Canada Issues Final Rule Updating Hazardous Products Regulations (HPR)

By Phil Molé, MPH

2023 is off to a quick start for new EHS regulations! Health Canada has just published a?final rule?to update its Hazardous Products Regulations (HPR) to align with the seventh revised edition of the United Nations Globally Harmonized System of Classification and Labelling of Chemicals (GHS).

In what follows, we’ll review the background of the final rule, summarize the key changes, and talk about what comes next.

The Background of Canada’s Update to the HPR

To better understand what’s happening now, we should take a moment for a brief review of hazard communication requirements in Canada and the background of the final rule.

In Canada, the HPR and the Hazardous Products Act (HPA) create federal requirements for suppliers of hazardous products intended for use, handling, or storage in Canadian workplaces to classify and provide hazard information through labels and Safety Data Sheets (SDSs). The Workplace Hazardous Materials Information System (WHMIS) is Canada’s national hazard communication standard for hazardous chemicals found in the workplace and has been in place since 1988. WHMIS requirements include hazard classification, cautionary labelling of containers, provision of SDSs, and worker education and training programs.

Health Canada’s 2015 amendments aligned the HPR and WHMIS with Revision 5 of the GHS, and improved alignment with OSHA’s HazCom Standard, which OSHA had revised in 2012 to align with GHS Revision 3. This revision helped, to a large degree, to harmonize hazard classification and labelling requirements between the two nations. But as the years went by, and the UN continued to publish new editions of the GHS (aka, the “Purple Book”), both Health Canada and OSHA began to eye revisions to their respective regulations to align with more recent versions of the GHS.

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