It’s big, bilingual and bustling. Quebec is Canada’s largest province geographically and is second only to Ontario in both population and economic influence. On the national occupational health and safety front, la belle province hovers around third place in terms of most lost-time injuries per 100,000 workers.

Manitoba and Saskatchewan have the highest workplace injury rates in Canada and have shared that dubious distinction for years. And those lost-time injury statistics do not include the agriculture sector, where 1,769 workers were killed between 1990 and 2005, according to the Canadian Agricultural Safety Association.

We know farms are dangerous — what’s happening in the rest of the industries in these two provinces?

Provinces on Canada's Atlantic Coast deal with the same challenges affecting workplaces throughout North America — they have an aging workforce and face a labour shortage now or in the near future. Like the rest of North America, Atlantic Canada’s industrial facilities have benefited from advances in automation and technology that have reduced hazards by automating dangerous tasks. More common in these resource-rich provinces, however, are the hazards unique to its fishing, aquaculture, forestry, agriculture and mining sectors.

The Vancouver Organizing Committee for the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games (VANOC) was a start-up employer in 2005. It would become a unique sort of employer, one that had a single purpose and would cease to exist once the job was done. It was in the process of forming a tight team of hard-working, keen people.

In those early days, VANOC’s then-small organizing committee of about 50 people became aware, through the Olympic grapevine, of occupational injuries and fatalities in previous Games in other countries.