Abstract
Employees working with hazardous materials need to be well-informed about the handling and safety procedures associated with the products they come into contact with on a daily basis. In Canada, the national hazard communication standard is the Workplace Hazardous Materials Information System (WHMIS) (1). Health Canada’s regulatory enforcement unit for hazardous workplace materials generated data, conducted analyses, and created a report that summarizes the compliance and enforcement activities under the Hazardous Products Act (HPA) and the Hazardous Products Regulations (HPR) that took place throughout the 2019-20 fiscal year. Some of the information included are the number of inspections undertaken by each jurisdiction broken down by type (regular inspection, compliance verification, and focused inspection), the number of non-compliances received throughout the inspections, and the breakdown of non-compliances by section of the safety data sheet (SDS) and label information required under the HPR. 76 of the 80 SDSs (95%) and 66 of the 70 labels (94%) had at least one observation of non-compliance with the HPA and/or the HPR reviewed. When comparing results from this inspection project to those of previous years’, the most common areas of non-compliance are largely in Sections 1, 2, and 3 of the SDS, with missing precautionary statements in Section 2 being the observation of non-compliance to affect the greatest numbers SDSs for all three inspection years. These results will be further compared and may be used to inform future compliance and enforcement activities, such as compliance promotion efforts to target common areas of non-compliances and inspection project scope.