Alberta scaffold
tag generator

Alberta is the clearest case in Canada. Where Ontario and British Columbia require the inspection but no tag, section 326 of Alberta’s Occupational Health and Safety Code requires an employer to ensure a scaffold is colour coded using tags at each point of entry indicating its status and condition — green for “Safe for Use”, yellow for “Caution: Potential or Unusual Hazard”, red for “Unsafe for Use”.

The inspection cycle is narrower than the colour coding, and this is the part most often stated wrongly. It attaches to the site-built scaffolds the Code names individually — bracket, double-pole, needle-beam, outrigger, single-pole, suspended and swingstage. Those must be inspected and tagged by a competent worker before first use, and at intervals of not more than 21 calendar days while workers work from the scaffold or materials are stored on it.

Section 326(5) then does something no other regulator covered on this site does quite so plainly: it lists what the tag must carry. The duty rating of the scaffold. The date on which it was last inspected. The name of the competent worker who last inspected it. Any precautions to be taken while working on it. And the expiry date of the tag.

Section 326(4) sets that expiry at 21 calendar days after the inspection the tag records, and 326(6) gives it teeth: a worker must not use a scaffold that has a red tag, a green or yellow tag that has expired, or no tag at all. The exception in 326(7) is narrow — a competent worker involved in erecting, inspecting or dismantling it.

One further trap worth knowing. A listed scaffold that is erected but not immediately put into service, or not used for more than 21 consecutive calendar days, must carry a red tag at each point of entry until a competent worker inspects and re-tags it. Scaffolds left standing between trades are exactly the ones that quietly fall out of compliance.