Inaugural health and safety conference coming to Timmins

Interpreting people’s body language is hard to master, but there are a few cues Brett Webb is hoping to teach people at next week’s health and safety conference.

Workplace Safety North (WSN) is hosting the inaugural event themed Building Safer Communities Sept. 5 at the Senator Hotel in Timmins.

“WSN’s idea is being able to create a community. We’re based in the north, so in the north for the north is our theory and what we want to be able to do through this conference is create greater communities and we’re looking to create conferences throughout the north because that’s how we effect greater change, that’s how we shift not only organizational cultures, but societal cultures,” said Webb.

The day’s featured speaker is Candace Carnahan, who lost her leg in a workplace accident at the age of 21 and is now a workplace safety advocate who champions workplace training as a preventive measure.

Other topics on the agenda are:

• First Nations culture and health and safety;

• case study on powerline safety: dump truck raised box indicator program;

• learning from a psychosocial education program in wildland firefighters: applications for Northern industries;

• climate assessment and audit tool: new predictive approach changing the face of health and safety;

• cannabis in the safety-sensitive workplace; and

• discussion panel: navigating mental health issues in the workplace.

Webb’s part of the session focuses on body language.

He’ll be looking at non-verbal communication and how to use body language to improve relationships.

“And then on the other side, to identify to cues in order to prevent violence or harassment,” he said.

The idea behind his session, he explained, is “could the person identify a perpetrator, let’s say, getting violent before they were consciously aware they were getting violent, therefore being able to intervene and use strategies to either remove themselves from the situation or deescalate the violent behaviour as quickly as humanly possible.”

In Ontario, he said there isn’t a lot of prevention training in relation to violence and harassment.

“We have a lot of solutions out there that are post incident, or post-accident and we try and manage someone’s stress, we try and manage someone’s outcome as a victim of violence and it’s extremely difficult,” he said.

Registration information for the conference is available here.