The Board of Canadian Registered Safety Professionals (BCRSP) marks 50 years of certifying occupational health and safety (OHS) professionals in Canada in 2026. Three members of its Board of Governors say organizations still spend too much time investigating what goes wrong and not enough time studying what goes right. Larry Masotti, Rebecca Chow, and Jeremy Mollet spoke separately about why success deserves the same scrutiny as failure, and why discipline is what lets organizations tell the difference between being safe and simply being lucky.
Organizations focused only on incidents stay reactive. Larry Masotti, MA, BEd, CRSP, chair of the board of governors at the BCRSP, says that bias has a measurable cost. "There's certainly value in both of those approaches, but if we only react, we're not anticipating what's coming and we're not dealing with leading indicators," Masotti says. He also warns against over-relying on numbers: "If it's numerical, we pay attention, and sometimes it's too easy to assign a number to something. It becomes a blanket statement. So, I think we have to balance qualitative with quantitative." Left unchecked, that imbalance breeds complacency. "Achieving success or getting good at something is always exciting and rewarding. Monitoring that success can be difficult because it requires diligence and discipline."
Feed-forward shifts the question from what went wrong to what can go differently. Rebecca Chow, BSc, CDMP-E, CRSP, vice-chair of the BCRSP, explains the distinction plainly. "The foundation is really a foundation of not necessarily focusing on feedback but focusing on feed-forward, because you're really trying to find out what can go differently to make it a different situation in the future," Chow says. The practical tool she has seen work best is the after-action review, built on a multidisciplinary team examining "the work as done versus the work as documented or imagined." That review functions only when workers feel safe raising concerns before they become incidents.
Psychological safety is a precondition for a functioning near-miss reporting system. Chow says the first requirement is environment: "It's really necessary for people to feel comfortable to admit a mistake they may have made, for the individuals to come forward noting a near miss." How organizations use near-miss reporting data is itself a growing field of practice. Jeremy Mollet, M.Eng., MBA, CRSP, CSP, CMIOSH, CHMM, director of resilience and corporate services at Enmax Corporation in Calgary and a member of the BCRSP's Board of Governors, adds that psychological safety is not simply positivity. "Being psychologically safe doesn't mean that everything is happy and that everything is positive," Mollet says. "It means you're able to critically say, this is a challenge for me, or this is a challenge for the team."
Compliance means checking a box. Competence means validating that a control actually works. Mollet illustrates the gap with an example from earlier in his career. "When I was younger, I took the courses, so I can go and deliver a task-hazard analysis or a field-level hazard analysis," he says. "I'm able to say yes, from a compliance perspective, I can check the box. The difficulty is I don't have the experience, and I don't have the operational knowledge. I need to rely on those people to make sure that it's validated." Recognizing the limits of one's own knowledge is itself a mark of professional maturity, Mollet adds: "I don't have that skill or experience. I don't have competence in this area."
Certification builds the structured discipline that studying success requires. Masotti connects the CRSP and CRST directly to that structure: "Certification, whether we're talking about the CRSP or the CRST, is a disciplined approach that requires that an individual measure, assess, and be mindful of all the different parts of an organization." Both designations are aligned with ISO 17024 and ISO 9001. Chow adds a behavioural dimension: "The certification process looks at certificant competencies, and the certificants are required to demonstrate not only technical competency but also behavioural competency," naming influence and communication as the two competencies she has seen do the most to move teams from reactive response to proactive prevention. On Chow's own team, roughly 80 percent of staff currently hold the CRSP designation.
Certified professionals earn well above the sector median. The BCRSP's 2025 Salary Survey, published February 10, 2026, drew responses from 1,819 of the 6,237 CRSP and CRST certificants invited. Among respondents, 69 percent reported salaries above $100,000, up from 59 percent in 2023 and 50 percent in 2017. Employment and Social Development Canada's Job Bank places the general OHS median salary at $85,000. The same survey found 89 percent of respondents satisfied or more than satisfied with their OHS career. As demand for certified OHS professionals continues to grow across Canadian industry, BCRSP's 2023 Perceived Value of Certification Survey found 90 percent of employers extremely or very likely to recommend the CRSP or CRST, with 54 percent formally acknowledging staff who earn a BCRSP certification.
The answer lies in continuous professional development, not a single credential. Mollet is direct: "It's not just a certificate. It's not just a designation. It's not just going to university and getting a degree. Those are all good things, absolutely, and they make up competence, but the other part is the application of it, and being able to rely on all of that experience, and failures as well as successes, to make informed decisions." The BCRSP's mandatory Continuous Professional Development Program runs on a five-year cycle. Masotti says that cycle gives certification its lasting discipline. Professionals pursuing CRSP certification should also draw on the wider practitioner network around them. Discipline built over time is what separates a safe organization from one that has simply avoided harm so far. Additional analysis appears in Canadian OHS premium reports.