Why Canadian leaders must own safety — not just delegate it

Canada recorded more than 1,000 workplace fatalities in 2024, according to the 2026 Report on Work Fatality and Injury Rates in Canada from the University of Regina — and experts warn the true figure may be significantly higher due to underreporting. Yet for many Canadian organizations, health and safety remains a compliance exercise: a checklist managed by a safety officer, reviewed at year-end, and rarely seen as a leadership priority.  

This thinking is costing lives and the fix starts at the top, according to Nayab Sultan, a Vancouver-based occupational health and safety advisor and researcher.  

“You can delegate responsibility, but you can't delegate liability,” says Sultan. “It's not just an issue of bringing safety onto the agenda once and then forgetting about it. It needs to remain on the agenda in each meeting, even if it's just for a short period of time, in order to keep the momentum." 

The compliance trap 

The gap between compliance and culture is wide — and it’s keeping many Canadian organizations stuck, particularly smaller businesses, says Paul Andre, Vice-President of Finance at Health and Safety Professionals Canada in Toronto. “Larger, more sophisticated organizations are looking to build those values into the organization and want to go beyond simply compliance,” says Andre. “They want that embedded into the culture so that they're not policing it because it’s something that’s valued across the organization.” 

Sultan points to a structural flaw that reinforces the compliance mindset: outsourcing. When safety is handed to a consultant or safety manager and treated as someone else's problem, leaders implicitly signal that it isn’t their concern. “Law and compliance only really set minimum thresholds,” he says. “Safety is seen as somebody else's responsibility rather than the organization or the leadership's responsibility.” 

Peter Smith, President of the Institute for Work and Health in Toronto, argues the economic case for safety is also being poorly made — and this is holding organizations back. He says leaders tend to measure only the direct costs of injury: retraining, wage replacement, and workers' compensation premiums, but they miss the broader picture. 

“What are the costs on retention of staff who weren't injured? What are the costs on loyalty to the organization? What are the costs of how valued our employees feel in terms of us taking care of them as a whole person when they come to the workplace?” says Smith. “These are real costs that most employers, if they're not already concerned about, ought to be concerned about, because they do help in terms of business sustainability and competitiveness.” 

Cascading accountability — and where it breaks down 

Research, including a 2016 study funded by the Saskatchewan Workers' Compensation Board, has found that C-suite leaders don’t directly reduce frontline injuries. Their influence is indirect — cascading through managers and supervisors before reaching workers. That finding has significant implications for how accountability is structured inside organizations, says Andre, who believes the most common safety failure for leaders is treating safety as separate from core performance management. 

“If you're looking for results, but yet you're not measuring or reinforcing it through the values of your organization, then it'll be tough to get to where you want to go,” he says. “Beyond building it into values would be building it into such things as performance reviews, goals, and expectations – if those things are built into the processes of an organization, it signals to everyone from the top down that it's important, they're measuring it, and they're holding people accountable for it.” 

Smith adds that what gets discussed at the leadership table is itself a signal – one that travels down through every tier of an organization. “If things like employee satisfaction, near misses, and number of injuries are not routinely discussed and routinely questioned at the senior leadership level, that says to both the people reporting to that senior management table and the people underneath them that these are not things the organization prioritizes or thinks are important.” 

Sultan warns HR professionals about the difficult position this dynamic can create. “HR professionals can get caught in that whirlwind where they understand the importance of seeing and saying and doing the right thing, but they also understand the delicate balancing act that’s needed to keep things moving,” he says. He adds that when corporate interests collide with safety obligations, it’s often the HR or health and safety director who feels the pressure most acutely. 

What visible safety leadership actually looks like 

Beyond posters and town halls, what does credible safety leadership look like in practice? All three experts agree on one answer: consistency of visible behaviour, day in and day out. 

“If a CEO walks out onto the floor without a piece of personal protective equipment, immediately that signals to everyone who sees that, that this organization doesn't value compliance,” says Andre. “It’s really about demonstrating behaviour out on the floor each and every time and being consistent with it — you can't be inconsistent with it or it's quickly going to get away on you.” 

That visibility and demonstrating the behaviors that are expected from frontline staff is critical for safety culture, according to Andre. “If you're not demonstrating those same behaviors, then you're really condoning behaviors that you'd prefer not to have within your organization,” he says. 

“You can have policies that are aligned with legislation, but when practice deviates from policies, that's when employees know what the real priorities are for the organization — that's when they know what's placed over their own wellbeing and health,” says Smith, who adds that employees pay more attention to what actually happens than to what the policy document says should happen. 

The assumptions leaders get wrong 

The most dangerous misconception, according to all three experts, is that appointing a safety professional discharges leadership’s obligation. “You can get into a thinking of, ‘That's why I have a safety manager in place – they manage safety, I don't manage safety,’” says Andre. “But it really belongs to everyone, and particularly the senior team.” 

Sultan points to a skills gap that rarely gets addressed: most C-suite leaders have never received formal health and safety literacy training – the kind that covers safety culture, leadership principles, and risk – and yet they are ultimately accountable for worker safety. He says that in the U.K., the Institution of Occupational Safety and Health (IOSH) has developed leadership-specific safety training for senior executives and he believes Canada needs a similar mandate. 

“They amplify the importance of planning for safety, culture, and understanding the principles of health leadership rather than just saying, ‘Okay, I've done a 30-minute online course and you're an expert now in managing health and safety as well as your organization,’” says Sultan. 

Senior leaders underestimate how much their own actions shape what happens on the shop floor, says Smith. “When employees feel valued, when they feel like their opinions are listened to and that directive has come from the top, that helps employees feel more attached to that workplace,” he says.  

Smith draws a pointed analogy for organizations where fatalities and critical incidents occur: “If a ship is out in the ocean and it gets hit by a storm and it just falls apart. that's the time where you see the fatality and critical incident,” he says. “But what we need is investment in building that ship and making sure it's resilient while it's in port, so that it can withstand the storm when it comes up.” 

This article is part of our Monthly Spotlight series, which in May focuses on workplace health and safety. Full coverage can be found here.