Construction sits above the provincial average for workplace injury in every province that publishes the comparison. Getting to that statement honestly takes care.
Headline figure
2.98 vs 2.40
British Columbia’s construction time-loss claims rate against the provincial all-industry average, per 100 workers, 2022. WorkSafeBC reports that “the construction sector in B.C. had a time-loss claims rate that was 24 percent higher than the provincial average” — news release, 23 April 2024.
What the data says
Workers’ compensation in Canada is provincial. Each board defines covered employment, counts claims and computes rates on its own basis, and no single national construction injury rate is published in a form that can be read and cited — a real limitation, stated here rather than hidden behind a borrowed number.
It also means the figures below should not be compared across provinces in absolute terms. British Columbia’s 2.98 and Nova Scotia’s 1.39 do not measure the same population, year or definition. What travels between provinces is the comparison each board makes internally: construction against that province’s own all-industry average.
| Province | Construction rate | All-industry rate | Year |
|---|---|---|---|
| British Columbia | 2.98 per 100 workers | 2.40 per 100 workers | 2022 |
| Nova Scotia | 1.39 per 100 covered workers | 1.21 per 100 covered workers | 2025 |
Sources: WorkSafeBC news release of 23 April 2024 (time-loss claims rate, 2022); WCB Nova Scotia news release of 6 May 2026 and its republication by the Association of Workers’ Compensation Boards of Canada, 14 May 2026 (time-loss injury rate, 2025). Different years, different coverage definitions and different denominators — read each row against its own provincial average, not against the other row.
Alongside the rate, WorkSafeBC reports that “Serious injuries account for approximately 21 percent of claims in the construction industry”, and that “occupational disease claimed the lives of 115 workers between 2019 and 2022”.
A separate WorkSafeBC summary, published 6 May 2026, gives the five-year claim volumes behind the rate: 38,000 claims accepted from 2021 to 2025, of which 7,400 were serious and 174 fatal, at a total claim cost of $1.3 billion. It records a 25% reduction in the time-loss injury rate and a 32% reduction in serious injuries over the decade, while still concluding that “Construction remains one of the highest-risk sectors in B.C.” The mechanisms it names are specific: 11,000 musculoskeletal claims from overexertion, 7,000 struck-by claims and 5,800 falls from elevation.
WCB Nova Scotia reported in its 2025 Impact of Workplace Injury release that “Construction, for example, has reached an all-time low injury rate of 1.39 per 100 covered workers in 2025”. Against the provincial all-industry rate of 1.21 that year, construction still runs above the provincial average — the same directional story as British Columbia, at a different level.
Ontario is the largest construction market in the country and publishes the least comparable data. The Ministry of Labour, Immigration, Training and Skills Development maintains Construction program sector trends (last updated 9 September 2025), recording events reported to the ministry by fiscal year. These are counts with no denominator, so they cannot be turned into a rate or set against the two provinces above.
| Event | 2019-20 | 2021-22 | 2023-24 | 2024-25 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fatalities | 26 | 24 | 15 | 21 |
| Critical injuries | 283 | 392 | 456 | 425 |
| Complaints | 5,500 | 4,860 | 4,688 | 4,411 |
| Work refusals | 8 | 13 | 11 | 7 |
Source: Ontario Ministry of Labour, Immigration, Training and Skills Development, Construction program sector trends, Table 1, last updated 9 September 2025. Four of the six published fiscal years are shown for width; 2020-21 and 2022-23 are omitted from this view, not from the source. The ministry cautions that “Only critical injury events reported to the ministry are included for each sector. This represents data that were reported to the ministry and may not represent what actually occurred at the workplace.”
Ontario also publishes a share figure that is easy to misread. In The year (2022–2023) in numbers, construction accounts for 31% of traumatic fatalities and 417 critical injury events. That 31% is a share of the 90 traumatic fatalities recorded for 2022 — not of the 264 total allowed workplace fatalities, which also include 174 occupational disease fatalities. Multiplying 31% by 264 gives a number roughly three times too large.
An absence is as useful to know as a figure. No construction-specific injury rate could be sourced for Quebec, Alberta, Saskatchewan or Manitoba in readable published form: Alberta and Quebec publish construction breakdowns only as downloadable documents, and the Saskatchewan and Manitoba releases give province-wide figures with no construction split. Rather than extrapolate, those provinces are left out.
Injury rates are a cost and a capacity matter, not only a safety one. A serious injury removes a worker from a crew that, as the firm-size data shows, very likely numbers fewer than five people, so the operational impact of one claim is proportionally far larger here than in industries dominated by big employers. The hazards the boards name — overexertion, falls from elevation, struck-by incidents — are also the ones with the most established controls, which is why both provinces can report double-digit improvements over a decade. For the workforce these rates apply to, see who actually works in Canadian construction, and for what it costs to employ them, what Canadian construction actually pays.
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