Name: Ben Clark Student #: 100861523 Section: A

Lecture #: 14 Lecture title: Engineers and Safety

As a professional engineer, you are required under the legislation to safeguard life in your
professional activities. Ontario legislation 941 of the Professional Engineer’s Act covers the
various duties under its section 77 for the code of ethics and talks about fairness and loyalty,
public needs, high ideals, and the knowledge of the development in professional engineering in
what you are doing and your competency. Misconduct includes breeches to the act and
regulations and taking on work that is not within your scope of competency. There is on average
2.6 workplace deaths every day in Ontario. Every year the Ontario economy experiences over six
billion dollars in lost time injuries.
The Occupational Health and Safety Act talks about your rights and responsibilities as a
worker and the responsibilities of your supervisor and employer. It talks about the role of the
government in enforcing the legislation and specific regulations for certain workplaces. The
internal responsibility system lays out where everything is and talks about a joint health and
safety committee or health and safety representatives. It is composed of worker members on the
committee as well as management. If you have designated substances within the workplace, then
the designated substances regulations apply and therefore you have to have a committee. The
ministry of labour is the enforcement body for the Occupational Health and Safety Act and has
significant power in the workplace. There are significant penalties when the health and safety
laws are broken which are an individual penalty of up to 25 000 $ for every charge laid and a
corporation can be fined up to 500 000 $ for every violation of convicted.
A hazard can be defined as anything that causes or may cause you to be hurt or ill.
Immediate hazards such as burns or bruises are called acute while others that take more time to
develop such as repetitive strain or hearing loss are called chronic. Latent exposures are similar
to chronic but you won’t see a response for as much as 20 or more years. There are physical
hazards, biological hazards, chemical hazards, and ergonomic hazards.
Under the Occupational Health and Safety Act, it outlines the conditions of a pre-start
health and safety review which is to recognize any hazards that might be present in the tasks that
are involved, as well as then to evaluate and provide recommendations and implement potential
control solutions.