Working Alone: What Canadian OHS Law Actually Requires

A plain-language breakdown of when Canadian OHS law actually requires a lone-worker check-in procedure, what that procedure needs to contain, and which industries face this exposure most often.

Most employers think of "working alone" as a description, not a legal category. It is both. Under Canadian OHS legislation, working alone triggers specific employer duties the moment certain conditions are met, and those duties exist independent of whether anyone has ever been hurt doing that job before.

The confusion usually shows up the same way: an employer assumes they do not have lone workers because most of the crew works in pairs or in a shop with other people around. Then someone points out the night driver, the single field technician, or the yard attendant who locks up alone on Saturdays, and it turns out the company has lone workers and no written procedure for any of them.

What "Working Alone" Actually Means

Alberta's OHS Code addresses this directly in Part 28, which defines working alone as work where a worker is the only worker for that employer at a work site, in circumstances where assistance is not readily available if there is an emergency, an injury, or the worker becomes ill. British Columbia's OHS Regulation covers the same ground under its working alone or in isolation provisions, and Saskatchewan and Manitoba impose comparable duties through their own OHS regulations even where the wording differs.

The operative phrase across every province is "assistance not readily available." That is a circumstance test, not a headcount test. A single cashier in a busy strip-mall store is not working alone in the legal sense because help is a shout away. A single technician servicing equipment at a rural site forty minutes from the nearest town, with no cell coverage and no coworker checking on them, almost certainly is, even though nothing about their job title says "lone worker."

When a Check-In Procedure Becomes Mandatory

A written check-in procedure is not a nice-to-have you add once someone gets hurt. It becomes a legal requirement once a role meets the working-alone test, and the test is usually some version of these three conditions together:

• No direct supervision is present at the work site
• The worker cannot be seen or heard by another worker who could respond
• If something went wrong, assistance would not arrive in a timeframe that limits harm

If all three are true for a role, on any shift, the employer needs a documented procedure for that role, not just a verbal understanding that someone will "check in when they can." This shows up constantly in roles that look routine on paper: the after-hours warehouse worker, the home care visitor, the security patrol on a night shift, the field service tech driving between rural job sites.

What a Compliant Lone-Worker Policy Actually Includes

Check-in intervals

The interval has to match the hazard level of the work, not an arbitrary company-wide number. High-hazard lone work (confined space entry prep, working at height alone, isolated electrical work) typically needs check-ins as tight as every 30 to 60 minutes. Lower-hazard lone work, like a field sales visit or a routine site inspection, can reasonably run on a 2 to 4 hour interval, plus a fixed start-of-shift and end-of-shift call so someone always knows the worker arrived and left safely.

Escalation procedure

This is the part most informal arrangements skip entirely, and it is the part that actually protects a worker. A check-in system without an escalation procedure just tells you a worker missed a call; it does not tell anyone what to do about it. A compliant policy names a specific person responsible for monitoring check-ins, a specific time window after a missed check-in that triggers action, and a specific sequence of steps after that: attempt contact, dispatch a coworker or supervisor to the location, and call emergency services if contact still cannot be made within a defined window.

Device requirements

The policy has to specify what device the check-in happens on, and it has to account for where the work actually occurs. A cellphone is not a working-alone solution in a cell dead zone. Sites without reliable coverage need a satellite communicator, a personal locator beacon, or a two-way radio with a defined range, and the policy should name a backup method for when the primary device fails or the battery dies, not just assume the phone will work.

Industries Where This Comes Up Most

Working-alone requirements apply across every sector, but a handful of industries generate the most exposure because isolation is baked into how the work gets done rather than being an occasional exception.

• Trucking and transportation, especially long-haul and overnight driving with extended stretches out of contact
• Field service and equipment repair techs travelling between rural or industrial customer sites
• Oil and gas field operations, well sites, and pipeline right-of-way work in remote areas
• Home care and community health visits conducted one worker to one client location
• Security patrol and after-hours facility checks
• Agriculture, particularly single-operator work with machinery on isolated land

These are also the sectors where COR and SECOR auditors ask the most direct questions about working alone, because the exposure is obvious and the written procedure is either there or it is not.

Building This Into Your Safety Program

A working-alone procedure only counts if it lives somewhere a worker and an auditor can both find it. That usually means it belongs in the company safety manual as a standalone procedure, gets covered in orientation for any role that meets the test, and gets reviewed on the same schedule as the rest of the program rather than written once and forgotten. Check-in logs are also easier to keep consistent, and easier to produce as audit evidence, on a digital safety forms platform than on a sheet of paper in a truck.</p>

If your business has roles that meet the working-alone test and no written procedure covering check-in intervals, escalation, and device requirements, that is a gap worth closing before an auditor or an incident finds it for you. On-Track Safety Solutions builds working-alone procedures into safety manuals and field safety programs across Alberta, BC, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba, and can review what you already have against the requirements in your province.