Thank you.
Honourable committee members, thank you for this opportunity today to be here on behalf of the Canadian Standards Association, known as the CSA Group.
I've been working in intellectual property enforcement for over 15 years now. I've worked for companies such as the Canadian Recording Industry Association and Nike Canada, so I've worked for some companies with some big IP.
I'll give you some information about the CSA Group. We're the Canadian Standards Association. We're an organization that writes safety standards for Canada. We also certify products to meet those standards; these are products that everybody uses in their houses—industrial, commercial, and consumer products.
Intellectual property law and enforcement are very important to CSA Group. Its proprietary trademarks and certification marks are the most valuable assets of the CSA Group, because they're not just trademarks: they're certification marks. These certification marks actually identify to regulatory folks or consumers that these products are safe.
Numerous Canadian regulations require products to be certified by a certification body such as the CSA Group. These regulations have been put in place to protect the public. For example, certain electrical, gas, and plumbing products are required by regulation to be certified. Products bearing counterfeit certification marks have not been put through certification testing; samples have not been provided for them to be tested. Uncertified or counterfeit-certified products are unsafe in the market.
Based on our experience, a majority of our counterfeits that we're finding are not manufactured in Canada. They're being imported and, based on our statistics, mostly from southeast Asia. What we're recommending or hoping is that the government provide customs officials the express authority to target, detain, seize, and destroy counterfeit goods.
I'll give you an example of how many contacts I have had with CBSA in the three years I've been working for CSA. On a daily basis from U.S. Customs I get two to eight contacts a day verifying certification marks. I've been contacted by CBSA one time in three years. In a three-month period, U.S. Customs seized over $10-million worth of consumer electronic products in one port.
The statistics on counterfeit goods in Canada are based on RCMP reports. I can tell you today that most industries do not report their counterfeits to the RCMP. In most cases, these investigations are not conducted because any reports to RCMP are prioritized and, in some cases, are not dealt with.
I guess what I would like to advise in this situation is that we adopt a recordation system whereby IP rights holders may record their rights with CBSA. This may help us prevent dangerous goods from coming into Canada.
I'll give you some examples from the last short period of time. Mr. Edwards mentioned the circuit breakers that have been found in an intensive care unit in a hospital. I'll have an information package that you will get later, and there are photographs in there of an exploding circuit breaker being tested in regard to meeting standards. This is a residential circuit breaker that fails.
Counterfeit CSA Group marks have been found on thousands of medicine vials in the last year. What you can do right now as an importer is select whatever product you want from overseas and have a manufacturer put on any certification mark they want. Then they can import them into Canada. These products have never been tested. These are supposed to be child-resistant containers and they're supposed to be certified to meet minimum standards. We don't know if the materials in these products are safe or not. We know that they have not been tested; therefore, they're unsafe for the public. We took almost 100,000 of these off the market.
Also most recently, industrial and hobby welder units have been found in the greater Toronto area, with values in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, and these were unsafe as well. They were untested. They had issues of proximity, of loose wires inside. These were portable welding units. The welders themselves carry the units; when welding, they may get electrocuted and killed.
Thousands of Christmas lights were pulled from the retail shelves of a major national retailer last year. This is an annual thing, as they get imported every year.
These Christmas lights had counterfeit CSA labels on them. All the components had counterfeit CSA marks, were substandard, and wouldn't meet our standards. They were fortunately pulled off the shelves of our national retailer, with only six being sold, because of the intelligence we received from China.
CSA investigated 204 incidents of counterfeit use of our mark in 2011. Most of those situations, we dealt with ourselves. So industry is dealing with the crime themselves.
In conclusion, I guess the government can play a role in improving the system to combat counterfeiting. The proliferation of products bearing counterfeit CSA marks is placing the public at direct risk. Counterfeit goods can kill, especially when it comes to certification marks being counterfeited. These products are definitely unsafe and untested.
Thank you very much.