Enform Canada and the Oil Sands Safety Association (OSSA) are merging, with the newly-formed association responsible for leading and accelerating improvements in safety performance energy sector-wide.
“We have actually been working on this for a number of years,” Enform CEO Cameron MacGillivray told the Daily Oil Bulletin.
“Both sides agree it makes great sense to have one safety association for the whole industry, and to take that to leverage our new organization so we can address safety in a more broad sense across the industry.”
The two organizations had announced their intention to join in 2016, but decided to postpone those plans due to industry market conditions. Discussions were reinitiated earlier this year.
“Last year in the depth of the oil price fluctuations, for many companies and ours included it was a significant distraction and challenge for companies to focus on things other than day-to-day business, and to improve the day-to-day functions,” said MacGillivray. “That was the reason we postponed the merger. Now that conditions, I think, have significantly improved since last year at this time, we are in a position where we can progress the merger.”
Enform is Canada’s safety association for upstream oil and gas, while OSSA represents mainly mining operators. The two groups believe research and education via a single organization will accelerate safety performance improvement, minimize duplication, improve operational efficiencies and reduce confusion among employers and workers regarding safety standards and training. Closing of the agreement is expected by the end of September 2017.
“Some of the things we think we can do include introducing standards across industry that are broadly accepted across the industry and promoted as standards,” noted the Enform CEO. “The second thing we think we can do is eliminate redundant training.”
In many cases, particularly for the service sector, workers currently may have to take the same sort of training repeatedly. By merging the two safety groups, MacGillivray believes Enform and OSSA can standardize a lot of training, reduce costs and make training more effective.
