The idea of a national standard of Canada again is that it remain impartial so that the process is fair when the standard is being developed and is not leaning toward one particular brand, as I mentioned earlier. It's not just the brands. Perhaps you can appreciate that in the service dog world or in any of this work, there are a multitude of different stakeholders from sectors, communities, disciplines, etc.
It's important that all of those people at the table be on the TC, the technical committee, because right now I have to make sure that the TC is going to be balanced. I have representation for about five different categories as well as five different regions across the country. There are rules to establish a national standard of Canada that we are obviously following very closely.
That said, the current situation in this environment in the service dog industry is very fragmented, and there's no rhyme or reason. Anybody can hang a shingle on their door. That's why once a standard is actually developed and published by the Standards Council of Canada, there will be an impartial standard that everybody helped to produce, that all of the various stakeholders had an opportunity to produce. Those who don't want to participate don't have to, but where it gets interesting is that if the government says, “My goodness, this is an amazing job. We like what we see here. We're going to reference those standards in our legislation”, then it becomes law. If it becomes law, that actually puts pressure on all of the industries involved to look at what kind of certification is going to happen to comply with the standard, because then it's no longer a choice; it's mandatory.
I've been researching this for over 20 years, and one of the nice things about NSCs is that not only can they be referenced in legislation, but when it comes to the conformity assessment piece, there's also a huge opportunity for third party accreditation bodies that already exist within Canada's national standards system, so we could turn to those organizations. Again, organizations may decide that they don't necessarily want to go through one particular accreditation body; there may be three or four, depending on the organization and the cost of accreditation.
There will be a lot of variables at that point in time, but there's definitely an opportunity for the national standards of Canada to also inform public policy, and through the process, the more public sector representation we get, the better. That way, we can look at our shared objectives—