Canadian Government Executive - Volume 25 - Issue 04

12 / Canadian Government Executive // October/November 2019 This article aims to increase people’s understanding of how to optimize Ohs regulation EMPLOYMENT The Building Blocks of By Mark Rice Occupatio Health and Regulation T hroughout my professional career, I must have heard this more than a hundred times – some people saying they pre- fer prescriptive occupational health and safety (OHS) rules and others saying they prefer performance-based rules. In both cases, these were expressed as opinions rather than the outcome of a systematic analysis. This led me to believe that publishing an article on the building blocks of OHS regulation can be of value to increase people’s understanding of how to optimize OHS regulation. After all, using only one type of rule is like using same tool for every job, while in practice, different types of rules are important and all have their place. This article explains the difference between prescriptive and performance- based rules as well as other categories of OHS rules. It explains the advantages and disadvantages of each category of rule, in- cluding how and when to leverage each category to achieve a government’s policy objective of improving OHS performance at workplaces within its jurisdiction. The seven building blocks of OHS regulation Collectively, there are six categories of OHS rules plus administrative items, which rep- resent the seven building blocks of OHS regulation. To be most effective, OHS regu- lation should contain the optimum mix of these building blocks as this provides the benefits of all categories whilemitigating the disadvantages of using individual categories on their own. These building blocks are de- scribed below and summarized in Table 1. (Bluff & Gunningham, 2003; & Rice, 2017) 1 General duties. General duties set the foundation of OHS legislation. These provide work site parties such as employers and workers with a broad, conceptual understanding of what is ex- pected of them in the workplace. A disad- vantage of general duties is that it is usu- ally not clear when compliance has been achieved. 2 Process requirements. Often in OHS there is a desire to continually improve, and process requirements support continuous improvement. A dis- advantage of process requirements is they