Alberta OHS Internal Responsibility System
While conducting an orientation for a client recently I asked the loaded question of “How many of you have had an inspection conducted by an OHS Safety Officer”? About 25% of the hands in the room went up. My next question was “How many of you were asked to provide proof of training and completion of required documentation”? All the hands went down.
This left me more than a little surprised as my experience up to that point was that the Officers were requesting proof of required training and completed documentation. At that point in the presentation I was trying to use the “expected” responses to reinforce the requirement to have required documentation available on site.
After a little digging it was determined that inspections by the OHS Officers has changed. In some situations, they are not looking for the documentation to verify that Contracting Employers/Employers/Workers are properly trained. They are simply conducting visual inspections to verify that they are working safely.
When the question of “why” was asked, the responses were as follows:
1. The requests for “proof of training/documentation” was creating excessive amounts of paperwork due to the inability of workers on site to provide the documentation. This resulted in numerous follow up attempts by the OHS Safety Officers to confirm the training/documentation was completed, directly impacting the number of completed site inspections.
2. Labour and Immigration department has implemented an Internal Responsibility System practice that requires the Prime Contractor to determine that all Contracting Employers or Employers on site are working in compliance with the Alberta OHS legislation.
3. If a Serious Incident occurs the OHS officers will be looking for the documentation to support the fact that the workers on site are competent and that the Internal System of Responsibility is in place for the Prime Contractor.
The ‘why’ appears to be driven by the current government’s focus to have volume and not necessarily quality inspections. To effect this, they have implemented the Internal Responsibility System that puts the onus on the Prime Contractor to ensure compliance. It is fair to say that the Prime Contractor should be doing this per the Act. However, for the poor performers in the industry the previous system provided them with an easy way to sidestep their obligations until a Serious Incident occurs.
What does this mean to all Prime Contractors?
If you are not checking your Contractors (Contracting Employers or Employers) to verify that they have the required training and documentation you are not meeting your legislated obligations as a Prime Contractor as defined in the Alberta OHS Act Part 1 Section 10(5)(a). That is to ensure that there is a system or process in place to ensure compliance with the Alberta OHS Act, the regulations and the Code.
What does this system look like? The simplest way to understand this is to know that you are required to communicate the responsibilities, ensure competency (training and documentation), complete documented inspections and correct any unsafe acts and conditions identified in the inspections. For the full description of the Government of Alberta Internal Responsibility System information check out the following link: Government of Alberta OHS Internal Responsibility System
As long as your company is following this system then you are doing everything that is reasonable and practicable. If you are not following your system then you may not like what happens if a Serious incident occurs and OHS starts asking for documentation.
