Aura Health and Safety hygienist Corrine Balcaen warns chronic exposure risk is going unmanaged across Canadian workplaces
When a hazard kills quickly, workplaces respond. When it kills slowly, over decades, the urgency disappears. That gap, says Corrine Balcaen, a senior industrial hygienist with Aura Health and Safety Corporation in Vancouver, is where Canadian workers are losing the most.
Balcaen carries a Certified Industrial Hygienist (CIH) designation, began her career as a policy analyst with WorkSafeBC, and has worked almost exclusively in mining for 17 years. The sector has made real progress on acute hazards, she says; chronic occupational disease still gets far less attention despite killing more workers.
Why slow-acting harms don’t carry the same urgency
“It’s all about urgency,” Balcaen said. “Most of us remember the pandemic, we’ll never forget it. There was a disease that would kill us all quickly, and look at the response. We came together almost as a globe and developed vaccines, sent everybody home, did a whole bunch of things to protect everyone. We’ve never had a response like that to cancer.”
“In the last probably 10 or so years, that industry has really started to focus on slow-acting harms,” she said, pointing to research sponsored by the Gates Foundation around 2014 and 2015, the Global Burden of Disease Initiative, which found mining’s single biggest contributor to occupational disease worldwide is silica, not asbestos. “Silica is ubiquitous regardless of where you mine,” she said.
Citing the International Labour Organization (ILO), Balcaen said the gap between traumatic and chronic workplace deaths is stark. “They say conservatively that there’s probably about a one to seven relationship: for every time somebody dies from a traumatic event, there’s likely to be at least seven more people dying slowly,” she said. “It’s probably up to one from 10 to 100 in the case of some cancers. We put all of our time, money and effort into that one out of eight, which is a very conservative number.” The majority of workplace deaths WorkSafeBC has recorded in recent years were attributed to occupational disease rather than traumatic injury.
Regulation lags decades behind the science
Balcaen is blunt about the limits of compliance alone. “Occupational hygiene programs should never, ever, ever, ever be based on legislation,” she said. “They should be based on current and best occupational hygiene practice. Regulations were born out of that profession, not the other way around. Regulations take time to enact and change, it’s a very slow-moving behemoth. That regulation hasn’t been updated for 15, 20 years. We know that what we used to think may or may not have been protective is absolutely not protective now.”
Silica is her go-to example: the accepted safe exposure level today, she says, is roughly four to five times lower than regulations once permitted. Filling the gap, in her view, is pressure from elsewhere: a workforce less willing to trade long-term health for a paycheque, and reporting frameworks like the Global Reporting Initiative. “Public opinion, workforces, researchers, a whole bunch of entities create more urgency now than regulatory obligations,” she said.
Her advice to employers: treat exposure management as a risk assessment, not a checklist. “You really need a comprehensive occupational exposure risk assessment, and then controls that are really robust and sustainable, to make sure that you either eliminate or control those risks,” she said, an approach that echoes the shift toward predictive, data-driven safety practices documented in the 2026 5-Star Safety Cultures special report.
Building capacity to close the hygiene gap
Even motivated employers run into a structural problem: there aren’t enough qualified people to hire. “We might have 500 [industrial hygienists] in Canada,” Balcaen said. “We also don’t have occupational physicians. We’ve got a very small contingent of professionals to do that work.” Becoming credentialed takes roughly a decade: a master’s degree followed by four years of supervised experience.
Balcaen and a colleague, Mona, have spent recent years developing a fix: a two-year diploma program to train occupational hygiene technologists, a role that doesn’t currently exist anywhere in the world. “We’ve got a curriculum developed. We have a university interested. We just can’t get regulator support, we can’t get the funding to do that,” she said. WorkSafeBC funded the market research behind the proposal roughly a year ago, but it remains stalled.
Asked what single change she’d most want to see, Balcaen didn’t hesitate. “We need capacity, capacity of trained professionals who understand the long-term implications associated with work,” she said, pointing to the coming wave of Canadian infrastructure spending in construction, mining, smelting and manufacturing. “Those jobs are most associated with some of the most egregious occupational diseases.”
Regulators, she argues, have the most at stake in closing that gap. “They’re the ones with the most to lose,” she said. “Regulators really struggle to recruit, and they have legislation to enforce. If they can’t do that, there’s a problem for all of us.” A proposed worker registry for tracking long-term asbestos exposure in B.C. suggests regulators are starting to treat latency-period risk as its own category.
This article is part of our monthly spotlight series, which in November focuses on industrial hygiene & occupational health.
