Published Canadian injury rates are usually lost-time claim rates per 100 workers, computed from claims the board accepted during the year. The denominator is full-time equivalents, and the numerator is a decision made by an insurer.
What it means in practice
- Acceptance is a decision, and it takes time. A claim filed in December and accepted in March lands in a different year than the injury. Over a single year that noise is real; over three it mostly washes out, which is why board experience programs use multi-year windows.
- An in-house count will not match the published one, and neither is wrong. You count events as they happen; the board counts claims it accepted. If your own rate sits above the published one, the gap is usually definitional before it is a safety problem.
- Coverage differs by province and by industry. Some employers and some sectors are outside a board’s compulsory coverage, which changes the denominator without changing anything on the floor.
What it is not
It is not a recordable-injury count. A recordable injury needs medical treatment beyond first aid; a lost-time claim needs an accepted claim and time lost. Most organisations have several times more of the former, and reporting one figure as though it were the other is the most common way a safety report becomes misleading without a single wrong number in it.
It is not comparable to a French accident avec arrêt or a German meldepflichtiger Arbeitsunfall. France counts accidents with at least one day of stoppage on a base of one million hours worked; Germany only counts accidents with more than three days of absence, per thousand full-time workers. Scaling one into the other produces a figure that looks comparable and is not.