Abstract Petroleum companies increasingly recognize the importance of the cultural aspects of health and safety management. This is due in part to the conclusion that a poor safety culture contributed to a number of disasters. Many Petroleum companies have measured their safety culture in order to identify improvements. Questionnaires are commonly used, as they are an efficient method to collect large data sets that can be analyzed statistically. Unfortunately, safety culture surveys have limitations; for example, they provide little assistance in identifying interventions to address areas of concern. A potential solution to this limitation is the use of a maturity or evolutionary framework. In the UK the offshore oil industry and the Health and Safety Executive commissioned a study to develop a health and safety maturity framework1. The study produced a cultural maturity model based on capability maturity models used in the software industry. This framework is similar to Westrum's three level safety maturity model2. These and other models were used as the basis of a Canadian cultural maturity model. This model consists of 5 levels of maturity (Documenting, Controlling, Engaging, Participating and Institutionalizing) and 10 elements. This paper describes the development of the model and the results of a cultural maturity project conducted in Petro-Canada's East Coast Operations.