Sure. We at the CSMLS are very fortunate to be a mid-sized organization. Fourteen thousand members sounds like a lot, but there are only 400 practitioners on Prince Edward Island. In Newfoundland there are only 800, and some don't even have a regulatory body, or they're what I would call a shoebox society, where I'm the president today and I hand off the shoebox when I leave.
It was born out of a legitimate need. Very few had the capacity, interest, or volume of immigration to set up their own program, so they trusted the national body, just like they do for setting the educational standards and the accreditation standards. Years ago, in the sixties, they agreed that would be the model, and our governance model for that program runs like a federation model. Each of them carries a vote. Ontario doesn't carry more votes than a smaller jurisdiction. They all feel they're in it together, and our job at the national society is to identify important things such as language proficiency standards and to have valid and fairly defensible testing programs. We can't set things like having to have Canadian experience. We removed that in 2000 because we knew it was a barrier to immigration.
So I think by approaching it as what's best for the immigrant and what's best for the profession, having a set of standards that are open, transparent, and fair that they've all agreed to.... They do have a sweet deal, though, because I don't charge them any money. I charge the immigrant directly and my society subsidizes the rest of the work. If Ontario were to do it, it would cost them three full-time staff. So it's out of legitimate need that they came to us.