61 days from the entry into force of some provisions of art Take action to modernize the occupational health and safety system (LMRSST), the CNESST is not ready, denounces employers, trade unions and health and safety companies in the construction sector.
Posted at 5:00
To comply with this new law which modifies art Occupational health and safety law (OHSA), new health and safety representatives must be on construction sites on 1is January. However, industry practitioners say they do not know how these representatives will be trained, because the Commission for Equity Standards in Occupational Health and Safety (CNESST) has not yet determined the content of the training, nor who will hold it. These new health and safety representatives have not yet been selected.
“If the CNESST is not ready, let it have the wisdom to say so and ask the government for more time,” said Éric Côté, CEO of the Corporation of General Contractors of Quebec, in an interview.
The government must urgently open the law and change this element or make a special ministerial order to say, we are not ready, we have been ambitious, we do things as they should.
Éric Côté, CEO of the Corporation of General Contractors of Quebec
Éric Côté argues that the industry doesn’t need two years, but just a few more months to put everything right.
Joint letter
All employers’ associations state that the CNESST lacks rigor and transparency in this file. In a letter sent to the Minister of Labor as well as in a joint declaration addressed to the CNESST, of which The print having obtained a copy, the associations denounced the “great variation in the decisions of the CNESST” which “returned several times to its own decisions as to the broadcaster of the training”.
“All the wasted time forces the advisory board to do things quickly, and this does not seem to us to be the right way,” write the employers’ associations.
“The disaster, we feel it coming, says Guillaume Houle, spokesman for the Association de la construction du Québec (ACQ), in an interview. Because the people who will be appointed in January 2023 do not have any training obligations. There is an inconsistency in the law. It requires training only for January 2024 ”.
Point one of their mandate is the inspection of workplaces. We will send people to inspect workplaces without any training.
Guillaume Houle, spokesperson for the Association de la construction du Québec, regarding the representatives of health and safety
The LMRSST provides for a part-time health and safety representative (RSS) at sites with 10 to 99 workers, while it provides one or more full-time representatives at sites with 100 or more workers or whose labor costs in loco exceeds 12 million dollars.
“On the eve of the entry into force of the provisions of the law, too many elements remain to be defined to ensure full application by the entrepreneurs of the mechanisms provided for by the law. We risk creating confusion, unduly slowing down work, poisoning the working climate and putting the safety of our workers at Quebec construction sites at risk ”, denounce the associations in the joint statement presented to the CNESST on 20 October.
“We knew from last year that RSS needed to be formed and it wasn’t done. We could have spent the year training these people. There are already programs that exist, can we draw inspiration from them and bring them up to 2022? asks Éric Côté, who stresses that contractors are currently submitting “somewhat blind” offers because they cannot predict the costs and terms and conditions that will be attached to health and safety representatives. .
800 representatives to be trained
François Simard, managing director of Équipe SST, a company specializing in the management of health and safety on construction sites, specifies that the same number of health and safety representatives as the health and safety coordinators, appointed by prime contractors on construction sites with 100 o more workers or where the cost of on-site labor exceeds $ 12 million.
“We have 800 coordinators, so in theory we should also have 800 health and safety representatives,” he says. We won’t have time to train everyone. ”
PHOTO HUGO-SÉBASTIEN AUBERT, THE PRESS
By law, new health and safety representatives must be present on construction sites from 1is January.
François Simard is also concerned that the training of health and safety coordinators will stop in January 2023 and will not resume until the fall of 2023, because the new content has not yet been approved by the CNESST. “We desperately need this training because there is a lack of coordinators everywhere,” he notes.
Although the CNESST is not ready, FTQ-Construction says it will be ready in January 2023 and will support its members who request it.
“For part-time RSS, due to lack of training, we can support them, give them advice or support them in their efforts,” said Simon Lévesque, head of health and safety at FTQ-Construction, who also sits on the phone. to the board of directors of the CNESST. “For the full-time one, we had our own content which we gave to reps on major construction sites with 500 or more workers. So we will continue to do so. “
The union wants to be able to continue to train its members, the new RSS, with the new content approved by the CNESST, while the employers’ associations would like neutral trainers.
The print asked the CNESST if the new health and safety representatives, who will take office in January 2023, are ready and if they will be trained by the Ahuntsic Collège as well as the health and safety coordinators.
“The CNESST is currently analyzing the applications submitted by The print and will forward the requested details in the next few days, “he wrote via email.
The CNESST adds that it claims to understand the problems generated by these changes in the workplace and will do everything possible to enforce the legislative changes and support employers and workers in the implementation of this law.
