Inspectors found small businesses throughout Wellington-Dufferin-Guelph to be largely compliant with pandemic-related health and safety measures during an inspection blitz last week.
Officers from the Ministry of Labour, Training and Skills Development were joined by local public health officials and bylaw officers in visiting 83 businesses between March 11 and 19, issuing five tickets.
That’s a 72 per cent compliance rate.
“All businesses need to keep doing more to protect their workers and their customers,” said Monte McNaughton, Minister of Labour, Training and Skills Development. “In Wellington-Dufferin-Guelph we’ve seen a substantial improvement.”
During a similar local blitz in February, targeting big box and large grocery stores, inspectors found 45 per cent compliance with health and safety regulations.
Jumping from 45 per cent to 72 is “certainly moving in the right direction,” the minister said.
The “most common” violations found during the latest blitz were for safety plan, screening and personal protective equipment requirements.
This round of inspections focused on businesses with 25 or fewer employees.
“We know that these small businesses don’t have big HR departments, so we wanted to provide a customer service approach to health and safety,” McNaughton said of what inspired the focus on small businesses. “We’ve been running webinars, sending inspectors out to educate small businesses during the first phase of the blitz and setting up a toll-free number that if any of them have questions on health and safety, that we have answers for them.”
Of the 34 small businesses visited in Guelph, 76 per cent were compliant with COVID-19 health and safety measures, with two tickets issued.
The most common violations noted by inspectors related to safety plan, screening and capacity limit requirements.
“We can’t visit every single business in the province, but we certainly work really closely with public health units to determine which businesses and which sectors to go into,” McNaughton added, pointing to the warehouse and distribution centre blitz in Peel region earlier in the year.
“With the small business blitz, we’ve heard from local public health units that this should be a priority. With the Wellington-Dufferin-Guelph one, we worked with them to make this one of our first stops during the province-wide small business campaign.”
