Thank you.
I going to start with strengthening the internal responsibility system. The legal duties and responsibilities of employers, supervisors, and workers overlap and complement each other in the pursuit of the highest possible health and safety outcomes. Together they create what's known as the internal responsibility system. This concept is as fundamental in health and safety law as is the concept of due diligence. The internal responsibility system is a key component of a well-functioning occupational health and safety system that exists to ensure that workers are safe and their health is protected.
Inherent in the legislative system are mechanisms for workplace parties to resolve issues. Those mechanisms include shared rights and responsibilities. Employers are required to provide a safe workplace, and workers have rights to know, rights to participate, and rights to refuse dangerous work. Most importantly, the right to participate requires workers to do their utmost to ensure that the highest possible standards of health and safety are maintained in the context of each unique workplace.
Also inherent are engagement mechanisms for resolving issues as they arise. This is a shared responsibility of employers, employees, and the joint health and safety committees or the health and safety representatives.
Bill C-4 would improve the internal responsibility system. The employer and employee, and workplace safety representatives and health and safety committees, are required to work together to resolve issues at the workplace without the need for intervention of government-appointed health and safety officers. The primary mechanism to resolve workplace health and safety issues has always been the health and safety committee. Canadian employers and unions have invested heavily in the training and processes to ensure that health and safety committees are effective. Bill C-4 strengthens the role by requiring employers to engage both the employer and employee members in the assessment and resolution of unsafe work and work refusals.
I now turn to the changes to the definition of danger. The definition of danger is changed in Bill C-4 to “an imminent or serious threat to the life or health of a person”. The definition does not diminish the right of employees to refuse unsafe work, nor will it diminish protection provided by the Canada Labour Code.
The current broad definition invites an assessment of speculative risk based on potential hazards for future activities that inevitably contribute to unnecessary work refusals. Speculation about unsafe conditions that do not pose an imminent or serious danger should be resolved by the workplace parties through the health and safety committees without the need to exercise the right to refuse or government intervention.
Now, refusing dangerous work is not something either party takes lightly. The current process is a three-step process that involves the workplace parties. This process is enhanced in Bill C-4 by requiring written documentation by the employer, and it enhances the role of the health and safety committee in resolving work refusals. You have been given a slide that explains the revised system and how it would work by comparing the existing and proposed processes. I'd be happy to review that during the question period, if asked.
The first step in the process to resolve or refuse requires the workers to contact their supervisor and indicate their concerns. The majority of refusals are resolved at this stage. If not, the next step engages the health and safety committee to do further investigations and make recommendations. This is the mechanism in the internal responsibility system designed to have workplace parties resolve issues. The proper role of government is to intervene only when the internal responsibility system fails. This has not been the case in the federal sector. Too often, labour affairs officers have been injected into the process too early, which undermines the responsibility of employers, employees, and their representatives to seek appropriate solutions together.
The workplace parties are better equipped to assess and manage these risks than health and safety officers, because the assessment of health and safety risks often requires specific expertise and technical knowledge about sector-specific workplaces. There are many examples of early inappropriate intervention by health and safety officers that diminish the effectiveness of the federal health and safety regulatory system.
Asking government officials to intervene in speculative risks is asking them to become experts on issues where evidence is often minimal or non-existent. That is the responsibility of the workplace parties.
In the provincial jurisdictions, the ministers of labour and workers compensation boards have developed protocols that are similar to those proposed in Bill C-4 to ensure that there is minimal interference in the workplace health and safety internal responsibility system. Danger is not defined in most provincial jurisdictions. Where it is defined, it is defined narrowly as an imminent danger to life and health.