Understanding Employer Duties Under OHSA: A Plain-Language Overview

What the OHSA Requires of Employers

The Ontario Occupational Health and Safety Act places a set of specific, non-delegable duties directly on employers. These duties cannot be contracted away, transferred to workers, or satisfied by delegating them to a supervisor. Sections 25 and 26 of the OHSA are the primary source of employer obligations, and they cover both general duties and specific requirements that apply regardless of the size or nature of the business. Understanding these sections is the starting point for any employer who wants to build a legally compliant and genuinely effective safety program.

Core Duties Under Section 25

Section 25(1) sets out the employer's primary duties. Employers must:

• Ensure that equipment, materials, and protective devices are provided, maintained in good condition, and used as prescribed — s.25(1)(a) and (b)
• Ensure that the measures and procedures prescribed by regulations are carried out in the workplace — s.25(1)(c)
• Ensure that every piece of equipment, material, or protective device is maintained in good working condition — s.25(1)(b)
• Ensure that a worker is not required or permitted to work in unsafe conditions — s.25(2)(h)
• Acquaint workers with any hazard in the work and in the handling, storage, use, disposal, and transport of any article or substance — s.25(2)(a)
• Provide workers with information and instruction on hazards as required — s.25(2)(a)
• Take every precaution reasonable in the circumstances for the protection of a worker — s.25(2)(h), the general duty clause

Core Duties Under Section 26

Section 26 imposes additional specific duties on employers, including the obligation to:

• Post a copy of the OHSA in the workplace in a location where it is likely to come to workers' attention — s.26(1)(a)
• Post a copy of the occupational health and safety policy in the workplace — s.26(1)(b)
• Prepare and review (as often as necessary) an occupational health and safety policy and develop and maintain a program to implement it — s.25(2)(j)
• Ensure that the health and safety representative or JHSC is informed of any accident, critical injury, or occurrence that required a worker to be given first aid — s.26(1)(c)
• Provide a copy of any report made under the OHSA to the JHSC or health and safety representative — s.26(1)(f)

The Internal Responsibility System

The OHSA is built on a foundational concept called the Internal Responsibility System (IRS). The IRS holds that everyone in a workplace — workers, supervisors, and employers — shares responsibility for occupational health and safety, and that the people closest to the hazards are best positioned to identify and address them. Under the IRS, safety is not the sole responsibility of a safety officer or the JHSC — it is a shared, distributed function that runs through every level of the organization. The JHSC exists to support and strengthen the IRS by providing a formal mechanism for worker and management collaboration on safety issues, not to replace the employer's primary obligation.

Due Diligence as a Legal Defence

If an employer is charged with a violation of the OHSA, they may raise a defence of due diligence under s.66(3)(b). Due diligence means that the employer took every reasonable precaution in the circumstances to prevent the violation from occurring. Courts apply an objective standard: what would a reasonable employer in the same circumstances have known and done? Demonstrating due diligence requires evidence of actual steps taken — hazard assessments, worker training, documented inspections, corrective action tracking, and supervisor oversight. A safety manual that is never used, or a training record that cannot be verified, provides little protection if something goes wrong.

Practical Steps to Demonstrate Compliance

Compliance with the OHSA is not a one-time event — it is an ongoing process of identifying hazards, implementing controls, training workers, and verifying that controls are working:

• Maintain a written occupational health and safety policy and program, reviewed annually at minimum, as required under s.25(2)(j)
• Ensure all workers receive orientation and task-specific training before performing potentially hazardous work — training must be documented
• Conduct regular workplace inspections and act on findings within required timelines
• Establish and support a functioning JHSC or health and safety representative as required by the size and nature of the workplace
• Investigate all incidents, near-misses, and work refusals, and implement corrective actions that address root cause
• Document everything — hazard assessments, training, inspections, corrective actions, and JHSC minutes form the documentary record that demonstrates due diligence