About Us

CONTENTS in this section

Passport to Safety's Vision

A country where workplace safety is assured and Canadians return home healthy at the end of each day.

Passport to Safety Is:

a unique, not-for-profit, cross-Canada catalyst for change intended to help eliminate needless injuries and preventable deaths of Canadians.

Passport to Safety supports the vision that young Canadians have the power to influence the evolution of safe workplace cultures.

People challenge a Passport to Safety "test", based on learning outcomes developed by health and safety curriculum experts from most provincial and territorial jurisdictions across Canada.

Successful participants are awarded a "transcript" that can be attached to resumés to demonstrate their basic awareness of health and safety. This basic level of awareness becomes a foundation on which to build all the other essentials required to be safer and healthier workers.

Participants are then encouraged to add more credits for other courses that help people manage risk, such as first-aid, babysitting, water-safety, snowmobile safety and literally hundreds of others. This supports and adds value to their efforts to find a job.

Passport to Safety is also designed to encourage and generate discussion about health and safety education and increase participation in training across Canada.

What Passport to Safety Is Not:

Passport to Safety, like the general workplace awareness and safety education offered in school systems, does not constitute job-specific health and safety training that is required of all employers under provincial, territorial or national jurisdiction. Passport to Safety is not a substitute for compliance.

All employers are still required to provide the training necessary for each worker to be able to perform their job safely. Young workers and new workers of all ages especially require appropriate levels of training and supervision.

Passport to Safety is also not intended to substitute or replace the many courses and programs offered by education systems, not-for-profit and other training providers across Canada.

Rather, it is specifically designed to reinforce these programs by providing nationally recognized, tangible credit to people for taking and passing them.

Governance:

Passport to Safety, through its management, currently reports to the Board of Directors of the Safe Communities Foundation of Canada (SCF), which initially supported and seed-funded the development of a national Passport to Safety program, with the intent of benefiting all stakeholders in health and safety in Canada.

All Passport to Safety revenues are committed to supporting the cause of injury prevention in Canada, which is also consistent with the objectives of Safe Communities Foundation.

Passport to Safety reports on its finances and manages its own staff and supplier relationships in a "stand-alone" manner, so as to provide clarity and transparency to its specific operations. The finance committee and the full Board of Directors of the Foundation apply the same rigor to Passport to Safety as to the other activities of the Foundation. This transparency not only ensures accuracy, clarity and accountability for Passport to Safety operations and finances today, but also creates an openness and flexibility that will allow it to evolve any structural and governance framework for Passport to Safety in the best interests of all stakeholders in the future.

The Safe Communities Foundation itself was incorporated as a registered charity 1996. SCF has been facilitating successful grassroots injury prevention programs. Its Board of Directors is charged with ensuring that appropriate standards of integrity, governance and fiduciary accountability are met. This accountability is necessary to ensure to all partners that such standards do indeed exist and that appropriate procedures are followed.

For more information on SCF, its governance and its activities, visit http://www.safecommunities.ca.

The Executive Director of Passport to Safety, Paul Kells, is also the SCF President. He reports on Passport to Safety matters to the Board of Directors of the Foundation. Passport to Safety enjoys close links with the staff and communities of the SCF network, but does not restrict its community links to members of the SCF network of communities.

The Origins of Passport to Safety:

The original "idea" is believed to have originated in Alberta, but was initially presented to and acted upon in the Peterborough area of Ontario. The Kawartha Manufacturer's Association began work on the concept, but soon turned it over to the local Safe Community coalition in Peterborough because of its broader reach throughout the entire community. Thus, the "Peterborough Pilot" was born.

As with any pilot, many lessons were ultimately learned. The most positive lesson of all was that the core concept of a "risk management" or "safety" transcript for young people was brilliant.

The Peterborough organizers, at the peak of its activity, reported memberships of more than 200 employers and over ten thousand young Passport to Safety members over a five year period, all in a community with a population of only approximately 65,000 people.

Still, there were also some very hard lessons that ultimately served as defining factors in the development of the national model. For example, in its original format the local coalition organized and paid expenses to over 20 volunteers to deliver training into the schools. For the coalition, this meant a heavy scheduling load, that all original and update records had to be entered manually into a database, that Passports to Safety were printed on paper and that additional credits had to be entered as stamps.

The costs, huge effort and thousands of person hours involved made the project extremely difficult to sustain in the long run. From these lessons, Passport to Safety determined that reducing costs, creating efficiencies, and generating self-sustaining revenues were crucial.

In addition, advisors to Passport to Safety from across Canada (see next section) concluded that a "test" mechanism, with underlying information to guide young people through it, should be used to support other existing training efforts in Canada, rather than replacing them with its own "awareness" program.

This meant that any young person with training from any source, such as school or outside school programs, job experience, self-study or any other method, would use Passport to Safety as a tool to validate and reinforce a basic minimum standard.

Finally, these students would then receive credit for it from employers, anywhere in Canada they might travel to, through a web based transcript system.

Finally, Passport to Safety owes its existence to, wishes to acknowledge and also pay tribute to the pioneers of the concept in Peterborough. Without the examples and lessons learned from the experiences of those involved, many of whom made considerable sacrifices, we would not be offering this wonderful tool to millions of Canadians, Australians, and New Zealanders today, and eventually, to young people all around the world.

How Passport to Safety Evolved Into A "National" Model:

In its own evaluation of the project in 2001, the Peterborough local committee urged that a national organization step forward and assume responsibility for pursuing youth awareness through Passport to Safety across Canada. It urged that the Safe Community Foundation be that organization.

In May, 2002, the Founder and Vice Chair of SCF, Paul Kells, asked the Board for its support in this effort and committed to spending his time fully engaged in this and other related activities. The Board agreed and provided seed capital and additional expense money to begin the effort.

Others soon joined the effort, with both financial and human energy contributions, including the Workplace Safety and Insurance Board of Ontario and Hydro One.

Paul Kells then approached 40 citizens across Canada to assist in guiding the philosophy, design and content of Passport to Safety, as members of a volunteer Standards and Advisory Board see "Who's Involved" on this website for more details).

These dedicated individuals included researchers, not-for-profit executives, education specialists, youth workers, curriculum writers, health and safety professionals, civil servants, organized labour members, business people, academics, students and other young people, including the members of the Cross Canada Youth Advisory committee.

In the end, volunteer curriculum experts from 7 different provinces and territories had a hand in writing the learning outcomes and test questions as volunteers. Experts and concerned citizens in several more jurisdictions offered additional input.

The goal of this group of dedicated professionals and volunteers was to establish a "pre-work" foundation of the minimum health and safety knowledge any of us would want any young person to possess (see Passport to Safety learning outcomes on our website.

This broad representation created a de facto recognition of Passport to Safety as a basic minimum pre-employment standard for young people across Canada.

In fact, the quality of this program has led the WSIB of Ontario to officially recognize Passport to Safety's test as a desired minimum standard for young people before they go to work and receive job specific training.

The learning outcomes themselves were finalized in the spring of 2003, the first draft or pilot version of the test and website went online on June 15, 2003, was quietly launched as a full scale tool on October 1, 2003 and was officially launched on November 24, 2003 in Ottawa at the Canadian Injury Prevention Conference.

Our first programs made available through school systems were launched June 2004.

Stakeholder & Partner Relationships, Including Revenue Sharing:

Financial sustainability of the Passport to Safety program is an important consideration at the local and national level. Passport to Safety is intended not only as a catalyst to support, encourage and promote injury prevention activities, but also to ultimately contribute financially to the sustainability such activities, not only in workplaces but in all environments.

Thus, from its inception as a national effort, the program has been designed to become financially self sustaining, through various fund-raising elements. These elements include:

Individual members (or cardholders), for which a modest (9$ + taxes, shipping) cost per member is charged. Most often, these youth memberships will be sponsored by others.

Employer memberships
Donations
Institutional support for distribution to education systems

Revenue generation through partner and other offerings (e.g. availability of certain recognized training and other services, and potentially products such as WHMIS, fire safety, etc. to employer and individual members)

For more information on how to become a recruiter organization or community, please contact us by telephone or e-mail.

At the national level, staffing will be provided to administer the overall program and provide accountability to the Board, and to offer the program direct to employers and participants where no community recruiter exists.