Health Canada audit project shows 98.4% of SDSs are not compliant

The WHMIS 2015 GHS implementation was fully adopted in Canada at the end of 2018, with the manufacturing sector being mandatory by June 2018. The Workplace Hazardous Materials Bureau, part of Health Canada, audited a batch of publicly available SDSs for compliance, taken from a range of industry types, all of which had a Canadian supplier.

Each section of the safety data sheet was assessed for compliance against the regulations, in particular looking at areas that were incomplete or where data was not provided. They also assessed the SDS for false and misleading information.

Of the 188 SDSs reviewed, 98.4% showed areas of non-compliance in Section 9 (physical and chemical properties of the product) of which 42.84% relate to false or misleading information that was provided. Although the review did not look at the actual classifications of the product (instead accepted these as correct) they still found that for section 2, 96.28% of SDSs were not compliant. This was mainly due to incorrect precautionary statements being used and the sub-section for “other hazards” being omitted, which is a mandatory part of the Canadian SDSs.

In total 4967 observations of non-compliance were found across the 188 safety data sheets.