Module 7 of 8

Your rights and duties

WHMIS sits inside the occupational health and safety law of your province or territory (or the Canada Labour Code if you work for a federally regulated employer such as a bank, airline, railway or telecom). Those laws give every worker three rights, and they attach duties to everyone in the chain.

Three rights every worker has

1. The right to know about the hazards in your workplace and how to protect yourself. WHMIS is the mechanism for chemical hazards: labels, SDSs and training exist because of this right.
2. The right to participate in health and safety through a joint health and safety committee or a worker representative, including being consulted on the WHMIS program.
3. The right to refuse work you have reasonable grounds to believe is dangerous to you or others, without reprisal, following the procedure in your jurisdiction's law (report to the supervisor, who must investigate; escalate to the committee or regulator if unresolved).

Worker duties

• Take part in WHMIS education and training and apply it.
• Read labels and SDSs and follow safe work procedures.
• Use the controls, PPE and protective devices your employer provides, as instructed.
• Check that containers you fill carry a workplace label.
• Report missing or unreadable labels, missing SDSs, hazards, spills, exposures and near misses to your supervisor.
• Never remove or deface a supplier label.

Employer duties

• Make sure every hazardous product that enters the workplace is labelled, and prepare workplace labels when required.
• Obtain a current SDS for every hazardous product and keep it readily available.
• Provide WHMIS education (generic) and training (site-specific) before workers handle or could be exposed to hazardous products, in consultation with the health and safety committee or representative.
• Make sure the training worked: workers must be able to apply it, not just sit through it.
• Review the WHMIS program at least once a year, and sooner when conditions change (new product, new process, new hazard information).
• Keep records of education and training.
• Maintain a list of hazardous products in the workplace where the jurisdiction requires it.

Supervisor and supplier duties

Supervisors must inform workers of hazards, make sure PPE and procedures are used, and take every precaution reasonable in the circumstances. Suppliers must classify products, label them and provide SDSs that meet the Hazardous Products Act and Regulations, and update the SDS and label when significant new data appears.

Do certificates expire?

No regulator sets an expiry date on WHMIS education, and no government body issues WHMIS certificates. What the law does require is that employers review their program at least annually and retrain when there are changes. In practice most employers treat training as current for about a year and ask for a refresher after that. The certificate from this course shows the date you completed it and a recommended review date twelve months later, which is what employers expect to see.

Where the rules live

Supplier rules (labels, SDSs, classification) are federal: the Hazardous Products Act and Hazardous Products Regulations, administered by Health Canada. Employer and worker rules are in each jurisdiction's OHS law; for example, Ontario's WHMIS Regulation (R.R.O. 1990, Reg. 860) under the Occupational Health and Safety Act, Alberta's OHS Code Part 29, British Columbia's OHS Regulation Part 5, and Part X of the Canada Occupational Health and Safety Regulations for federal workplaces. The requirements are nearly identical across the country because every jurisdiction built its regulation on the same model; the details, such as whether a written product inventory is required, differ slightly.