Certainly.
In February 2013 Health Canada approached us to prepare a national standard for radon mitigation in residential buildings. It was part of the implementation of a Canadian strategy designed to refocus efforts to encourage indoor radon testing and the reduction of indoor radon levels. Health Canada's guidance document is called, “Reducing Radon Levels in Existing Homes: A Canadian Guide for Professional Contractors”, and this will serve as the core document that is going to help us develop this standard.
As you correctly pointed out, the differences in our climate and geography—and I mentioned this in my opening remarks—is that the mitigation standards and practices that come from the ASTM, the standards organization in the U.S., can't always be applied in situations where mitigation is an option to control the health risk from indoor radon exposure.
So we're working on developing two national standards. One is for radon control options in new low-rise residential buildings, and one will be for radon mitigation options for existing low-rise residential dwellings—what you have to do to retrofit, for instance.
Our objective is going to be to provide the requirements, the specifications, guidelines, and characteristics that can be used consistently to ensure that materials, products, processes, and services used in radon mitigation of low-rise residential homes are fit for their purpose. So we want to make sure that what people put into radon mitigation will actually work.
Our objective is to also harmonize technical specifications of products and services with the goal to make the industry and services related to radon mitigation more efficient, and to provide organizations and radon mitigation professionals in the industry a tool to ensure that product and services are consistent.
It's also about how they do it. It's not only what they use, but how they apply it, how they do it. Then we'll be following up with conformity, which is to ensure that the products and services meet the standards that are set, so that'll be the other side of our activity.
This is all with Health Canada. The complexity here, of course, is that radon is a very difficult gas to detect, so there's a big technical challenge in terms of that. We have academics participating, of course, the industry, the contractors, as well as health professionals.
So the standards' work will take the better part of two years to develop as we go back and forth with these discussions and they are quite open discussions. The technical committee is composed of all these participants and everybody puts their issues on the table. The goal is to have a standard so that the materials used for radon gas mitigation and how you apply it are understood and meet a standard that's going to be effective.