There’s a growing body of evidence demonstrating that an organization’s “safety culture” has an impact on its safety performance. But what gets less attention is how a company’s safety culture affects its liability for safety offences. In fact, there does appear to be a relationship between safety culture and OHS liability. Courts may consider the absence or presence of a safety culture a factor in deciding whether to hold a company liable for a safety offence. Likewise, a company’s safety culture may affect how harsh a sentence it receives for any safety violations for which it’s found liable. Here are two cases that illustrate how a company’s safety culture—or lack of one—can impact its sentence for a safety offence.
FACTS
A worker at a power plant was assigned to man a conveyor belt system used to move coal into hoppers. The worker moved the conveyor system to the empty hopper and discharged the coal into that hopper through 14” wide slots in the floor. The worker’s hard hat was found near a slot. Almost 10 hours later, co-workers found his body buried in coal in the hopper below the slot. The power company pleaded guilty to failing to provide fall protection in violation of the Nova Scotia Fall Protection and Scaffolding Regulations.
DECISION
The Nova Scotia Provincial Court imposed a fairly light sentence on the company—a $25,000 fine and $15,000 for education sessions through the Nova Scotia Construction Safety Association.
EXPLANATION
The court said there was no suggestion that the company was a “bad corporate citizen” or that it cut corners to increase profits. In fact, the court praised the company’s robust safety culture, which included:
The safety offence occurred because of a “misapprehension” on the company’s part—that is, it didn’t think the floor slots posed a hazard to workers because of their narrowness, said the court. So given all relevant factors, the primary goal of sentencing the company, said the court, was general deterrence. In other words, the sentence should convey the message that mistaken assumptions about safety can have dangerous consequences.
R. v. Nova Scotia Power Inc., [2008] NSPC 72 (CanLII), Dec. 1, 2008
FACTS
Two workers were assigned to sort a pile of scrap aluminum. Because the pile was large, there wasn’t enough room in the area where it had been dumped to sort it. So the foreman told the workers to sort the scrap in a location close to stacked bales of scrap wire. The stack was four bales high and about three metres in height. While the workers were sorting the aluminum on the ground, a large bale weighing 2,080 pounds fell on one of them. Co-workers couldn’t remove the bale by hand or forklift. The worker died from his injuries. The company was convicted of a safety offence and fined $100,000—2/3 of the maximum penalty for the violation. It appealed its sentence as too harsh.
DECISION
The Alberta Court of Queen’s Bench upheld the company’s sentence.
EXPLANATION
The company argued that the fine was too high, noting that it was a first offender and didn’t have “malevolent corporate practices or a bad corporate culture.” But the trial court had faulted the company for providing no signs, barriers or supervision even though it knew that stacking bales was dangerous. It also criticized the company’s corporate culture of delegating safety to workers, which it didn’t believe should be encouraged. The appeals court noted, “The modern corporate attitude should be oriented to safety first.” The company also noted that it had spent $15,000 to reconfigure the site to prevent a similar incident. The appeals court was unmoved. Post-incident actions can lead to a lower fine if the judge thinks they’re a sign that the company’s culture is safety-sensitive. But the trial court in this case had taken the company’s reconfiguration efforts into account and didn’t find them significant enough to warrant a lower fine.
R. v. General Scrap Iron & Metals Ltd., [2003] ABQB 22 (CanLII), Jan. 9, 2003
Loading ...
