Escalator Field Guide
Elevator Field Guide
Vertical Transportation Field Guide
iOSElevators in Canada, by the numbers
How many elevators and escalators each province regulates, how many incidents and injuries they report, and what inspectors keep finding. Every figure comes from a published source, mostly the regulators’ own reports, with a link.
Nobody counts Canada’s elevators. Each province counts its own, in its own report, on its own fiscal year, using its own idea of what an is. Four provinces publish a real count. Together they regulate a little over 122,000 devices. Five more publish nothing you could put in a table, and one of those has three inspectors for the whole province. This page gathers what exists, says plainly where it stops, and links every number to the document it came from.
Two marks to know: looks like this, and a pill like TSSA Public Safety Report 2026 opens a source document in a new tab.
The question this page answers: how many elevating devices are there in Canada, how often do they hurt someone, and which provinces publish the numbers to say so?
Just over 122,000 devices in the four provinces that publish a count. Ontario 69,520, British Columbia 30,224, Alberta 18,431, Saskatchewan 4,497. Those are the regulators’ own figures for their most recent reporting year, and the sum is ours, not theirs.
There is no national total. Manitoba, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland and Labrador publish no device count. Quebec is not covered on this page. Anyone quoting a Canada-wide number is estimating.
Escalators are where people get hurt. In Ontario an escalator logged 37 incidents per 100 devices in the year to April 2026; an elevator logged 1.4. Escalators are 3.4% of Ontario’s inventory and produced 88% of its elevator and escalator non-permanent injuries. TSSA recorded one escalator death in each of the three years before that, and none this year. It recorded no elevator deaths in any of them.
Nobody in Canada publishes a count of injuries to the mechanics. The IUEC posts incident summaries as safety alerts, but no total. The only measured rate is American: elevator installers and repairers die in elevator-related incidents at more than 50 times the rate of construction workers as a whole.
Incident counts cannot be compared between provinces. Ontario reported 1,823 incidents across elevators and escalators; British Columbia reported 67. That gap is mostly definitions and reporting rules, not safety. Read each province’s numbers against its own history, never against its neighbour’s.
Who regulates how many
Each row is the regulator’s own headline figure, in its own words, for its own reporting year. The years do not line up: Ontario runs May to April, Alberta April to March, Saskatchewan July to June, and British Columbia reports on the calendar year. Ontario’s year to 30 April 2026, published in September 2026, is the newest figure here.
TSSA
Technical Safety BC
AEDARSA
TSASK
Service NL
Sources, in order: TSSA Public Safety Report 2026, pages 23 and 30; Technical Safety BC, State of Safety 2025; AEDARSA Annual Report 2024–25, page 19; TSASK Annual Report 2025, page 17; CBC, 13 May 2025.
What each regulator reported, in its own terms
Read down a column, not across. Ontario’s 1,823 (958 on elevators plus 865 on escalators and moving walks, both below) and British Columbia’s 67 describe different things. Ontario counts every safety-related occurrence reported to it, and its own report says the rise above the ten-year average is “possibly due to better reporting.” British Columbia ranks each report by severity. Alberta counts reports received and then decides which ones to visit.
Ontario elevators, year to April 2026
958 incidents, against a ten-year average of 776 (1,174 the year before).
54 non-permanent injuries (average 100).
0 permanent injuries (average 6, and 7 the year before). 0 deaths.
Rate: 1.40 incidents per 100 elevators, down from 1.72.
Ontario escalators and moving walks, year to April 2026
865 incidents, against a ten-year average of 718 (966 the year before).
392 non-permanent injuries. 1 permanent (6 the year before).
0 deaths. The year before had one, an elderly rider with a mobility device; TSSA found the escalator working and signed correctly.
Rate: 36.59 incidents per 100 devices, down from 43.97.
British Columbia, 2025
67 incidents reported (the report’s own headline tile says 59; its text says 67, and we quote the text).
Ranked: 11 insignificant, 12 minor, 7 moderate, 9 major and 1 severe; 11 still under assessment. That breakdown adds up to 51, and the report does not explain the gap.
14 injuries, down 58% from 2024’s 33, with the same caveat that reports still under assessment are not counted yet.
2024, for comparison: 76 incidents, 33 injuries, 7 major.
Alberta, 2024–25
176 incident reports on elevating devices.
80 on-site investigations.
5 serious, meaning medical treatment was required.
0 deaths.
Saskatchewan, 2024–25
30 reported incidents or complaints, “ranging from entrapments to missing floor buttons or licence postings.”
1 met the definition of an accident: an electrical shock that needed medical attention.
0 deaths or serious injuries.
The rest of the country
Manitoba, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, PEI and Newfoundland and Labrador publish no incident figures for elevating devices. If you know of a public report we have missed, the forum is the place to say so.
Ontario and Alberta figures are for fiscal years ending 30 April 2026 and 31 March 2025. Saskatchewan’s year ends 30 June 2025. British Columbia reports on calendar 2025, and notes that injuries from reports still under assessment are not yet in its totals.
Elevators are the volume. Escalators are the injuries.
Only Ontario publishes enough detail to say this with numbers, so this section is Ontario. There is no reason to think the shape is different anywhere else, but nobody else has shown their work.
- Escalators and moving walks are 2,329 of Ontario’s 69,520 devices, or 3.4%. They produced 392 of the province’s 446 non-permanent injuries on elevators and escalators, or 88%.
- An escalator in Ontario is about 26 times more likely to log an incident in a year than an elevator: 36.59 per 100 devices against 1.40.
- Transit stations generate 71% of escalator incidents over the decade to April 2026, and shops another 21%. Offices, arenas, hotels and everything else share the remaining 8%. The previous year’s report put transit at only 40% of the escalator inventory. TSSA’s own reading: it tracks usage, not equipment.
- Elevator incidents follow the same rule. Residential buildings produce 54% of elevator incidents over the decade, offices 16%, shops 7%, hospitals and care homes 6%. The previous year’s report put apartments and condominiums at 39% of the elevator inventory.
- Escalator deaths in Ontario: one a year in each of the three years to April 2025, and none in the year to April 2026. Elevator deaths: none in either year, and a ten-year average of 0.4.
What the last escalator death was not. The rider who died in the year to April 2025 was elderly and using a mobility device. TSSA investigated and concluded the equipment was functioning properly, met the code, and had signage nearby telling mobility-aid users to take the elevator. The regulator’s response was a public-education campaign for seniors, not a code change. Whether that is the right answer is a fair question for the forum. It is not a question this page can settle.
What the union counts, and what it does not
Every figure above is about the riding public, or does not say. None of the four regulators separates a mechanic hurt in a pit from a shopper hurt at a comb plate. So the people with the highest exposure are the ones the provincial numbers say least about. Two other sources fill some of the gap, and both are worth knowing the limits of.
The IUEC Safety Department
The union’s Safety Department posts incident summaries, covering close calls and injuries, as safety alerts. Twelve were on the public page for 2025 and 2026 when we checked: caught-between (five), caught-in (one), struck-by (two), three filed as “other,” and one alert covering both a rigging and hoisting close call and a fall. Members can get them by text. What it does not publish is a total. The union’s site has no annual count of injuries or deaths among elevator constructors, in Canada or the United States, though its memorial page lists each member killed on the job by name and date.
CPWR, using US government data
The Center for Construction Research and Training’s 2018 data report is the last full count. From 2011 to 2016, 145 US construction workers died in elevator-related incidents, about 24 a year, 51% of such deaths across all industries. The yearly toll doubled from 14 in 2003 to 28 in 2016, with a peak of 37 in 2015. CPWR’s “elevator-related” category also covers hoists, aerial lifts and personnel platforms, not just elevators.
- Elevator installers and repairers die in elevator-related incidents at 14.9 per 100,000 full-time workers, more than 50 times the rate for construction as a whole, and higher than ironworkers or insulators. Construction labourers had more deaths in total, 31 over the six years, at a far lower rate.
- Falls to a lower level cause 53.5% of those deaths, and nearly half of the falls are from 30 feet or more. Being caught in or crushed by equipment is next at 25.7%. Electrocution is 4.9%.
- More than a third (37.9%) happen during assembly or dismantling. Repair and maintenance is 18.2%. Inspecting or checking, 3%.
- Nearly half (46%) of the non-fatal injuries kept the worker off the job for 31 days or more.
- On the public side, US hospitals treated about 25,000 elevator- or escalator-related injuries in 2017, up 30% from roughly 19,000 in 2007. More than one in ten was a child under 15.
Canada has no equivalent that we could find. No province’s elevating-device regulator reports worker injuries separately from rider injuries, and we found no workers’ compensation publication that breaks this trade out. The nearest thing to a Canadian figure for a mechanic’s own risk is the US rate above, and the reasons it would differ here, different fall-protection rules and different hoistway practice, cut in more than one direction. Anyone who tells you the Canadian number is guessing.
The CPWR report draws on the US Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries and Survey of Occupational Injuries and Illnesses, and on the Consumer Product Safety Commission’s hospital sample for the public figures. Its 2003 to 2010 and 2011 to 2016 series use different classification codes and are not strictly comparable, which the report says itself.
Pass rates, and the three orders written most
A periodic inspection either passes, fails with high-risk orders, or lands in an “other” bucket. The pass rates below are the regulators’ own, and again they do not compare across provinces, because British Columbia has a “conditional pass” category that Ontario does not.
The orders Ontario inspectors wrote most, year to April 2026
Elevators
793: hoistway or car door restrictor annual task not done, records not kept.
779: car emergency system maintenance not done, log book not updated.
436: scheduled maintenance task not done, log book not signed.
Escalators
70: steps with broken tread not repaired or replaced.
53: step demarcation lights not working.
41: comb with broken teeth not repaired or replaced.
All three elevator orders are paperwork and maintenance discipline, not broken equipment. That is worth sitting with: the most common way to fail an Ontario inspection is a log book. The escalator list is the reverse. All three are things a rider can see. New this year: TSSA issued its first administrative penalties in the elevating devices programme, $18,000 to a Mississauga condominium corporation for six counts of having elevator alteration work done by a contractor that was not registered. The power came into force in June 2025 and, so far, reaches only passenger elevators in residential buildings.
Mechanics, contractors and owners
Only Ontario publishes a full headcount. The others publish enough to sketch the shape.
Ontario
4,853 certified mechanics, up from 4,679.
180 registered contractors, up from 163.
23,241 elevator owners and 358 escalator owners.
1,938 elevator engineering designs approved in the year (16 more for escalators).
That works out to about 14.3 devices per certified mechanic, which is a ceiling, not a caseload: not every certificate holder is on the tools.
Alberta
Acceptance inspections in the year: 560 new elevators and 523 major alterations, plus 112 new barrier-free lifts and 47 personnel hoists.
New escalators: 17. In a year.
AEDARSA’s chief executive, in the same report: when he started, AEDARSA had about 6,000 devices and twelve staff; today it has about 19,000 devices and thirty staff.
Saskatchewan
369 acceptance inspections for new, modernised or altered devices, up 16.8%.
Mechanic licences renew every two years, which is why the regulator’s licensing revenue swings from year to year.
An Elevating Device Mechanic licence has been the route in since 2022.
New Brunswick
No counts, but a scale marker: the province collected about $200,000 a year from elevator inspections, permits and licences. Fee increases taking effect on 1 July 2026 are expected to lift that to $543,000 once they apply for a full year.
Where this sits
The regulator behind every row here, and the code edition it enforces, is on find your code. How a mechanic gets certified in each province, and why the Saskatchewan route is different: becoming an elevator mechanic. The three Ontario orders above all trace back to a maintenance control program, and that page explains what one is. Ontario also publishes something no other province does, a register of elevator outages, covered on its own page. Terms defined plainly: the glossary.
Every source behind this page
- The 122,000 total is ours. It adds four regulators’ headline counts across four different reporting years and four different definitions of a device. Ontario’s figure includes dumbwaiters and parking lifts; Saskatchewan inspects ski lifts under the same programme. Treat it as the right order of magnitude, not a census.
- Incident figures are not comparable across provinces, and we have said so three times on purpose. Ontario’s count would look very different under British Columbia’s rules, and vice versa.
- “Not published” means we could not find it. We read the most recent annual report for each regulator and its public web pages. A figure that exists only in a freedom-of-information response, a legislature answer or a news story is quoted as that, not as a published statistic.
- The 26-times and 88% figures are arithmetic on TSSA’s numbers, not TSSA’s own claims. The inputs are on the pages cited. The division is ours.
- British Columbia’s 2025 page disagrees with itself. Its summary tile says 59 incidents; its text says 67 and calls that a 4.4% increase on a year it reported as 76. We have quoted the text and left the arithmetic to the regulator. The 2024 figures are from the previous year’s report and are stable.
- The worker figures are American and end in 2016. CPWR has not published a newer elevator-specific count, and the IUEC publishes summaries, not statistics. If a Canadian compensation board has ever broken out this trade, we did not find it.
- Quebec is not covered on this page.
- The United States numbers come from an industry association, the National Elevator Industry Inc., and its fact sheet is dated 2020. They are here for scale only.
- This page will go stale. Each regulator publishes once a year, at a different time. Ontario in September, Alberta in June, Saskatchewan in November, British Columbia in May. Ontario’s 2026 report came out in September, shortly before this page was checked. Alberta’s 2025–26 report had not appeared by then, later than its usual June; Saskatchewan’s next is due around November. The verified date in the footer is when the numbers were last checked against the reports.
Every row on this page has a regulator behind it, and a code edition it enforces. Which one applies where, province by province and state by state.
Find your code →The three orders Ontario writes most are all maintenance records. What a maintenance control program is, and why the interval differs by province.
Maintenance control programs →Working to the elevator code on the job?
The Elevator Field Guide is the elevator code in plain English, searchable and offline. It covers the code. The numbers on this page come from the regulators and live here only.
