Why this sits on a certification registry
Ontario makes 23 trades compulsory, meaning you cannot legally do the work without holding the certificate. Most of them are trades where getting it wrong injures somebody: electricians, gas-side refrigeration mechanics, sprinkler and fire protection installers, crane operators, steamfitters. The counts below are the backdrop to that decision.
These figures are for whole sectors, not for individual trades. Ontario does not publish injury data by the injured worker's trade, so no honest per-trade rate exists.
Worker fatalities by sector, 2015 to 2024
| Year | Construction | Industrial | Mining | All sectors |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2015 | 18 | 30 | 4 | 53 |
| 2016 | 13 | 33 | 0 | 46 |
| 2017 | 23 | 25 | 6 | 54 |
| 2018 | 28 | 27 | 0 | 55 |
| 2019 | 18 | 25 | 1 | 45 |
| 2020 | 25 | 29 | 1 | 56 |
| 2021 | 23 | 33 | 1 | 58 |
| 2022 | 19 | 43 | 3 | 65 |
| 2023 | 17 | 30 | 1 | 48 |
| 2024 | 18 | 27 | 3 | 49 |
| Ten-year total | 202 | 302 | 20 | 529 |
Fatality counts have stayed broadly flat across the decade: construction has run between 13 and 28 deaths a year with no clear trend either way.
Critical injuries by sector, 2015 to 2024
| Year | Construction | Industrial | Mining | All sectors |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2015 | 162 | 595 | 34 | 890 |
| 2016 | 172 | 634 | 29 | 951 |
| 2017 | 322 | 1352 | 35 | 1926 |
| 2018 | 324 | 1505 | 31 | 2136 |
| 2019 | 308 | 1774 | 41 | 2411 |
| 2020 | 360 | 1367 | 34 | 2035 |
| 2021 | 407 | 1596 | 65 | 2387 |
| 2022 | 417 | 1828 | 67 | 2685 |
| 2023 | 450 | 1987 | 82 | 2918 |
| 2024 | 442 | 2148 | 99 | 3113 |
Do not read this table as a ten-year trend. Reported critical injuries roughly doubled between 2016 and 2017 in every sector at once, which is the signature of a change in what gets reported rather than a real doubling of harm. The Ministry publishes no note explaining the jump, so the honest reading is that 2017 onward is comparable with itself and not with the two years before it.
What counts, and what these numbers leave out
A "critical injury" in Ontario has a legal definition: an injury that places life in jeopardy, produces unconsciousness, causes substantial loss of blood, fractures an arm or leg, amputates a hand, foot, arm or leg, burns a major portion of the body, or causes loss of sight.
The counts exclude:
- Deaths from natural causes, and suicides
- Deaths of non-workers at a workplace
- Deaths from a criminal act or a traffic accident, unless the Occupational Health and Safety Act is also implicated
- Deaths from occupational exposures that happened years earlier, which means long-latency illness such as asbestos-related disease is not in these figures at all
They also cover only incidents reported to the Ministry, and the Ministry states plainly that its critical injury data "may not represent what actually occurred at the workplace" and can include non-workers. Treat every number here as reported counts, not as a complete record of harm.
Related
Official verification sources
- DatasetOccupational Health and Safety worker fatality and critical injury counts report, Ontario Ministry of Labour, Immigration, Training and Skills Development
- LawOccupational Health and Safety Act, R.S.O. 1990, c. O.1 (e-Laws)
Last verified 2026-08-20 against the Ontario dataset, which was itself last updated 2025-10-22 and is republished yearly.