Innovating Canada
Dr. Sarah Wilson PhD, MSc
Founder & CEO, Canadian Safety Group
Safety is a promise that the person who leaves for work comes home. The quality of instruction decides whether it is kept.
Workplace safety runs on a circle: premiums fund prevention, regulators approve providers, certificates return as proof. Every layer counts what’s easy to count. Competency is hard to count. A worker can die trained, every box checked.
“When a fatality report says the worker was trained, that line frequently closes the file,” says Dr. Sarah Wilson, PhD, MSc, founder and CEO of Canadian Safety Group. “It should ask the next question instead. Trained by whom? Assessed by whom? And could they do the work safely?”
Where the circle breaks
The circle breaks where information meets the worker. The most dangerous work is done by people who take in information differently, yet safety information is written for auditors, regulators, and lawyers — not the apprentice learning with their hands, the worker who deserves plain language, the new Canadian working in a second language, the gig worker with no safety department, or the small employer running safety out of their truck.
When information doesn’t land, work doesn’t stop. Workers guess, improvise, or copy someone nearby. Compliant on paper, unprepared in the field. Wilson calls it masked compliance. The evidence is on the record: Ontario’s Construction Death Review found 77 per cent of the fall deaths it examined involved trained workers. Only 16 per cent were properly protected.
A structure from 1976
The Ham Commission gave Ontario the Internal Responsibility System in 1976, and it was right — for deep mines, large industrial employers, stable long-term workforces. That workplace no longer exists. Today’s projects are multi-trade and multi-employer, with rapidly transitioning workforces with both union and non-union workers blended on the same site. Responsibility designed to flow through one employer now has to survive a subcontracting chain. The principles still hold. The structure they were built for is gone.
The system is starting to agree. The second annual Construction Death Review, released in June 2026, devotes a chapter to competent persons and workers — deaths of people who lacked what the law already required — and recommends defined skills, experience, and training, with measurable performance indicators. In plain terms: competency you can measure.
Counting what counts
Canadian Safety Group works at the point the circle never measures: did learning become protection? Competency can be measured — watch the worker do the task. CSG’s programs are built on current research and field practice, taught by mentored instructors who apprentice under supervision until a senior instructor signs their name to it. “A two-day train-the-trainer course — or worse, an instructor certificate purchased off the internet — taught to workers whose lives depend on it serves nothing and no one,” Wilson says. It tests the rules themselves: when its review of published Canadian research showed a wood guardrail post can pass inspection and still fail under a falling worker, it took the evidence to the Ministry.
They hold themselves to the standard they ask of others. Information entrusted to them is handled with the due diligence they demand; ISO certifications are underway in safety management, information security, and AI governance. A computer is never the last check. A person always makes the final call.
Their vision is simple: every worker, in every trade, in every province, deserves safety knowledge built for them, in language they own, at a standard that predicts survival. Safety is not a paperwork exercise. It is a promise that the person who leaves for work comes home. A circle that counts paper protects paper. Theirs protects people: “If we’re going to be wrong, we would rather apologise to you than to your family.”
Before your next training dollar is spent, ask who trained the trainer — and how they were assessed. Learn what competency-based training looks like at canadiansafetygroup.com.
