Government Operations committee  You're absolutely right. I think one of the virtues of the system is the requirement to have balance in the committees between users and manufacturers. All the major vested interests have to be in the room. There has to be a balance between the number of representatives so no one

Government Operations committee  If we weren't there, you would probably have a much more skewed process. If you didn't have these principles, I honestly doubt whether many people would participate in the process, because they wouldn't believe that they were effectively represented and were being listened to. P

Government Operations committee  The short answer in this case in terms of the standards is that the committee establishes the standard.

Government Operations committee  Sorry. It's an excellent question. You're absolutely right, and we will take that on as a recommendation and do that work. But I have to tell you, you're absolutely right. There's no way any of these standards-writing bodies could do this work if they had to pay. These are all si

Government Operations committee  Yes. Let me try to answer that. Again, it's complex. There are only eight organizations accredited by the Standards Council of Canada as Canadian standards development organizations. That's the definition, but there are other institutions that also go out in an industry-specific

Government Operations committee  I'm sure there are hundreds.

Government Operations committee  I don't know if we have a list, but a significant number of our standards are in regulations, so we'd have to look at how that would impact the capacity of that regulation to be maintained in Canada. That would have direct impact there. Obviously, in terms of those who would ma

Government Operations committee  I do. Public Works spends between $13 billion and $16 billion on procurement on an annual basis.

Government Operations committee  It's $3 million but $2.1 million is recuperated through fees.

Government Operations committee  It's less than $1 million; it's $900,000.

Government Operations committee  Well, I'll be very frank you. Not everything the government buys needs a CGSB standard, but there are some things that do. I know at one point in CGSB we tried to estimate the impact of CGSB standards on government procurement, and it was just over $1 billion in about 1989. Tha

Government Operations committee  Yes.

Government Operations committee  I'm going to start with an answer, and then I'm going to ask Begonia, because she has more technical knowledge than I do, to be honest. Let's say you're a Canadian company, and the first thing you want to do is sell in Canada. The first thing you'd want to know is whether there

Government Operations committee  Yes I can. You're absolutely right. I apologize for that. CGSB at one point, in about 1990, had 1,300 standards in its collection. A lot of these standards were in fact created more because they were specifications for government products. We took them all off the books. Basicall

Government Operations committee  Okay, I'll go very quickly. You're absolutely right, we've reduced them. We now have a collection of about 350 standards. In 2008—