Starting in December, Canadian police forces will receive new training to determine when a fatal workplace accident goes beyond a breach of occupational health and safety law and amounts to criminal negligence. The course was developed by occupational psychologist Robert Stewart of Calgary, Alberta, Consulting Director of the John Petropoulos Memorial Fund, and will be distributed through the Canadian Police Knowledge Network, including a French translation.
Protocols that were never built
The course is intended for police officers, Crown prosecutors and workplace safety regulators. According to Stewart, the Canadian parliament added the so-called Westray provisions to the Criminal Code in 2004, but police forces were never trained or funded to apply them. As a result, no protocols existed for assessing a fatal workplace accident under criminal law. Stewart points to a 2009 case in Calgary, in which a toddler died after a bundle of metal fell from a construction site. No criminal charges followed at the time, only fines under provincial law. Stewart later developed an investigation protocol with the Calgary Police Service for examining workplace deaths under criminal law; that work grew into the new course.
Three pillars for investigators
The training rests on three pillars: the legal elements of criminal negligence and organisational liability, workplace safety management systems as a benchmark for what is reasonable, and human and organisational factors such as corporate culture and decision-making under competing priorities. A legal review was carried out by Professor Jennifer Quaid of the University of Ottawa. According to Stewart, employers are often unaware of their criminal exposure, or sceptical about it. A passed audit, a low accident-claims record or a good contractor rating mean little in his view: investigators will look at how workplace safety programmes actually function, not just what is written on paper. He uses the image of the well-known attention experiment: “60 percent of people don’t see the gorilla” – officers who, at the scene of a workplace accident, look only for conventional violence often miss the signs of organisational negligence, he says, and pass the file on to a regulator that cannot launch a criminal prosecution.
Figures from the United Steelworkers union show how limited the law’s application has been so far: over twenty years, the Westray provisions led to 27 charges and 12 convictions. Toronto Police Service and Kingston Police Service have since made Westray training mandatory for their officers; seven recommendations for wider mandatory training are currently before the federal government.
Context
The Westray provisions trace back to the disaster at the Westray coal mine in Pictou County, Nova Scotia, Canada, where 26 miners were killed on 9 May 1992 in an explosion of methane gas and coal dust, despite earlier safety warnings from workers, the union and inspectors. In response, Bill C-45 came into force on 31 March 2004, an amendment to the Criminal Code that governs how organisations can be held criminally liable for the actions of their representatives, and that imposes a legal duty of care on anyone directing the work of others.
The Canadian example illustrates a problem seen across several legal systems: criminal law that can hold organisations liable for fatal workplace accidents often exists on paper long before it is applied in practice, because investigative agencies are not systematically equipped for it. That gap between legislation and prosecutorial capacity can also arise in other countries with specific laws on corporate criminal liability, such as the United Kingdom. Targeted training for the first investigators on the scene can therefore be just as decisive for the outcome of a case as the law itself.
Source: New Westray law course trains police to investigate workplace deaths, 21 October 2026
Additional research: Department of Justice Canada, Criminal liability for workplace deaths and injuries – Background on the Westray Law
