise and kind of awesome educational resources and just give them away,” she said. “At the end of the day, it’s a win-win. We want people to come home safely.”
