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ORFA ALERT

Ontario's Seventh Working for Workers Act Shifts OHSA Responsibility and Accountability Landscape

June 3, 2025

ANNOUNCEMENT

Ontario's health and safety regulatory culture continues to evolve. The Working for Workers Seven Act 2025 is the most recent investment by the province to raise the minimum expectations for worker safety. The Act and a related set of regulatory proposals and proposed policy actions will focus on:

    • Creating safer workplaces for stronger workers
    • Fighting worker abuse
    • Protect Ontario workers

The Act has many new directives however, of notable interest are the administrative penalties that can be served on "persons" by Ministry of Labour, Immigration, Training, Skills and Development (MLITSD) inspectors. Who exactly that may be will be more clearly defined in time but it might be expected that under Canadian law "persons" would include Employers. It's described as an, "Administrative Monetary Penalty (AMP) regime under the Occupational Health and Safety Act (OHSA)".

Administrative Penalty

69.1 (1) If an inspector finds that a person has contravened or failed to comply with a provision of this Act or the regulations, an order or requirement of an inspector or Director, or an order of the Minister, the inspector may impose an administrative penalty against the person in accordance with this section and the regulations by issuing and serving a notice of administrative penalty on the person. Unlike fines or prosecutions under OHSA which are processed through the courts (with fines collected by municipalities), administrative penalties are paid directly to the Minister of Finance. Review of penalties issued will be made by a "prescribed person or entity". There will be a regulation, "governing administrative penalties and all matters necessary and incidental to the administration of a system of administrative penalties under this Act.". [More]

In addition, the MLITSD also recently added "Compliance Commitments" to its enforcement tool kit. [More] 

Following modern regulator principles, MLITSD is introducing compliance commitments to the continuum of options that inspectors have when enforcing the Occupational Health and Safety Act (OHSA) and its regulations. Compliance commitments are commitments made by workplace parties to an inspector to correct specific administrative or low-risk contraventions of the Ontario Health and Safety Act (OHSA) and its regulations. For these types of contraventions, inspectors may choose to issue a compliance commitment instead of issuing an order. Various factors will affect the use of compliance commitments, including inspector discretion, the history of the contravener and case specific factors. So, inspectors could potentially use orders, fines, administrative penalties, compliance commitments and recommend prosecution to enforce OHSA and regulations.

The ORFA continues to monitor these changes and will update members as information is received.

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