Alex Ewing's drive towards enhancing safety standards is deeply personal and rooted in family history
When Alex Ewing first started out doing small-scale renovations with his father, he found the lack of leadership and the sloughing of responsibilities between contractors and subcontractors alarming.
“We were doing projects in what should have been the safest environment there was—a hospital—and when it came to workplace safety, people were scratching their heads,” Ewing recalls.
Now, as Senior Partner at Aceis Group, Ewing has carried that memory with him, using it to propel his passion for all things safety.
“I said to my dad, I think we need to get into health and safety,” he tells COS. “I spent a year taking every half-day or week-long training I could find and got all kinds of certificates under my belt.”
This dedication and thirst for knowledge bore fruit when Ewing introduced himself as a health and safety trainer at a networking event, securing his very first customer.
However, this wasn’t just about business expansion or filling a market gap. For Ewing, the drive towards enhancing safety standards was deeply personal and rooted in family history – his grandfather had succumbed to complications from asbestos, a loss that underscored the seriousness of workplace safety.
“It felt powerful to be able to tell people that this is so serious. My dad didn't have a dad because of poor safety.”
Sadly, Ewing’s family isn’t alone in their grief. A 2023 research paper from the International Labour Organization estimated that almost three million people die every year due to work-related accidents and diseases – that’s up by nearly five percent from 2015.
For Ewing, making any kind of dent in those figures is his life’s mission - but the journey was far from easy. Ewing and his team have come up against a myriad of challenges – not least grappling with their identity as either a training or consulting company while simultaneously aligning their mission with the needs of small and mid-sized businesses.
“We saw this as an opportunity to support these companies and address that gap,” says Ewing. “These companies are looking at how to save money, how to formalize and market themselves. And after all that, they’re not left with many resources to put towards protecting their people. These are the groups we want to help.”
And the data’s here to back up Ewing’s mission. According to a recent report from Angus Reid, almost 20% of Canadian organizations don’t have the legally required health and safety programs in place. And smaller companies seem to be the ones missing out the most, with organizations having 29 employees or less accounting for 52% of that number, according to CBC.
It’s no surprise then that Ewing’s furore for change has been met with enthusiasm – with Ewing telling COS that the introduction of their Excellence Program being a watershed moment for Aceis Group.
“As we've started to formalize health and safety, we've started to point out different challenges,” he says. “The Ontario government has done really well in terms of its developments, its understanding that there is a size in which a business can and can't comply. For instance, the new right to disconnect law policy is only required for businesses with over 25 employees. That enables small businesses to focus on the important stuff. Do we need the small business to worry about disconnecting or do we need to a small business to worry about workplace injuries? Because they only have so many resources available.”
Understanding that the scale of a company directly impacts its focus is key to Ewing. After all, a small family run café can’t spend as much time or money on their processes – and as such health and safety should take precedent over other more trivial issues.
Looking ahead to 2024 and beyond, Ewing firstly wanted to recognise the important role Operations Manager Chris Ryan played in their past, present and future journey – specifically talking of both his and Ryan’s aims to focus on sharing the passion and knowledge of all things safety with the next generation of officers.
“As a teacher, when I see my students develop their careers, running their own businesses, that's a proud papa moment. Getting to see our members really develop and maintain these health and safety management systems, and then walk in years later to a totally different organization – that’s a nice feeling.”
