Government Operations Committee on May 29th, 2014

[Pat Martin, NDP, Winnipeg Centre, MB]

Thank you.

Mr. Gray, your last comment answered my first question in that there seemed to be a bit of a contradiction in the opening remarks. Pablo said that you do no development of standards, yet you answered Ms. Crowder's question by saying that you're currently developing two standards for radon. You more or less meant that you had to adapt existing standards to suit the Canadian reality. I understand that.

Again, in reading the notes that our analyst prepared for me, I'm very impressed with the amount of work and the volume of capacity in your shop, with 30 full-time employees, and what a bargain it is at $1.2 million net cost to the government for a lot of seemingly important consumer protection-type work. I can't think of another agency that operates with that kind of a net cost, so I'm very impressed with that.

Let me ask a question specifically, though, from the building industry, which is my background. I notice you've touched base on a lot of the regulations. I suppose the certification process for a construction contractor is, in your view, like a pre-qualification. Prior to bidding on government construction projects you'd have to be pre-qualified. But that was compromised and this committee dealt with that very issue on the West Block, for instance, where you can buy your way onto that list.

There is one famous example where the stonemason who was thrown off the job paid a Conservative lobbyist $10,000 a month for 15 months in a row and wound up not only getting on the pre-qualified list when he clearly wasn't, but ended up getting on the job and getting thrown off the job because he wasn't qualified. This is obviously an isolated incident but it's obviously in their best interest to get qualified and they're willing to pay a well-connected Conservative lobbyist in Montreal to get qualified.

It worries me that the system can be compromised. If you don't do any of your own standard development—and some standards are developed by industry for industry with some self-interest associated with it—are you the watchdogs to prevent that from happening?

Let's face it, when the ISO first came up it was part of that whole total quality management frenzy that swept—scientific management, TQM, PS 2000, or whatever it was called in various sectors. In the ISO standards, some industries set their own targets in order to meet those targets and that's all they had to do to get their ISO stamp. It was very easy to create your own. Meeting your own standards is different from meeting the needs stated by the customer.

What satisfaction can you offer us that the type of example I gave you with this Varin guy in Montreal and the corruption associated with being pre-qualified can't happen again?

[Pablo Sobrino]

Mr. Chair, let me speak first on how we provide some assurance that the standards organizations are doing work that's fair and balanced and considers all points of view.

The Standards Council of Canada has an oversight role on all standards organizations. They accredit our process as they do with all recognized standards bodies in Canada. They ensure that we have a process of consultation and engagement with all interested parties that develop standards. That is a requirement of the ISO, the International Standards Organization, and the Standards Council of Canada does that accreditation. They audit our process annually on both the standards setting and the certification and conformity assessments, which are the two ways we assess whether the standards are being met. The Standards Council of Canada has that oversight role in ensuring that we are certified that way.

In the case of real property, real property uses our standards as well as the standards of other standards organizations in developing their specifications.

[Pat Martin, NDP, Winnipeg Centre, MB]

Construction is more difficult, isn't it? You're not dealing with a material whose strength you can test. You're dealing with the integrity of a construction contractor in this example.

[Pablo Sobrino]

Right, but when we're receiving the quotes, we're expecting them to be based on the standards we use, for instance, in real properties and on using materials that have been certified, whether they are asked for glass or for CSA-certified electrical or those kinds of things. Their pricing and the bid will be based on standards that have been developed. We ensure that the architects who are designing are developing their specifications according to that.

I am not aware of whether we actually require a construction company to meet a particular management standard, because that would be what we would expect. If you were specifying a management standard, you might ask for that. Some departments will require that companies have a certification of ISO 9000 or ISO 14000 to do business for some kind of service they're looking for. I'm not aware of whether, in our real property system, we ask construction companies to meet that. I'd have to check, but I can't really speak to the issue with West Block. I'm not that familiar with it.

[The Chair, NDP, Pierre-Luc Dusseault]

Thank you for your answers.

Mr. Aspin, go ahead for five minutes.

[Jay Aspin, Conservative, Nipissing—Timiskaming, ON]

Thank you, Chair.

Good morning, gentlemen, and welcome to our committee.

I understand from our material that the board undertook an evaluation in 2009—actually it was by Public Works—and there were several recommendations. I have the report here. I'd like maybe for you to zero in on what you consider the top two or three recommendations, and perhaps you could include the recommendation regarding prices for services.

[Pablo Sobrino]

I'm, of course, able to speak to that.

The most significant one had to do with moving to full cost recovery. We are now at about 80% to 90% of full cost recovery. We'll likely not achieve full cost recovery, because part of what the standards board does is help me in my other role in acquisitions, which is to set standards for things that I'm buying. Some of that work is internal, so I could move the money back and forth in my organization, but it would not really be full cost recovery. Essentially, any external work is now on full cost recovery. That was to meet one of the main recommendations of the evaluation.

The second thing had to do with what we're charging, and that was to ensure that we fully recovered costs. This goes back to an earlier question. Our standard rate at that time was about $1,000 a day, and the report recommended—and I don't know how they got to the dollar—$1,111 a day, and we're now up at about $1,300-a-day cost recovery to run the standards development process.

The certification services were at $1,050 per day, and it recommended that we move this up to about $1,275 a day. We're now just under $1,700 a day for the actual certification process. These rates are competitive. They're competing with the private sector. We're not below market. We're actually moving to market rates. This is what other standards organizations would charge to do these services. That, I would say, is the most important piece.

We also had some internal things, one of which was to develop a strategic plan as to where we are going. Certainly we have developed that. Getting out of almost 700 standards was part of that strategic plan. We wanted to focus on our core business and remove the standards that no longer need the federal government's involvement. We wanted to have those given to others.

[Jay Aspin, Conservative, Nipissing—Timiskaming, ON]

Thank you for that. I have just a quick question. I'm just curious about how standards are developed. I'm told you have a committee made up of employers, users, and experts. How is this committee chosen, and what would happen if some of the members disagreed with a particular standard?

[Pablo Sobrino]

The nature of this body is consensus-based. Consensus does not mean agreement. Essentially, what we do first of all is to ensure there's a balance of interests. So there are a number of things that we expect the committee to provide.

First of all, everybody who participates has to have a direct interest and has to have expressed an interest. So, if you've been invited to a standards committee, you have to actually be interested in the work of the standards committee of course. You have to demonstrate some ability and to make active contributions, so it is an engagement in the committee process. They have to represent a constituency, so they're not necessarily representing themselves but representing a constituency. Part of our role is to ensure that is happening in that discussion, that technical committee.

What we try to do is of course to get balance in the committee, some national representation, and that the committee is actually manageable—a committee of 500 isn't going to work—so the committee is a decent size.

What we do is in terms of consensus, so we ensure that every viewpoint is recorded and discussed and any point that continues to be strongly held focuses the discussion more on that point until the member who has that point of view is ready to accept, not agree, but accept that their view has been considered and incorporated. So it is really a consensus-building organization and this is why it takes a long time to get this committee to develop the standard.

If everybody is in violent agreement you can get a standard done in two or three meetings, but sometimes it takes two or three years as people go through this process. That might mean bringing other people into the committee for the discussion, bring in that expertise. We manage that process to drive that consensus discussion.

[The Chair, NDP, Pierre-Luc Dusseault]

Thank you.

I now yield the floor to Ms. Crowder for five minutes.

[Jean Crowder, NDP, Nanaimo—Cowichan, BC]

Thank you.

This is more of a comment before I get into a question, but Ms. Ablonczy referenced leaky condos. Of course, I'm from British Columbia and I think it's a good case in point. You talked about public interest. It's a good case in point where in some cases there was allegedly substandard construction, but in fact the standard itself was insufficient to meet the unique climate on the west coast. That resulted in costing hundreds of thousands of dollars to homeowners when you added it all up. It's a really good example of how standards need to be continuously revisited, that when there are problems emerging that there is that kind of work that's done in order to make sure the standards meet the unique Canadian climate. I wanted to put that out there. Of course people are still suffering in British Columbia as a result of that.

I wanted to touch as well on the evaluation report. This statement in the general conclusions I thought was a bit odd. It said that the evaluation did not find evidence to demonstrate the added value of the CGSB over non-government service providers. But then it goes on to say that the CGSB occupies a unique role in the national standards system.

Could you reconcile those two statements? On the one hand it's saying no value is added, but on the other hand it clearly says you have an important role to play by this unique role.

[Pablo Sobrino]

It really defines our role within government. Fundamentally, the private sector, and I should be clear that this is mostly not-for-profits, but the standards organizations out there are well-developed. They're well recognized and they can take up most of the interests of industry and consumer organizations, other interests outside.

Our unique role is as the federal government, where we're the only one that is within the federal government, where the federal government has a need to regulate something, to ensure a safety health issue that is not being taken up outside. We are the one that the federal departments come to see, for instance, on flotation devices, the building code. There are many areas in the building code and it can be very specific. Glass sliding doors, for example, I was reading from my list yesterday about glass sliding doors for patio door safety. There's just not a market out there that is looking. It's too diffuse, that market, too diverse, so the National Research Council, the owners of the building code have come to ask us to put together the standard for that.

We occupy a niche and that niche is really around the federal requirement for standards, as opposed to standards that are not created elsewhere because either they're too specific or there's not a lot of trade benefit to it. What drives industry to get a standard is to be able to do business. So in our case it's about standards for things and products that we need or that there's a public interest in looking into.

[Jean Crowder, NDP, Nanaimo—Cowichan, BC]

I think that public interest aspect is really important. I know sometimes people will refer to standards as being red tape or onerous, but in fact when I look at some of the lists of the things you do or have been involved with, I see there are health and safety issues involved. You referred to PFDs, for example. That's definitely a safety issue in terms of people's survival. Again, we have a unique climate here, so I'm sure you're probably working on standards with regard to the suits.

[Pablo Sobrino]

Survival suits for emergencies—

[Jean Crowder, NDP, Nanaimo—Cowichan, BC]

Yes, I mean survival suits as well. Where I live, the water temperature doesn't vary much. It's 50 degrees and it doesn't vary much either way. You don't survive very long in that water.

I want to come back to the food again for a moment. You have food safety, organic agriculture, and organic aquaculture. When you're talking about standards in those areas, are you looking at health? What kinds of standards are you looking at when you're looking at developing food standards?

[Pablo Sobrino]

On the food standards, we're often asked by either Health Canada, or as in the case of aquaculture, Fisheries and Oceans, to develop a standard by which they can then assure that facilities are run to the standard that was agreed to.

The inputs that come into that are health impact and biological impact. All those kinds of things are brought into that technical discussion and then developing a standard that addresses those issues is the discussion the technical committee goes through. It is, no pun intended, quite organic in the sense that you're bringing all the interests in. Obviously the aquaculture industry is interested in having something efficient, etc., but it also wants to ensure that its operations are acceptable to the public. So there are the health and biological impacts. That's why you have those other inputs to that discussion. That's what the technical committee does.

The makeup of that technical committee is quite important because the interest that is being addressed is not necessarily the interest that the originator wanted. You know, it wanted to have a good seal of approval on its facility, but the interest is the health and safety of Canadians, so those who know that come in.

The technical committees are each drawn up, and all this is public. The membership of the committee, the discussions of the committee, and the deliberations are all available on our site. The process is open and transparent.

[The Chair, NDP, Pierre-Luc Dusseault]

Thank you.

Your time is up.

We go now to Mr. Adler for five minutes.

[Mark Adler, Conservative, York Centre, ON]

Thank you, Chair.

Thanks, officials, for being here this morning.

I do want to begin by saying that this is a very interesting discussion. Certainly I'm hoping that Mr. Martin will learn something, since we're discussing standards, in particular ethical standards. I see he was on his BlackBerry before. I hope he's relaying some messages back to his leader so he could repay the taxpayers' money for those political offices that were set up in Quebec and Saskatchewan.

[Pat Martin, NDP, Winnipeg Centre, MB]

Could you actually repeat that insult?

[Mark Adler, Conservative, York Centre, ON]

I would like to—

[Pat Martin, NDP, Winnipeg Centre, MB]

I'd hate to miss a good jab.

[Mark Adler, Conservative, York Centre, ON]

Pardon me for speaking while you're trying to interrupt. I do have a couple of questions that I would like to have answers to.

What is your office total budget?

[Pablo Sobrino]

The office's total budget last year was, I believe, $3.9 million and then our total net budget was.... Hang on one second. Here we are. Our total cost of operating was just under $4 million; then our net was just over $1 million.

[Mark Adler, Conservative, York Centre, ON]

Okay. You have 34 employees.

[Pablo Sobrino]

Yes.