The newest inductees were welcomed into the League of Champions at the COR (Certificate of Recognition) Open House and Leadership Conference held March 2 by the Ontario General Contractors Association (OGCA) and the Infrastructure Health and Safety Association (IHSA).
AGF Rebar, Colliers Project Leaders, the Corporation of the Town of Milton and the Ontario Electrical Construction Company Ltd. were recognized with a Jersey of Courage that they are encouraged to get signed by members of their organization.
The League of Champions is an initiative that exists to help companies build a safety culture and be recognized for their leadership, states a release issued by the OGCA.
The league is a joint program between the OGCA and MySafeWork and is intended to promote safety in construction and all industries. Rob Ellis of MySafeWork was on hand to help present the jerseys.
This year’s Doug Chalmers Award was also presented at the event to Dan Fleming, corporate director of occupational health and safety training at EllisDon.
The award is given out annually to a group, member or an association that has made significant contributions to the advancement of occupational health and safety in the construction industry.
Chalmers, a former chair and board member of the OGCA, was described as one of the “most recognizable champions of safety that we have had in the OGCA,” commented Clive Thurston, president of the OGCA, who presented the award.
Fleming is part of the OGCA Safety Committee and has been working on the Safety Pass Committee. The pass, an idea Fleming pitched to the OGCA, is an online health and safety orientation program that will provide consistent training for all general contractors, subtrades, associations and industry. He has also been a part of the IHSA Provincial Labour Management Committee and the IHSA Carpenter Trade Committee.
Fleming said he has known and worked with Chalmers for the past 20 years and explained he was instrumental in creating a strong safety culture in Sarnia, Ont.
“Partly due to Doug’s influence, Sarnia is known as the capital of health and safety culture in the province,” said Fleming.
He said the key is collaboration and innovation, which will lead to the betterment of safety in companies, the industry and the province as a whole.
“The more we work together and share our best practices the more consistent our safety programs will be, which will lead to overall improvement of safe work practices on all of our projects,” he explained.
When Fleming started at EllisDon five years ago, he said, the occupational health and safety team needed to determine what to do to get the program to the next level.
“Although we have a great program and safety record we realized we needed to direct our support to subcontractors,” said Fleming.
“We did a safety culture survey to get feedback on our gaps and created a Next Level initiative and team. We launched the program in partnership with Rob Ellis and brought it across the country.”
This led to collaboration with safety professionals at the League of Champions events, he said.
“We agreed we could do more if we worked together and shared our resources. From there we created the safety committee to look into the development of consistent training requirements, subcontractor guidelines and best practices.”
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