Biography

Andy Reimer began working in safety in the energy industry in 2009 with Energy Safety Canada (then Enform) where he divided his time between facilitating industry recommended practices and guidelines and the industry safety auditing program. Highlights included writing the “How to get started with Process Safety” series and a complete overhaul of the COR HS Audit Protocol to meet BC, Alberta, and Saskatchewan program requirements. In 2016, he joined then Spectra Energy, soon to be Enbridge, where he initially developed safety programs for their Westcoast gas gathering, processing, and transmission operations. Here the challenge was integrating provincial and federal regulations into a singular effective standard in programs such as Lock Out / Tag Out, Confined Space Management, and Safe Work Permitting. Eventually the program included all of Enbridge’s North American gas assets. In 2020, Andy was tasked with creating a single Project Safety program with the full merger of multiple legacy business unit-based project groups. With contractor spend in the billions for everything from mega projects to local contracts for pipeline integrity digs, the messy challenges of contractor safety management were front and center. Andy came back to Energy Safety Canada in 2024 intent on applying lessons learned to the work of revitalizing the industry's safety auditing program. Andy has also contributed to collective efforts for industry and the safety profession. His work has remained relentlessly focused on systems to better manage low frequency / high consequence events -- working first in the development and promotion of Critical Control Management and more recently with the Construction Safety Research Alliance's research work on Serious Incident / Fatality (SIF) prevention. Preventing "stuff that never happens" is difficult--so we have to find simpler ways to do it.