I can add a little to that.
That's a good question. Of course, you're absolutely right. ISO is like the United Nations. It's sort of the global level of standards. It's like a world body. It's in Geneva. It has about 20,000 standards globally. Canada participates in ISO along with 163 other countries. So you're right; there's a global structure for this.
ISO introduced the ISO 9000 quality management system standard in the early 1990s. I don't how many of you will remember that. The reason that became so significant in the marketplace at the time was that, in the early 1990s, the European community announced it would give preference to those in public procurement, in terms of their bid process, who demonstrated they met a demonstrable quality management system. The only one they recognized was ISO 9000. It just so happened. So there was an awful lot of take-up in Europe in terms of that standard, and then of course internationally companies that wanted to go into the European market had to move quickly to demonstrate they could achieve that certification.
We began this process in the 1990s to meet this demand in Canada, because the Canadian government recognized there was an urgent need to supply this service to Canadian companies, and the private sector simply had not ramped up yet to do it. We began to certify companies, private sector companies, that they had a demonstrable quality management system that met the 20 different components of the ISO standards.
So we'd go in to a manufacturing process.... I was an auditor. I'm a certified auditor. We would go in and review the books. We'd look at their processes. We'd review the manufacturing process. We'd look at their records. We'd interview their people to make sure they had a quality management system that met the standard and they were actually using it in an effective and demonstrable way to produce the correct products. That's what we've done.
Since then, the private sector has expanded hugely. In fact, now many national Canadian organizations do this. QMI is a big one in Canada, part of CSA. Also there are many international groups, such as BSI. The British are here, the Irish are here, and the Germans. It's a global community now that provides the support to business.
At CGSB, of course, our job is not to duplicate what is in the private sector. We do not compete with the private sector. So as that service has come to fruition, we have now refocused our energies on providing those services to public sector organizations.