Government Operations committee  I think they are ahead of us, because their industry drives their need to innovate. We have to change how we respond to that need. I am actually doing a joint standard for North America, the first one ever under the RCC pilot program. It's for, oddly enough, balloon-type backwat

Government Operations committee  Let Jean go first.

Government Operations committee  I have this tsunami hitting me right now—alarm systems. Alarm systems are a virtual technology, and we run the main committees in Canada for alarm standards. These are hitting us big time, because as Jean said, you have to write performance standards. The performance standards, t

Government Operations committee  The only one I would suggest, and it's a matter of clarification, is that the SCC is supposed to approve national standards of Canada, and though we are now moving towards this it's not exactly covered off. Other countries such as the U.S. allow the SDO to declare a standard with

Government Operations committee  I have sat on the code commission for the Canada fire and building codes for the last five years and have been in attendance for the last 12, and it has been somewhat embarrassing to sit there and hear the members go on and on about CGSB's lack of updating. I understand the probl

Government Operations committee  I have experienced all three that you mentioned. There are people who want us to dumb down to the lowest. They usually get told they can't. There is pressure to harmonize the north and south, or all three, and there is pressure on the Europeans. Generally so far the system has be

Government Operations committee  Well in our country, to be honest, the SDOs are not rich companies. The federal government and others will have to get together and drive it with the SCC. The SCC is probably best set to help push that through, but it needs to have that knowledge. If it costs $10,000 a day to be

Government Operations committee  I gave an example of the electric vehicles standards which in the U.S. were written 12 years ago. We're just doing them now and we're using the American standards. We should have been doing them 12 years ago with the Americans, if we could have. That's an example of where we miss

Government Operations committee  There are some, but not as many as there could be.

Government Operations committee  There are just a few.

Government Operations committee  Well, one is that in some areas there's an overly heavy administrative burden. As my staff always say, “Are we more interested in the outcomes, or are we interested in dotting the i's and crossing the t's in the process?”. That's always a challenge. I think the other challenge is

Government Operations committee  I think Jean covered it. I am the chair of the international ISO committee on second-hand goods—an interesting topic—and the issue there is that I was appointed by ISO but was delegated by the SCC, as he said. We hold, I think, seven national committees for ISO, and we hold three

Government Operations committee  I would say that we're rated very highly because our consensus system is very robust.

Government Operations committee  I would say that we are closest probably to the Australian-British model.

Government Operations committee  As for our voting record, when I came to the SCC, the voting failure at ISO and the IEC was 32%.