---
title: "Near miss — the incident that injured nobody, and why it is worth recording"
description: "What a near miss is, why almost no Canadian jurisdiction requires you to report one, and how to run a reporting system that does not simply produce blame."
term: "Near miss"
definition: "An unplanned event that could have caused injury, illness or damage but did not. In most Canadian jurisdictions there is no statutory duty to report one to the regulator, which makes it a purely internal source of information."
alsoKnownAs:
  - "Close call"
  - "Near hit"
  - "Good catch"
jurisdiction: "Canada"
locale: "en-CA"
publishedOn: 2026-09-06
reviewedOn: 2026-09-06
canonical: "https://safeally.net/en-ca/glossary/near-miss/"
sources:
  - label: "Incident investigation"
    url: "https://www.ccohs.ca/oshanswers/hsprograms/investig.html"
    publisher: "CCOHS"
  - label: "Occupational Health and Safety Act, R.S.O. 1990, c. O.1 — notices and reports"
    url: "https://www.ontario.ca/laws/statute/90o01"
    publisher: "Government of Ontario"
  - label: "Work injury statistics"
    url: "https://www.ccohs.ca/oshanswers/information/injury_statistics.html"
    publisher: "CCOHS"
---

# Near miss — the incident that injured nobody, and why it is worth recording

An unplanned event that could have caused injury, illness or damage but did not. In most Canadian jurisdictions there is no statutory duty to report one to the regulator, which makes it a purely internal source of information.

A near miss and a lost-time injury usually differ by luck, not by cause — the
same missing guard, the same unsecured load, one step to the left. That is the
whole argument for recording them: they are the only source of failure data a
workplace gets **without paying for it**.

## What it means in practice

- **Reporting is internal, and voluntary in most jurisdictions.** Some acts
  require notice of certain non-injury events — an explosion, a structural
  failure, an unplanned release — but a general near-miss duty is the exception.
- **The counting rules are yours**, which is exactly why they must be written
  down. A near-miss rate is only comparable to itself, and only if the definition
  did not drift.
- **A rising number is usually good news.** Reports go up when people trust the
  system. Reading the curve as a deterioration is the fastest way to close it.
- **Anonymity buys volume, attribution buys follow-up.** Most working systems
  offer both channels and publish what was fixed.
- **Feed it into the same investigation process** as injuries, with the same
  root-cause discipline and the same corrective-action tracking, or the reports
  become a suggestion box.

## What it is not

**It is not a first aid case.** A first aid case is an injury, it is recorded
under the first aid duty, and in several jurisdictions the record has to be
retained for years. A near miss produced no injury at all.

**It is not a hazard report.** A hazard is a condition; a near miss is an event.
Both belong in the system, and mixing them makes the numbers meaningless.

**And it does not carry the weight it does in Italy.** There, _mancato
infortunio_ reporting sits inside the D.Lgs. 231 organisational model and is
scored in INAIL's OT23 form, which turns it into a filing with a premium
reduction attached. In Canada the same event has no external audience — which
means the only reason to run the system is that it works.