Drawing together provincial Workers Compensation Board (WCB) injury statistics, interviews with workers from multiple sectors and existing OHS research, the report argues that workplace violence is both far more widespread than official statistics suggest and far more preventable than governments and employers have been willing to admit. Rather than treating violence as an unavoidable feature of health care, education, public transit or retail work, the report insists that it is an OHS hazard that employers have a legal responsibility to prevent, and that governments must regulate.

As the report’s findings make clear, the scale of the problem is staggering.

According to WCB data, accepted workplace injuries caused by violence more than tripled between 2015 and 2025, rising from 641 accepted claims to 2,187. Even more alarming, workplace violence injuries increased by 20 per cent in just the past two years, suggesting the trend is continuing rather than stabilizing.