Canadian delegates returning from Seoul say the global workplace safety standard is expected to be finalized in late 2027
ISO 45001, the world’s only global consensus standard for occupational health and safety (OHS) management systems, is being revised for the first time since its 2018 launch, and two Canadian delegates who just sat through the International Organization for Standardization’s annual in-person plenary in Seoul, South Korea say the work is further along, and more consequential, than most Canadian employers realize.
Troy Winters, national coordinator of health and safety at the Canadian Union of Public Employees and vice chair of ISO Technical Committee 283, led the week of sessions in Seoul. “Working Group 6 is the working group that is tasked with developing the next version of the global… standard ISO 45001,” he said, describing mornings spent on the revision itself and afternoons on related projects, including a remote-work standard nearing completion and early planning for ISO 45002, the implementation guidance that becomes obsolete the moment the new 45001 is published. TC 283 also hosted a local conference for about 40 to 50 attendees, where, Winters said, “our Canadian delegate, Dylan Short, did a presentation on the work that we are doing with 45001.”
What’s changing in the next ISO 45001
Winters, who oversees the comment-review process, pointed to several substantive additions still being finalized: language asking organizations to “consider the diversity of the workers” when assessing hazards, new considerations around return-to-work processes, a sharper focus on occupational illness rather than just acute injury, and what he called “probably one of the biggest changes,” a push toward workplace well-being rather than simply the absence of injury.
Short, speaking from his own presentation at the plenary, framed the underlying shift in similar terms: a move away from treating hazard and risk as “just a physical thing, a point in time thing” and toward continuous risk management. “We actually have to look at hazard and risk on an ongoing basis,” he said. One open question that was still being argued while he was in Seoul is which verb the standard should use for this new emphasis on health rather than just safety: “Is it promote? Is it support?”
Why the timeline keeps slipping
The standard is in its draft international standard phase, the first point where the broader public, not just committee members, can weigh in. “We got about 1,400 comments,” Winters said, “and we weren’t quite expecting 1,400, so we’ve added a little bit of extra time to the calendar to make sure that we take the time to do it right.” Short, describing how that volume gets managed, said editorial and grammatical notes are filtered out first, which “took us from 1,400 down to about 700 to 800” substantive items, reviewed line by line with no formal vote. Short recalled one list that drew three conflicting suggestions in a single sitting: “Comment number 1 is, I would like to add this to the list. And comment 2 is, I’d like to adjust the wording in the list. And comment 3 is, I’d like to delete the list.”
Winters originally targeted June 2027 for completion. “I don’t think we’re going to quite make June,” he said, “but I think we’re aiming to have it launched complete in September now.” Short’s own guess lands in the same range: “Q3, maybe Q4 ‘27.”
Canada’s adoption gap
Short was candid about where Canada stands today: 420 ISO 45001 certificates covering 821 sites, against roughly three million employers in Ontario alone, which Short said is "embarrassing." New Zealand, at about a tenth of Canada’s population, has more certificates and more certified sites, which Short attributes to a regulatory structure “based around hazard and risk” rather than the topic-based model Ontario inherited from its 1970s-era Occupational Health and Safety Act. Short praised Quebec’s 2024 regulatory overhaul, produced through a mandatory ten-year review cycle, as a rare domestic example of the hazard-and-risk approach. Canadian employers can compare and study a side-by-side breakdown of ISO 45001 and CSA Z45001 requirements.
He’s equally blunt about Ontario’s WSIB Certificate of Excellence program: “That’s a fantastic idea until you include COR as a management system. COR is not a management system, it’s a program.” Most Canadian employers, he argued, “see safety as a cost… not what it adds to the organization,” unlike Toyota, which he credits with treating safety investment, including deploying robots on high-hazard tasks, as a direct productivity driver, a shift COS documented in its own profile of Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada’s decade-long safety transformation. It’s the same framework-over-checklist argument Short made in a webinar on advancing workplace safety programs.
What Canadian safety leaders should take from it
Winters pointed to strong Canadian leadership elsewhere on the committee, including a recent menstrual health and menopause support standard and a publicly available standard on climate change impacts, both released within the last few months, and encouraged more Canadian safety professionals to join the Mirror Committee. “Almost all the meetings are done virtually, so it’s easy to participate,” he said. Short closed on a similar note of confidence, framing worker participation as “already in our Canadian DNA,” while pushing the industry to think past its own walls: safety management has to look past “what’s inside the fence” to the whole supply chain, “because sometimes the hazard shows up because it showed up on a truck and we’re only part of that chain.”
