The Safety Spotlight

Bill Hart is a fifth-generation miner from West Virginia. He watched his grandfather die of black lung when he was sixteen, and later watched the same disease take his father. He now starts work at a gold mine in South Carolina alongside his son, the sixth generation in the family to go underground.In this episode, Bill makes a case that most safety programs get backwards: safety isn't a priority, it's a value. Priorities shift wit...

A broken door handle nobody fixed will tell you more about your safety culture than your incident numbers will.Michael Bassey has spent two decades in process safety across Nigeria, Qatar, the UAE, Argentina and North America, leading high-risk, high-consequence investigations. In 2010 he ran one that was thorough, detailed, and well received by leadership. Eight months later the same facility tripped again. Different shift, differ...

Ask a room full of employees whose job safety is, and plenty of hands will point at the safety department. Brian Fielkow got that answer when he bought his own trucking company, and he calls it the wrong one. 

Brian did not arrive in safety the usual way. He started out practising business law in Milwaukee, where meeting clients across a range of industries taught him to look for patterns. He went to work for his favo...

Ask most organizations how safety is going and they will hand you their incident numbers. Cody Woolf would rather know what happens on site when the senior leaders aren’t there.

Cody didn’t come to safety the usual way either. He went to school for law enforcement and criminal justice, then spent his early career in commercial vehicle enforcement with the Alberta government, pulling vehicles over on the highway and learn...

What can safety leaders in construction, oil and gas, and manufacturing learn from a workplace where you can't pause an emergency to fill out a hazard assessment?In this episode of Safety Spotlight, we sit down with Nicole Wetsch, Manager of Occupational Health and Safety for the Edmonton Police Service. Nicole started her career in medical microbiology and nanotechnology research before moving into policing, and she brings a scien...

Ask most leaders if they have a good team and they'll say yes. Ken Larson's answer is that they have no idea what a real team is.In this episode of The Safety Spotlight, executive coach Ken Larson explains why most "teams" are really just a roster of talented people working near each other, not with each other. We get into interdependence, the misfire vs. the mishire, why you get what you tolerate, and why a leader's behavior matte...

What happens when a safety professional stops writing policies and starts walking the floor instead?  

In this episode of the Safety Spotlight Podcast, we sit down with Erin Heimbecker, Workplace Safety Specialist at the Saskatchewan Association for Safe Workplaces in Health (SASWH), to explore what it actually takes to build a safety culture that people believe in, not just comply with. 

Erin's pat...

What does it take to keep millions of kilometers of road safe when 80% of everything we use every day depends on the people behind the wheel? 

In this episode of the Safety Spotlight Podcast, we sit down with Mario Da Silva, Fleet Safety and Risk Management Leader at Manitoulin Transport, to explore what it really means to build a lasting safety culture inside one of Canada's most complex transportation operations. 

Mario's...

What does it really take to transform workplace safety from a compliance requirement into a deeply embedded culture?

In this episode of the Safety Spotlight Podcast, we sit down with Tom Fitzgerald, founder of Safety Fitz LLC and a former foundry supervisor with over 50 years of experience in operations, HR, and safety leadership. Tom brings a rare perspective, having worked directly on the production floor before moving into safety...

Psychological safety is often treated like something you install with a policy. But is it really a systems issue, or a leadership one?

In this episode of Safety Spotlight, we sit down with Joan McMillan, Canadian Registered Safety Professional and PhD candidate in developmental psychology, to explore the human side of safety culture.

With more than 20 years in health and safety, Joan brings a perspective grounded in behavior, emotion...

A lot of companies say “safety first.” Darren Varga, Director of EHS at Aecon Group Inc., argues that misses the point. If people do not trust the system, they stop talking, and that is when risk quietly stacks up.

In this episode of The Safety Spotlight, Darren shares how an ergonomics and biomechanics background, along with time as a Ministry of Labour inspector and global consultant, has shaped a practical approa...

Silica exposure is one of the oldest known occupational hazards in the world, yet it remains widely misunderstood, under-prioritized, and routinely mismanaged across modern industries.

In this episode of The Safety Spotlight, we sit down with Nayab Sultan, an occupational and environmental health specialist with decades of international experience, to unpack why silica continues to pose such a serious and often invisible risk to wor...

"If I don't have room to improve, the system is broken." That is the philosophy that drives Rick Sikora, CEO of Cranemasters. In this episode of The Safety Spotlight, Rick shares why he questioned the validity of a 97% audit score - and why questioning what we do is the only way to fight complacency.Rick breaks down the critical difference between "common sense" and "common knowledge," especially for the new generation of workers e...

In this episode of Safety Spotlight, we sit down with Tyler Foley, a former stuntman turned safety consultant and the founder of Total Buy-In HSE Consulting. Tyler shares his unique backstory, moving from performing six-story high falls into cardboard boxes to managing safety in high-risk industries, revealing how the principles of stunt work - like engineering controls and redundancy - directly translate to the job site. Throughou...

In this episode, we sit down with Sarah Rasoul, a Top Woman in Safety and safety leader at Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada. Sarah shares how an unexpected career path led her into occupational health and safety, and why proactive,prevention-focused work became her mission. She breaks down the power of a strong communication culture, the importance of worker engagement, and how tools like near miss analysis and the PDCA cycle driv...

Safety did not start as the headline for Jeff Mulligan, it became the mission. In this episode of Safety Spotlight, Jeff, COO of Astec Safety and an early catalyst behind Utility Safety Partners, explains how risk management evolved from a back-office function into a leadership priority. He also exposes the next big challenge facing safety leaders everywhere: aging, hidden infrastructure.

How does a finance and public policy veteran...

Linda Miller never set out to transform how people move and work. Her early goal as a rehabilitation specialist was to help them recover. But after seeing how preventable injuries could derail entire careers, she started asking a powerful question: why are we treating the damage instead of preventing it?

That question led her to ergonomics and a lifelong mission to design work that fits people, not the other way around. Her first ma...

In this powerful episode of Safety Spotlight, we sit down with Spencer Beach, a third-generation tradesman turned professional safety speaker, whose life was forever changed by a devastating workplace fire in 2003. What followed was more than a physical recovery. It was a complete transformation in how he understood safety, leadership, and purpose.

Spencer recounts the day everything changed, the chemical shortcut that led to a hous...

In this episode of Safety Spotlight, we sit down with Mike Schwarz, CEO of MyZone AI, for a candid look at the AI revolution already transforming how businesses operate. From his early dot-com ventures to leading large-scale automation projects, Mike shares real insights on how organizations can harness AI for massive ROI.

He reveals how automation can streamline up to 90% of operations, why his team only takes on projects that deli...