Sarah is the communications lead for CSV Midstream Solutions and a member of Digital Journal’s Insight Forum.
There was a point in Daniel Clarke’s story where the room stopped moving.
He wasn’t talking about numbers or growth. He was describing how a good idea meant to help people had missed the mark.
A few years ago, CSV Midstream Solutions had been formalizing its approach to suicide prevention, developing materials and training to bring awareness to every site. But as the program took shape, Clarke said something was missing. The company had been treating mental health as a self-serve list of resources instead of a relationship.
“The help-seeking approach is what we’ve all been taught,” said Clarke, CEO of CSV Midstream Solutions. “It’s, ‘Here are the resources. You can do this yourself.’ That’s the message the western world keeps pushing that you can do it yourself. But we can’t. We need each other.”
Applause broke out across the room, and it was recognition of a truth that connected far beyond one company. It captured what many in the room understood about leadership and care: showing up for people is part of the work itself.
Clarke’s point reflected CSV’s ethos of Creating Shared Value, which is a business strategy framework that works on the premise that when organizations approach business with care for their teams and the communities where they operate, outsized business performance follows, and both become stronger. At CSV, that principle shapes how we think about leadership, culture, and safety, and how care for people is built into daily operations.
Clarke was speaking at the Working Stronger Conference in Edmonton alongside Dr. John Oliffe, Canada Research Chair in Men’s Health Promotion at the University of British Columbia; Mark Hoosein, CEO of the Alberta Construction Safety Association; and Debra Murphy of Alberta Beef Producers. Moderated by Seth McVeity from the Canadian Mental Health Association, Alberta Division and Centre for Suicide Prevention, the panel explored what effective mental-health programs for men can look like across agriculture, construction, and energy.
The discussion centered on mental health in the business environment, and quickly turned to Buddy Up, a program that encourages men to look out for one another through peer connection and early intervention. The focus on men reflects what research has shown for years: in Canada, men die by suicide at roughly three times the rate of women, often because stigma and social norms make it harder to ask for help or even recognize when it’s needed.
A few years ago, we customized Buddy Up to fit the realities of field work and the people who do it, creating the first program of its kind in Canada’s energy sector. Clarke’s remarks reflected on what we learned from that experience and how it continues to evolve.
The discussion that followed built on that idea of connection. Each speaker brought a different view from research, industry, and community but shared the same goal of making workplaces places of care, connection, and prevention.
Understanding the issue beneath the surface
Men’s mental health can be difficult to see, and even harder to talk about.
“Men often present with what we call masked depression,” said Oliffe. “Irritability, overwork or withdrawal instead of sadness. These behaviours can be misread as disinterest or discipline problems when they’re really distress.”
Oliffe explained that for many men, pressure and purpose are tightly linked.
In demanding or isolated work environments, the same qualities that help people push through long hours can also keep them from reaching out when something is wrong. Expectations around toughness and control can make vulnerability feel like weakness, especially where risk and performance are part of everyday life.
A change in attitude, increased risk-taking, or an unusual focus on work can all be quiet indicators that something is wrong.
“Workplaces are where men spend most of their waking hours,” he said. “That makes them one of the most important places to promote mental health and prevent suicide.”
Murphy spoke about what isolation looks like in agriculture where rural work is the everyday, and why connection matters most in those settings.
“In agriculture, people often work alone for long hours and carry a lot of pressure,” she said. “You might go days without really talking to anyone, and when things get hard, that isolation can get louder. Conversations like this remind us how much we need to check in with each other.”
Her point echoed across other sectors.
Clarke noted that in remote operations, the culture of endurance can make it harder to recognize when people are struggling.
“You need tough people to do hard work,” he said, “but those same expectations can make people hide what’s really going on.”
According to Statistics Canada, 4,850 people in Canada died by suicide in 2022, or roughly 13 people each day. Men make up about half the population but account for nearly 75% of those deaths. Men are three times more likely to die by suicide than women. Middle-aged adults between 30 and 59 had the highest suicide rates, accounting for more than half of all deaths that year.
For leaders, that reality changes the conversation.
Workplaces are one of the most important places for prevention. When culture allows people to speak honestly and notice when something is wrong, mental health becomes both a measure of well-being and of how organizations take care of their people.
“In our industry, safety is something everyone owns,” said Hoosein, referring to the construction industry. “You look out for your crew, you look out for the people beside you. What Buddy Up shows is that mental health needs to be seen the same way. It’s part of safety. It’s not separate from it. When we talk about taking care of each other, this is what we mean.”
“The same way we talk about physical hazards, we should be talking about psychological ones,” he added. “If someone’s struggling, that’s a hazard too, and it deserves the same level of attention and care.”
That understanding is shaping how CSV approaches mental health and suicide prevention.
When we first connected with the Centre for Suicide Prevention, we saw an opportunity to turn research into practice and build prevention directly into daily operations.
How Buddy Up became part of our safety culture
When we began integrating Buddy Up, the goal was to make mental health part of the same system that protects physical safety. Working with the Centre for Suicide Prevention, we adapted the program to fit both field and corporate settings so it felt like something people could own, not something handed down.
“The key for us was embedding this within safety,” said Clarke. “Safety is something people in our industry already understand and value. We didn’t want a separate program that felt like it was competing with that. We wanted something that would grow from it.”
That also meant changing how support shows up at work.
Many programs focus on help seeking, asking people to reach out when they need it. Clarke said the reality is different when someone is struggling.
“Everything that we had been doing was a help-seeking type of approach. It was, ‘Hey, if you have mental health issues, here are your resources.’ When you are struggling with mental health, it is everything you can do just to push the voices away. The shift for us was to make support visible and offered, to be the person who notices and says, I am here.”
The result was a three-tier model built around visibility, awareness, connection, and action.
- Everyone begins as a Buddy, learning to notice when something seems different and to start a conversation early.
- Some employees volunteer as Connectors, taking additional training to listen, support, and link people to help.
- Others go on to become Supporters who work with safety leaders to coordinate resources and keep the culture visible across sites.
Colour-coded hard-hat stickers identify Buddies, Connectors, and Supporters so people know who is available to talk on a job site. Conversations now happen naturally during meetings and safety stand-downs, where mental health sits alongside operations and performance.
“When people know they can talk without being judged, it changes the whole environment,” Clarke said. “You see people looking out for each other in ways that are real. It’s leadership at every level.”
What leadership looks like next
For Clarke, the experience of Buddy Up has always been about more than just awareness. It’s about what leadership looks like when care becomes part of how a company works.
“When you step back and look at this through the lens of Creating Shared Value, it’s about understanding that business performance and human well-being aren’t competing priorities,” he said. “They rise together.”
The panel made clear that prevention begins long before a crisis and that leadership is defined as much by empathy and awareness as by results. Building teams that can talk openly about mental health doesn’t make organizations softer — it makes them stronger, safer, and more capable of sustaining performance over time.
At the Working Stronger Conference, Clarke said CSV plans to give away a Buddy Up implementation toolkit next year to help other companies apply what we’ve learned, sharing practical steps for embedding prevention into safety systems and creating peer-to-peer networks that fit their workplaces.
“We can have all the systems and processes in the world,” Clarke said, “but it comes down to how we show up and care for our people, the Golden Rule. That’s what makes a difference.”
