NORCAT mine training is a seal of approval.

For mining contractors, being a card-carrying trainee of NORCAT is a widely recognized seal of approval in the Canadian mining industry.

Before any outside worker steps onto a Sudbury mine or mill property, they must flash their NORCAT-issued photo identification card as proof they've been properly trained to work safely.

The card is visual assurance that the worker has had the required occupational health and safety training by completing the Contractor Orientation program offered by the Northern Centre for Advanced Technology (NORCAT).

By its very nature, surface and underground mining is hazardous work, especially for contractors says, Norm Lavallee, chief operating officer and business manager for the Sudbury-based advanced technology centre.

"Contractors face a difficult workplace on each project."

Mining contractors have been a commonplace in the industry for decades. But as major miners like Inco and Falconbridge have reduced their workforce to focus on core production business, contractors' roles have expanded beyond just sinking shafts to include a variety of construction and other infrastructure work.

After a construction fatality at a Sudbury smelter, a precedent-setting court case in the mid-1990s placed the onus of responsibility, and liability, on the large miners to ensure that outside workers had received the proper training and equipment to work on-site.

Inco and Falconbridge decided to delegate all their contractor-orientation training and safety record keeping over to Cambrian College and their NORCAT centre.

The result has been a computer-based orientation program used by more than 2,000 Canadian mining contractors with more than 100 courses available. NORCAT today has over 40,000 workers in a database.

NORCAT instructors are only too familiar with the half-margins of safety involved in underground deep mining.

The centre is well known for its Onaping underground test mine, where some of the world's best hard rock miners and diamond drillers are trained. But today their Internet-based health and safety training generates a slightly bigger chunk of their $5 million in annual revenues than the miner common core program.

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Much of the money from those courses is poured back into their advanced industrial prototype development.

In the Sudbury mining camp, Lavallee says all external workers, "even the pizza delivery guys," must receive some form of training on site etiquette. That includes what vehicles have the right-of-way, the required behaviour around rail lines and the limitations of cell phones and two-way radios.

The contractor programming is guided on a combination of what's provincially legislated under Ontario's Occupational Health and Safety Act, along with widely-accepted Canadian mining industry best practices and individual companies' house rules.

Besides WHMIS, contractors also take training modules for surface and underground orientation, depending upon what areas they access.

Recognizing what hazards may exist before a contractor steps onto the site is what factored into the creation of last year's online fall arrest protection course and the just recently launched Internet version of Confined Space Awareness.

Lavallee says contractors must have the presence of mind to ask where their anchor points are to hook up their lanyard, but it's still the responsibility of the on-site supervisor to point out the risks and hazards.

"Falls happen because people don't anchor themselves. If they've done everything right, it should not be a source of injury."

All of their online courses are supported by CDs, with testing conducted at several NORCAT-hosted locations around Ontario including Sudbury, Timmins, Sault Ste. Marie, Haileybury, New Liskeard, Marathon, Wawa, Thunder Bay and Brockville.

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Lavallee says previously, when large mining companies conducted their own in-house contractor training and record keeping, there were shortcomings.

"The difficulty with that (was that) it was a paper-based system," says Lavallee. "We shifted over to a computer-based system with all the advantages of adult-learning and record keeping."

He finds most companies and organizations have great difficulty keeping track of employee health and safety training records, which he calls a "critical loophole," should they be challenged in court.

Should an industrial accident occur, companies must provide Ministry of Labour investigators with sure evidence of having fulfilled their training responsibility.

"The hardest part to defend in court becomes what training was provided to those individuals," says Lavallee. "Unless you can defend on your training side, you're automatically going to pay a fine."

Since launching its training and record keeping programs, NORCAT has successfully defended its corporate clients on the only two occasions they were challenged.

Their occupational health and safety standards have been so widely accepted internationally that Canadian mining contractors and suppliers tried through NORCAT have easy access to most mining jurisdictions.

Jon Baird, director of the Canadian Association of Mining Equipment and Service for Export (CAMESE), says there's no doubt mine that the safety programs offered by NORCAT are universally accepted worldwide and "set the example for many other countries" to follow.

Years before, Baird says, there were major problems in Canadian mines before the industry gained a better understanding of rock mechanics that dramatically improved safety records. Today, safety training has contributed to better productivity, an improved environmental record "and foreigners want it.

"It's now a standard for the world," says Baird in mentioning the safety training and procedures that saved the lives of 72 potash miners in Saskatchewan last January from an underground fire.

This spring, NORCAT was preparing to greet a Chinese delegation from the coal and hard rock mining sector looking to adopt Canadian training methods.

Lavallee says one advantage of computer-based training versus an in-class instructor is each person experiences the exact same training. An individual's level of comprehension of a course can easily be determined, as well as how they answered the questions and how many times they repeated the course. Random questions are automatically inserted, "so two people side-by-side will never answer the same test."

NORCAT's record keeping business has morphed into a human resources function they call their Integrated Staff Management System, allowing corporate clients to keep track of all their required safety training by subscribing online.

A prospective employer can also go online to confirm a contractor's safety qualifications before admitting a worker on site.

"Our image is to ensure that people work safely," says Lavallee.

He says he believes they can nationally market their data management system to small and mid-sized companies and government ministries in the 50- to 1,000-employee range.

Jim Allan, a Burlington-based health and safety consultant, is a huge supporter of online training.

"I find with distance, with cost-pressures driving the situation, most people can't afford to take the training, with travel and hotels, so they don't take it."

Similar to the plethora of distance education correspondence courses available, "Online training is a tremendous tool" allowing people to study in their own time, at their own pace, and at a smaller cost.

The only drawback with computer-based courses is the lack of class interaction. Allan says a well-designed online course should have a built-in component to talk with instructors, electronically or by phone.

In cases of fall protection or working on confined spaces, Allan says there must be a demonstrated practical element taught in these areas, according to Ministry of Labour regulations.

"You really can't consider a person as trained unless they've actually been able to do it."

With federal law C-45, which amends the Criminal Code to increase the potential for criminal liability for workplace injuries or fatalities, now in effect, companies now more than ever are being held more accountable for safety oversights.

www.norcattraining.com

By IAN ROSS 

Northern Ontario Business