The overarching goal of our Zero-Harm philosophy continues to be that “everyone who works on Petro-Canada’s behalf goes home safe and sound every day.” Our efforts to promote Zero-Harm have succeeded in establishing a core value, which is the belief that all injuries and illnesses are foreseeable and preventable — both at work and at home. Only when all employees, including leaders, and contractors have embraced this belief can we eliminate incidents from our business and operations.

Another important component in reaching our goal of Zero-Harm is that we learn from the experiences of others, both within and outside Petro-Canada. Building on the lessons from the tragic incident at Texas City and the Baker Panel Report, Petro-Canada put a team into action to address priority issues. In 2008, this team:

1. established standards for management of change and enhancing process safety knowledge and capability
2. strengthened accountability for process safety through increased role definition
3. enhanced the tracking of process safety incidents and near misses with a focus on more proactive management of such events
4. put greater emphasis on addressing process safety during scheduled Total Loss Management (TLM) audits.

Our success achieving Zero-Harm depends design maintenance equipment, people’s skills in operating working safely, and accountability our leaders on safety. The performance provide framework achieve goal of Zero-Harm. In 2008, we initiated work evolve the existing TLM standards to expand process safety expectations.

A Process Safety Steering Team was put in place early in 2009 to oversee the implementation of the changes and to ensure a focus on process safety is sustained. Individual assets currently use performance metrics appropriate to the nature of their business to steward process safety management at their site. As industry metrics evolve, Petro-Canada will assess their relevance for monitoring and enhancing the enterprises process safety performance.

2008 Safety Performance

We include contractor injuries in recordable injury frequency measurements because we believe that the safety of all workers at Petro-Canada’s sites is of the utmost importance. We also believe that, when contractors get hurt at our worksites, we are equally affected.

The table below shows our improvements year-over-year on our safety performance.

While we have made significant improvements in all our injury frequencies, we believe there is still more that can be done to improve our overall safety performance. Nevertheless, we must note these achievements were generated despite the overheated labour market conditions and increased hiring we experienced in 2008. In addition, we grew our business internationally where, in some places, the safety culture may be different from North American standards.

Contractors are a valued and essential part of our business and a key part of our growth strategy. We need to work toward all of our sites and practices providing safe working conditions for all. As shown in the figures below, in 2008 our contractors were three times as likely to be injured as our employees. Despite earlier successes, this number reminds us all that we must continue to stay focused on contractor safety. To that end, Petro-Canada has brought together a multi-disciplined team, with representatives from all our businesses as well as contractor companies themselves, to improve contractor engagement in our safety culture and reduce the injury frequency. The team’s initiatives, such as leadership visibility, better contractor safety training and effective contractor selection, are already being implemented throughout the Company.