Conestoga College Students Make Safety Pledge
Ball Construction was pleased to be part of a League of Champions event on October 3rd at Conestoga College’s Waterloo campus. Held in partnership with the Grand Valley Construction Association, students in Conestoga’s construction trades programs signed the Jersey of Courage—thus pledging their commitment to job-site safety across Canada.
Rob Ellis—who founded the MySafeWork after his son David died following a workplace accident in 1999—was the featured guest speaker. The League of Champions is a joint OGCA/MySafeWork program with support from IHSA, WSIB and the Ministry of Labour and is intended to promote worker safety in all industries, starting with construction. To prevent worker injury and death, the league’s outreach activities serve as a way to raise awareness and transfer knowledge about workplace safety.
According to Ellis, “Last year 125,000 young people in Canada were injured on the job. And that’s only the number that was reported.”
Many of Conestoga’s students will soon be in the work force, and thus the presentation and Q and A session that followed served as a reminder for them to seek out companies with safe work environments—and as safety leaders—to inspire, improve and promote a culture of safety.
Other league members in attendance included Jason Ball, President of Ball Construction; Suzanne Johnson, Ball’s Environmental Health & Safety Coordinator; Martha George, President of the Grand Valley Construction Association; and Steve Hanley, Vice President of Melloul Blamey Construction, himself a graduate of Conestoga’s construction engineering technology program.
To learn more, check out MySafeWork as well as the safety resources on the Grand Valley Construction Association website.
