Alberta SSIA Licensing: What Every Client Should Verify Before Hiring a Security Firm
The Security Services and Investigators Act sets the floor — most Alberta clients aren't asking the right questions above it.
The floor is not the ceiling
The Alberta Security Services and Investigators Act (SSIA) sets the licensing floor for every security officer working in the province — every guard must complete Alberta Basic Security Training (ABST), pass a criminal record check, and hold a valid provincial licence. Yet the sharpest procurement teams in the province don't stop at 'are your officers licensed?' They ask the follow-up questions the SSIA doesn't require answers to.
The five verifications that separate the professionals
One: request a monthly licence audit — proof the entire deployed roster carries current, non-expired licences at the moment of the audit. Two: ask for a written escalation matrix — the chain from officer to supervisor to command post to law enforcement. Three: demand tour-report samples from prior clients — GPS-tagged, cloud-timestamped, and delivered by sunrise. Four: verify sick-call coverage windows in writing — the difference between a sixty-minute backfill and a four-hour gap is enormous. Five: ask about certifications beyond ABST — H2S Alive, CSTS-2020, First Aid, ProServe, NVCI — matched to the specific deployment.
What Alberta Security Services does differently
We publish our licence audit results monthly to our client portal. We staff a provincial reserve pool with 60-minute callout coverage across the Edmonton–Calgary corridor and beyond. Every patrol, incident, and shift-change is logged before dawn. And every officer's certifications are matched to the deployment before the roster is finalized.