Ontario’s ESA Moving to Risk-based Oversight

Mar 28, 2019

The Electrical Safety Association plans to implement a risk-based approach for electrical wiring by 2020. This means ESA will spend more effort on higher risk electrical wiring work, and less effort on lower risk work, without compromising safety.

Risk-based oversight means that ESA will use risk criteria to determine what wiring work requires a site visit. All high risk work willt be inspected, and medium and low risk work will be subject to selective inspection. That is, for every two, three, five, or ten installations, one will have a physical site visit by an inspector. However, this ratio remains to be determined.

Permits will have a risk level assigned to it based on

    • who does the installation work
    • what the installation is
    • where the installation is

ESA is responsible for identifying and targeting leading causes of electrical safety risk, ensuring compliance with regulations, promoting awareness, education and training, and collaborating with stakeholders to improve electrical safety in Ontario.

The organization believes selective inspection and a risk based approach can help address contractors’ scheduling concerns as it creates opportunities for ESA to keep them better informed as to when an inspector will or won’t be coming to visit a site. This also means ESA will be able to focus on the work that poses the greatest safety risk, including the investigation of work done by unlicensed contractors.

ESA expects that risk-based oversight will be in field by 2020, and is still determining how it could work and testing certain parts of the risk-based approach. We’ve also gathered information from licensed electrical contractors across the province in Town Hall meetings to determine how this change could potentially affect their businesses to ensure the rollout is as smooth as possible.

Watch for a formal notice and/or consultation for licensed electrical contractors and other stakeholders in summer 2019.

Find out more.