Most of the notice-of-project rules covered elsewhere on this hub are administrative housekeeping. Crane and rigging work is the exception: the threshold that triggers a notice, and the lead time attached to it, genuinely changes how a schedule has to be built — and it isn’t the same number in every province.
Key takeaways
Ontario requires a notice of project where the estimated cost of labour and materials exceeds $50,000, filed through the same online work-notice portal covered elsewhere on this hub, and attaches no specific advance lead time to that filing. British Columbia’s OHS Regulation 20.2 sets a different bar entirely: written notice is required at least 24 hours before work begins if the estimated cost of labour and materials exceeds $100,000, or if the work involves new erection, major alteration, structural repair or demolition of a building more than two storeys or 6 metres high, a bridge, a retaining structure more than 3 metres high, or a silo, chimney or similar structure more than 6 metres high — triggers that have nothing to do with dollar value at all. A firm that plans BC lifts on Ontario’s no-lead-time assumption can schedule a crew before the clock BC actually requires has even started running.
Worked example — a structural trigger, not a dollar trigger
A crane crew is booked to erect steel for a three-storey addition in Vancouver, priced at $78,000 in labour and materials — under BC’s $100,000 dollar threshold on its own. But the structure is more than two storeys and over 6 metres high, which independently triggers OHSR 20.2’s notice requirement regardless of the dollar figure.
A scheduling process built only around the dollar threshold would miss this job entirely and book the crane for the next available date. Checking both the dollar test and the structural triggers — and building in the 24-hour notice window before confirming a lift date — is the difference between a compliant schedule and a crew showing up a day early relative to when the notice clock actually clears.
Ontario’s work-notice portal lists personnel lifting with cranes as its own distinct category, required before hoisting workers begins — separate from, and in addition to, the general $50,000 notice-of-project threshold. A crane job that stays under the dollar threshold for the project as a whole can still trigger this separate notice the moment the plan calls for lifting a worker rather than only material.
Lift planning sits on top of a statutory hazard-assessment cycle that already exists on this hub for other high-risk work: Alberta’s OHS Code requires employers to assess hazards before work begins and control them, a cycle covered in more detail elsewhere on this hub. Specifically, section 7 of Alberta’s OHS Code requires the employer to assess the work site and identify hazards before work begins or before a new work site is constructed, to prepare a written report of the results and the controls chosen, to date that report, and to repeat the assessment at reasonably practicable intervals — a dated, written record, not an undocumented walk-around. The industry term “field-level hazard assessment” is common shorthand for a pre-task check done at the point of work, but it’s worth being precise about its status: the obvious province-level industry safety association for construction carries no reachable page on the topic after repeated attempts, and no source found treats “FLHA” itself as a defined statutory term. The honest framing is that it operationalizes the statutory hazard-assessment duty rather than being a quoted requirement in its own right — and CCOHS’s own guidance on job hazard analysis and safety talks is a more directly citable source for the due-diligence framing than the industry-association page most firms would reach for first.
Ontario’s compulsory-trades framework carries an explicit reciprocity exemption for Hoisting Engineer — Mobile Crane Operator 1, alongside six other named trades, for holders of an equivalent Québec certificate or registered Québec apprentices — a reminder that crane operator credentialing is taken seriously enough nationally to be written into inter-provincial recognition rules, even where the details differ by jurisdiction. What a scheduling or credential-tracking tool can genuinely do is flag when a specific operator’s certification is approaching expiry, or when a crew roster includes someone whose credential hasn’t been confirmed against the operating jurisdiction’s own requirement. It cannot confirm the certification is valid on its own authority — that still means checking the credential itself, not trusting a database entry that hasn’t been reconciled against it.
Drafting a lift plan from load-chart data, ground-condition inputs and the equipment on hand is a legitimate use — it produces a first draft fast, from information that’s already structured. It doesn’t decide the plan is safe to execute: a qualified lift supervisor or engineer still reviews the ground-bearing assumptions, the load chart against actual rigging configuration, and the exclusion zone, and signs off before the lift happens. Certification-expiry tracking across a crew, and matching the dollar and structural notice triggers above to a specific job’s scope automatically rather than by memory, are lower-stakes and genuinely time-saving uses that don’t touch that judgment boundary at all.
Related reading: a hazard register for a trades business and a training matrix that flags expiries and AI for excavation contractors.
$50,000 in labour and materials, filed through the province’s work-notice portal, with no specific advance lead time attached. Personnel lifting with cranes is also its own separate notice category on that same portal.
BC’s OHSR 20.2 sets a $100,000 dollar threshold, adds independent structural triggers — building height, retaining structures, silos and chimneys over set heights — and requires written notice at least 24 hours before work begins, a lead time Ontario’s rule doesn’t specify.
It’s industry terminology for a pre-task hazard check, not itself a defined statutory term in the sources checked for this article. The underlying legal duty is the statutory hazard-assessment cycle set out in provincial OHS legislation, such as Alberta’s OHS Code.
It can track expiry dates and flag a roster entry that hasn’t been reconciled against a jurisdiction’s requirement, which is useful. It can’t confirm validity on its own authority — that still requires checking the credential itself.
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