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Alberta Safety Program and COR Readiness Checklist

Use these questions as a practical self-review before a COR or SECOR certification discussion, COR audit, program rebuild, or readiness review with your Certifying Partner. The goal is to identify where written requirements, workplace practice, and evidence may not line up.

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This is a general readiness tool, not an official COR audit instrument or SECOR assessment instrument and not a substitute for advice from your Certifying Partner. Certification requirements, audit or assessment procedures, and employer obligations should always be confirmed against the current applicable standard and Alberta requirements.

How to Use This Checklist

For each question, ask for evidence rather than relying on a yes or no answer. Look for alignment between the written process and records, what supervisors and workers describe, and what can be observed in practice.

1

Leadership and Responsibilities

  • Are health and safety responsibilities clearly assigned to senior leaders, supervisors, workers, and contractors?
  • Can supervisors explain what they are expected to monitor, correct, document, and escalate?
  • Is there evidence that identified safety issues are followed through to completion?
2

Hazard Assessment and Controls

  • Are worksite hazards assessed before work begins, with affected workers involved as required by Alberta OHS legislation?
  • Are hazard assessments repeated when work processes or operations change and at reasonably practicable intervals?
  • Do the selected controls follow the required hierarchy and clearly explain how risk is being reduced?
3

Training and Competency

  • Can you show how required training is identified for each role?
  • Are training records current and easy to retrieve?
  • Where competency matters, do you verify more than attendance at a course?
4

Inspections and Preventive Activities

  • Are workplace, equipment, and process inspections completed at a frequency that matches your risks and applicable requirements?
  • Are deficiencies assigned, tracked, and closed rather than simply recorded?
  • Can you show recurring issues and what was done to address them?
5

Incident and Near-Miss Management

  • Do workers know what needs to be reported and how to report it?
  • Do investigations look beyond immediate worker actions to contributing conditions and system issues?
  • Are corrective actions specific, assigned, time-bound, and verified for completion?
6

Contractor Management

  • Are contractor requirements scaled to the type of work and risk involved?
  • Are the legal roles and responsibilities of employers, contracting employers, owners, prime contractors, and other applicable worksite parties understood?
  • Is there a consistent process for qualification, work planning, orientation, communication, oversight, and contractor performance follow-up?
7

Emergency Preparedness

  • Are emergency plans specific to your actual locations, operations, and credible scenarios?
  • Do workers know their roles and how to access emergency information?
  • Where drills, exercises, tests, or reviews are required or used, are they documented and used to improve emergency readiness?
8

Worker Participation and Communication

  • Do workers have practical ways to raise hazards, concerns, and improvement ideas?
  • Can you show that safety information is discussed, not just distributed?
  • Are required health and safety representatives or joint health and safety committees in place for the employer's workforce and worksite structure?
9

Documentation and Records

  • Are policies, procedures, forms, and records current and controlled?
  • Can important records be retrieved quickly without searching across multiple disconnected systems?
  • Do your documents and records support what supervisors and workers say happens and what can be observed in practice?
10

Program Review and Improvement

  • Do you periodically review whether the safety system is working as intended?
  • Are trends from incidents, inspections, hazard assessments, training, and corrective actions used to set priorities?
  • Can you show what has changed in the program because of identified gaps or performance data?

What to Look for After the Review

A useful readiness review should leave you with a short list of priorities rather than a larger binder. Focus first on gaps that affect higher-risk work, legal obligations, repeated incidents, weak supervisor processes, missing evidence, or areas likely to create inconsistent results across documentation, interviews, and workplace observations.

Need a Second Set of Eyes?

COR Value Safety can complete a focused readiness or gap review and help separate priority issues from lower-value paperwork cleanup.

See COR Audit Preparation

Evergreen guidance by Will McCartney, CRSP

COR Value Safety resources are reviewed as guidance changes and are written to connect regulatory or audit requirements with practical workplace implementation.

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