Government Operations committee  Des is absolutely right. We do use external consultants, mostly for auditing services. To answer your other questions, the number has increased over, I would say, the last four years, primarily because our staffing levels have been reduced. Around 2010, we had about 46 people on

Government Operations committee  Well, to clarify—

Government Operations committee  Reduction in personnel has been done completely through attrition. A number of people have retired over the years and we have not backfilled the positions. On the standards side, we've also put in what I would call efficiencies, because we've improved our processes. We hope to c

Government Operations committee  Thank you for the question. GCStandards were introduced this year to meet the needs of our federal government clients. As you know, we are accredited by the Standards Council of Canada to develop standards in Canada. There are several constraints when it comes to accreditation.

Government Operations committee  In the accreditation system for any committee, we have to make sure that there is a balance between the producers, the users and what we call the general interest representatives. Normally, we have consumers, representatives from non-profit organizations, and so on. It depends on

Government Operations committee  It might be consultants or academics. They are often people from the university community or from non-profit organizations. They can represent the interests of the environment, for example.

Government Operations committee  Who selects the committee members? On our team, we have standard-setters who have expertise in their respective area, which means that they will look for participants in the industry and in universities. If it's a new committee, they will consult the other committees to see if t

Government Operations committee  GCStandards is a product prepared outside the accreditation system, which means that it is a product that is specifically for the government when it does not need a standard from the accreditation system. Let's take Fisheries and Oceans Canada, for example. Perhaps the departmen

Government Operations committee  Yes, it can be a guideline, but also a standard that gives public servants directives for their program. It may be a standard established for their program, for themselves.

Government Operations committee  No, it is less costly because the standard development system requires the creation of a committee and also public consultations. There are lots of rules of the game. It usually takes a year and a half, if not two years to develop a standard. In fact, certain steps need to be

Government Operations committee  I think I can answer your question. Back about four or five years ago we had 856 standards that were over five years old. As of April 15, we have 162, so that means we've addressed 81%—

Government Operations committee  The ones that are left will probably take between one and two years to be completed, but we are working on all of them.

Government Operations committee  No. We've never done that analysis on a case-by-case basis. We recently did an analysis of the petroleum committee, because we were—

Government Operations committee  The national standards system that we are part of represents only a fraction of the standards systems in Canada, and it's like that in all countries. We represent what's called the voluntary standards system, which falls under the area of ISO and the IEC, the International Electr

Government Operations committee  Thank you. I'd like to try to answer your question. We have two standards for organic food in Canada. We have the organic agriculture standard and the organic aquaculture standard. They are both national standards of Canada. They were financially supported by Agriculture Canada