Naming unsafe Alberta firms needs legal OK

The Alberta government says it wants to release the names of companies with poor safety records, but it needslegal approval first to ensure no privacy laws are broken.

"I know who they are, but now to make this public, it could potentially put them out of business,"provincial Employment and Immigration Minister Thomas Lukaszuk said Thursday.

"I want to be satisfied 100 per cent that they indeed fall into that category because I would hate to put a business and hence, workers out of work by saying, 'Whoops, I made a mistake.'"

On Wednesday,acting auditor general Merwan Saher called on the province to get tough on this "small, but high-risk" group of employers, who have higher-than-average rates of workers with disabling injuries in many cases, three to four times the provincial average andconsistently fail to abide by orders from Occupational Health and Safety.

The report also criticized the province for suspending compliance orders to boost safety statistics, as well as lacking the systems totrack non-compliance properly.

The report's findings were lauded by the Alberta Federation of Labour, whichnow hopes it will prompt the province to make changes.

Lukaszuk has vowed to crack down on unsafe companies and says he'll go one step further if he canrelease the company names.

"I want to release all employers because there could be some on the fringe of that list ...you know, they're not as bad but they're getting there. So what I want to do is actually release the statistics of all employers," he said.

Lukaszuk said he hopes to have ananswer about legally releasing the names within a few months.