User Notice: Cookies

This website uses cookies to enhance your user experience and improve our website performance.

By continuing on this website, you consent to the use of the cookies.

For more information on the cookies we use and how to manage your cookies settings, please read this Privacy Statement

Health and Safety

IO is committed to making health and safety a priority in everything we do. We place a high value on the well-being of our employees, clients, industry partners and the general public.

We are placing an increasing emphasis on safety by enhancing the performance requirements on our large construction projects. We are also taking steps to ensure our service providers meet the highest possible safety standards in their day-to-day management of the government’s real estate portfolio and their delivery of the construction projects that support those facilities.

IO was proud to be the first public agency to support the League of Champions, an initiative spearheaded in 2016 by the Ontario General Contractors’ Association (OGCA) and MySafeWork. The League strives to be a catalyst for safety improvement in individual companies and the construction industry as a whole.

Other IO health and safety initiatives include:

  • Certificate of Recognition (COR) for Larger Construction Projects   
    The COR occupational health and safety accreditation program is now a requirement on IO’s public-private partnership (P3) and Direct Delivery projects.
  • P3 Project Requirements   
    In addition to COR and the industry standard safety documentation such as CAD7 and WSIR, as part of the prequalification process bidders are required to submit the qualifications of their proposed safety coordinator. As well, we have developed a template approach to preparing and monitoring the site-specific safety plan and the site-specific independent inspection regime.
  • Healthy Government Buildings   
    We take pride in using diligence and collaboration to oversee our property management and project management service providers for the thousands of facilities in the provincial portfolio. Tools include annual audits, recurring review meetings and quarterly reporting specific to health and safety.
  • Safety First for IO Employees   
    Health and safety begins in your own workspace. We have a framework in place to guide internal efforts around compliance and awareness. We review our policies continuously to ensure we are current with industry standards. For example, we now ask our employees to submit a site visit form to their manager before visiting a construction site. This starts a conversation regarding the health and safety implications of the visit. We provide staff training about site safety in a classroom setting and have procedures in place to ensure employees are accounted for at all times when visiting project sites.