There's a fairly lengthy answer. I'll try to give a short one.
If you compare Canada's standards system to those of other countries, we and the U.S.A. are a little different, because we have independent or private standards development systems. Most other countries, such as those in Europe or Australia, have a state-owned or a state-related member body, such as the SCC, which is the member body for ISO. One of the complexities in our system is that we don't have, compared to our peers, a huge number of standards. I think that's because historically, due to our constitution and the way the country is set up, standards are used more to promote or relate to regulatory matters and less for industrial needs, so you see a lower number. Someone might say they have 30,000 standards. A lot of those 30,000 standards might be used by industry. Are they audited? Probably not. So there's a variation in that.
The other complexity we have in the way we develop our system is that as SDOs, we often run into the case where province A or regulator A refers to four editions back of our standard, but all the rest, or half of them, refer to the latest edition. For us that creates some maintenance headaches and a lot of phone calls from somebody who's trying to figure out which one they should certify to.
Our system has a parallel system called the code system. You have the Canadian Commission on Building and Fire Codes, which I sit on as the representative for SDOs. It writes the codes. It is not formally part of the standards system, but it is a key element. We try to coordinate and work on it very much. We've developed a guideline for coordination between the SDOs. Our biggest challenge is getting members. We're all getting older. The industry in the country is not as strong as it used to be. We don't like to have a representative from a branch plant; we'd rather have an expert.
We carry our weight very heavily at the international level, at ISO and IEC, but I see coming down the pipe the need to really get down to harmonizing cross-country. As a country, and in terms of standards systems, we have to deal with the case that the Europeans and the Chinese are increasingly influencing what we have to write and what we have to measure to. We have to get together as a group and do that.
The SCC has, therefore, changed its way of working. When I was there it was very much inward looking. It's looking out to see how it can drive the system through innovation. To me, the key to our system is that we have to move away from writing standards through regulation to writing standards to create innovation, so that people will want to locate their factories and their research centres in this country and build out from there.
Thank you.