My work in health and safety entails the anticipation, recognition, evaluation, control and prevention of hazards that arise from work or that could result in injury or occupational illnesses like cancer or asthma, for example.
We do everything from training to reviewing work procedures for different groups. We deal with employee work refusals and a lot of asbestos issues, because asbestos is a commonly used material in construction and a confirmed lung carcinogen.
I did a bachelor of science in chemistry from McGill University, followed by a master’s in professional practice and occupational health sciences, also from McGill. Then I received an environmental engineering certificate from Ryerson University’s G. Raymond Chang School of Continuing Education.
I took an environmental chemistry class in my last semester at McGill and met a professor who was an occupational hygienist. He was always talking about going up north and looking into why certain Inuit groups were having higher incidents of illnesses than people living in Toronto. He discovered that the pollution was coming from Europe through the winds and was being deposited in the ice. By eating the animals, the Inuit were causing the pollution to concentrate. I remember asking one day, “What do you do and how do I get into it?” And he told me about the Ryerson program.
At the time I was applying for jobs in Montreal, a lot of regulatory changes in Ontario were having an impact on the workplace, and as a result there was a need to hire more people to ensure compliance. There was far more opportunity here, and I ended up at the TTC.
My group is responsible not only for the occupational hygiene aspect, but also for the environment, so I was bridging a knowledge gap. The environment group is responsible for spills and waste. We want to make sure we know where all the chemical products are ending up. We also do environmental compliance assessments, so that essentially means looking at what each TTC property is emitting and asking, “What is our impact on the residents around us?”
The Ryerson program was an introduction to all these things. It gave me the background I needed to understand what those impacts were and how we apply that knowledge to our workplace.
I liked the environmental law course the most. We deal with the Occupational Health And Safety Act in our job daily, and I had no knowledge about the environmental regulations, so through the course, I dove more closely into that.
It’s a two-year program – you spend three semesters in class and your last semester doing a co-op term, so it’s not just theory and research.
I like the variety in my job and the fact that we help people live long and healthy lives so they can enjoy their retirement. We deal with everybody – we provide services to about 12,500 employees, from bus drivers to welders.
I actually helped develop the Gatekeeper program, a suicide prevention program at the TTC. Funnily enough, that ended up in my lap because, as a Franco-Ontarian who lived in Montreal, I was the only person at the TTC who could speak French. I was the only one who could communicate with Montreal Transit, which was the basis of our program. You won’t find that suicide prevention programs in any occupational hygiene books.
As members of the Occupational Hygiene Association of Ontario, we’ve been talking about how we can promote the field. There are programs at McGill, Ryerson and U of T, but they’re not really well known. Health and safety is not something that’s prominent. It’s not 100 years old it’s 30 years old. People think of it as an afterthought rather than something they should be doing proactively. The field is growing, and people are hearing about it now more and more.
