Yes and no. It depends on which products or services it covers, and I'll give you two quick examples.
Transport Canada has a haz-mat regulation for transporting hazardous materials and packaging. There used to be a CGSB standard. It's still there. For some reason, Transport Canada has decided to go on its own and write its own standard. We worked closely with Transport Canada on that regulation, and we got some feedback from them recently, saying that writing a standard is a pain. They decided that next time they were going to get CGSB to do that, because writing a standard is a different mindset. It's managing a group of stakeholders and stuff like that and they've decided that it's not their core business.
On the other hand, if we go back to the furniture, for example, the government is in a very different position from the private sector. For a lot of the products the government buys, you award the contract to the lowest compliant bidder, or the least expensive compliant bidder. So I look at this as jumping a bar,saut en hauteur. Somebody has to fix the height of the bar; otherwise, you're just going to end up buying everything in China and you're going to have no quality. So you have to make sure the quality is at a certain level to set up a level playing field for the companies to compete. I wouldn't see that as part of regulation, because it would apply to every business in Canada. As a private enterprise, I wouldn't want the government to tell me which furniture I'm allowed to buy. So from that perspective, for furniture, for instance, it's a procurement issue that is specific to all governments, which are tied to go to the lowest bidder.
Haz-mat, for Transport Canada, is another story.