Thank you, Mr. Chair and committee members, for inviting CSA here. As indicated, I'm a director with CSA and I have two of my colleagues here with me today.
We sent 70 slides in with the submission so we're not going to do that to you this afternoon. This is about discussion, and I'm not trying to put you to sleep with a PowerPoint presentation, but there are some key slides, and I'll go through them relatively quickly. Then I want to turn it over to Jeff and to Mike. They have some key messages they want to deliver as well.
The key points I want to focus on here in the information that was sent is what CSA is and how CSA standards support society and industry for the better good. Of course, if there are questions afterwards, we can respond.
We heard the hockey helmet and the refrigerator reference. We do much more than that when it comes to supporting industry and other initiatives. As I said, the information was sent through, and I'll focus on what CSA is and the standards development.
Here are some key facts about CSA. CSA was established in 1919, so we're coming up on our 100th birthday here. We're going to have a big cake and a celebration. The other key thing is that we have a presence in 14 countries. Saturday I returned from Taiwan. We had met with the Taiwanese government and industry officials, and they are adopting our standards for pipeline operations, so it's huge with regard to the recognition that we're seeing around the world and the adoption of the standards that have been developed by CSA.
Moving on to CSA standards, basically, we're a not-for-profit organization. We serve business, industry, government, and the consumer society. Our whole goal here and our vision is to make the world a better, safer, more sustainable place to be. We build our standards to that end to enhance public safety and health, quality of life, and to facilitate trade.
If I was to pick out one part of that to add on to Mr. Ferguson's information that he shared, it's that recently, and because we are not-for-profit, we have seen a vast decline in many areas of our operations in CSA. We produce training manuals and training classes on the standards. That has declined. The purchase of the publications have declined. Participation in our technical steering committees that come from industry, which I'll speak to in a minute, has declined, as has funding, which historically comes from industry and government sectors.
We're seeing a risk here to what CSA does. If the government wants to do right by Canada and it wants to fund the development of standards and programs to support industry, that's a key place that they could focus on. One of the organizations that is funded by the federal government is the NEB, the National Energy Board, which is key to many of the standards that CSA produces for the oil and gas industry.
Moving on, the slides show the breadth of where we operate and where we produce standards across the various programs: the electrical, the energy, the environment, and technical safety. It's not just focused strictly on the energy industry.
As for the standards development process, basically, CSA is a facilitator of an accredited process. We bring the experts to the table to develop the standards to put controls in place and run the industry safely and sufficiently. Those committees are composed of volunteers. They all volunteer their time and efforts and, of course, are funded by the companies they work for or by the programs that are funded by the government.
Slide nine shows a brief overview of the workload for standards development. The key thing to notice here is that there are three points in the process where standards in development are put out for public review. We have an opportunity for the public or for interested parties to actually submit a request for information or to provide any additions they want for the standards.
I want to touch on the part of the process that affects the energy industry in oil and gas. We also have a nuclear program, but I won't get into that today. I'll talk about the oil and gas program. It has been in existence for about 45 years. There are actually 20 committees that support the standards development process in the oil and gas industry, and about 400 members in 11 different areas are covered in the work that those committees do. That's found on slide 12, and those are all the green balloons, if you see them there.
On our goal in CSA moving forward, we opened an office in Calgary in 2014, and our goal there is to advance the development of standards in additional areas of the oil and gas industry. Currently, we deal with LPG—liquid petroleum gas—storage and handling and pipelines. We also want to get into the upstream industry on the refining side, into the gas processing side, and into the oil and well drilling and servicing piece as well. That's an area where we want to work with industry and the regulators to move forward and have more standards in place to support that side of the industry, sustain it going forward, and make it successful in Canada.
We see the technical committee and the formation of that now, so I'm not going to spend a lot of time on that. But on slide 14 you'll see that the two main standards in the oil and gas industry are supported by about 11 other standards. As we develop a standard, we start to develop more standards to support those various aspects of the industry to make sure the industry is safe and that we have regulatory and public confidence as we go forward.
We have a couple of slides there on security management and emergency management. Those are global. They aren't adopted just by the oil and gas industry. Many of our municipalities and cities have adopted these same standards for their emergency management processes and security processes.
Next, there are examples of some standards that are in development. The one on “fugitive emissions and venting” is a work in progress right now, as is the one on “well design”.
Moving into the piece away from standards development, CSA supports our standards with web applications and access. We have over 100 learning products that support the standards and about 10,000 customers who access our information annually.
On stakeholder engagement, we have about 9,000 members currently, and well over 40,000 people have actually come to our website in what we call our “community of interest”, which provides information to the public about what's going on within CSA, the various programs, and the status of those.
At that point, I'm going to stop. There is a ton of information that was sent to you. If you have any questions on it, of course we're prepared to answer.
I want to turn to Jeff first and let him give you a quick briefing on what he has going on.