How the Conservatives Helped us (or didn’t) Part III

Fellow travellers;

Have you ever wondered why aerospace companies have such routine access to so much taxpayer money? Have you pondered how they can default on 94% of their Federal loans without penalty? Or how they can get away with seemingly anything and suffer no consequences, not even investigations?
Have you wondered how the Canadian Standards Association (CSA) gets away with all that they’ve been caught doing?

Watercup.

Shakedown: So, CSA was doing their usual shakedown, promising to harm the man if he didn’t pay whatever CSA wanted, and it’s protection money that they wanted. The CSA disregarded Queen’s Printer laws, the Statutory Instruments Act, and Federal contract law, all in one magical meeting. We got the same treatment, but it was by phone. Face to face threat-making is so much friendlier.

“Trust me”.

The Ruling was a lemon. So let’s make lemonade.

They got letters.

Renegade judiciary:

On March 8, 2016, the Federal Court of Canada issued a Decision in the CSA vs. P.S. Knight case which alters the common and historic understanding of the ownership of Federal and provincial law.
The Court ruled that text submitted to government by non-government parties for inclusion within legislation remains the private intellectual property of the originator or copyright assignment holder for that text, provided that the drafting of that text was not conducted under the direction of government.
As most legislation includes text voluntarily drafted by interested parties and their representatives, the text covered by the Court ruling represents the majority of Federal and provincial legislation in Canada.
[…]
Beyond PS Knight’s interests, the Ruling means that every publication which quotes from legislation that incorporates the contributions of citizens, lobbyists, etc. is now violating the private property rights of those persons who had contributed to that legislation.
Every legal publishing house in Canada is affected. Carswell Publishers, LexisNexis, Thompson Reuters, Evan Ross, Martins -all of these extensively quote from domestic law in their commentaries on domestic law.

Somehow, I don’t think they’ll be held to the same standard.

Curiouser and curiouser: They’ve posted a vacancy for their CEO position, yet they’re not replacing their CEO. They’re angry that we reported their vacancy / non-vacancy, yet they still have the vacancy posted publicly. They demand that we retract the report that they’re recruiting another CEO, while telling the world that they’re recruiting another CEO…

A reminder to readers — I was aware of the deep problems with Canadian Standards Ass’n certifications long before Gordon Knight came along. So, a heads up to Conservative leadership donors: prepare to be disappointed.
I know I am.

“Open Letter to CSA’s new CEO”

Restore CSA;

The Canadian Standards Association (CSA) is about to announce their new CEO. This new hire replaces Ash Sahi, the former CEO that RestoreCSA managed to chase out the door late last year. Since Sahi’s firing, the CSA has been run by a committee of executives and, as everyone knows, the best way to efficiently and decisively run any organization is through an unwieldy, bureaucratic committee.

Restore CSA;

Why does CSA think it owns the law? Well, the CSA coordinates the drafting of a wide range of legislation, including electrical laws. The CSA thinks they own the law on the basis that they drafted its text and lobbied for its passage into law, therefore they own those portions of law that contain their contributions.
The trouble of course, is that CSA isn’t alone in lobbying governments. There are an awful lot of contributors to public law and, should CSA win, then by precedent all of these contributors would own their portions of the law.
Does that sound chaotic? It should.
Right now, CSA is restricting public access to public law, the only way anyone can see some of these laws is by paying CSA for that privilege. But it gets worse. As presumed owner of these laws, CSA is also charging for the enforcement of law. That is, they charge a use rate for each instance of compliance with what they call their laws.

Restore CSA;

Manufacturers understand CSA. That is, they know that CSA testing isn’t real, certifications mean nothing, etc. But they treat CSA’s staged processes as just part of the cost of doing business in Canada. It’s like a tax, you pay if you want to play.
Manufacturers start talking when CSA induced expenses begin to outstrip their revenues. One manufacturer recently complained to us about CSA’s money grubbing. Apparently the CSA hits them up for money at every possible stage of their business operations. The CSA even charges just to update a file.
“When [certain] components became obsolete they were changed” to other already approved components. Just to register that change “in CSA’s paperwork or computer, their MINIMUM charge is $825.00 PER CHANGE.  This is $2,475.00 for [these] three changes.  Along with this, there is[an] annual CSA maintenance charge of $1123.50.”  And on top of that, CSA charges for mandatory site inspections, most of which don’t involve any actual inspection.

Churnover: As a result, 31% of CSA’s board have exited in 2015, and we’re only halfway through the year. Officially, in this year alone, the cumulative turnover has now reached 61%. That’s 12.31 times the national average.

Well, this is just juvenile;

In May of this year, CSA launched a claim against RestoreCSA with the Canadian Internet Registry Authority (CIRA).
In Canada, CIRA is the authority responsible for the registration of website addresses. They don’t control the content of websites but they do have power over the addresses of websites using the “.ca” suffix. In this case, the CSA was claiming the right to own the RestoreCSA.ca address and, on this argument, they made some demands.
Specifically, CSA requested that CIRA “order that the registration of [RestoreCSA.ca] be transferred to the Complainant.” In other words, they wanted CIRA to take the RestoreCSA.ca address away from its legal owner, P.S. Knight Co. Ltd., and give that ownership to CSA Group.

And they lost.

The Inspector’s Debate.

“I have read the amendments and am a little dumbfounded as to the changes. […] I know this may sound a little bit like paranoia but this Code seems like it was written exclusively to exclude my product.“

We also requested copies of Industry Canada’s correspondence related to our company, PS Knight Co Ltd, and the CSA and its affiliates. We wanted to know what they had been saying about us, what they had said to CSA about us, and what orchestrating between them was underway. Well, Industry Canada advised that this search will require 27,983 hours of time and we have accordingly been invoiced for $279,780.

So, Michael Jackson made a widget. It was a lovely widget, this widget. It was cheaper than anything on the market and was demonstrably safer than anything on the market. Indeed, Michael’s widget had run the engineering gauntlet and, as a safety device, had been demonstrated in a long series of mandated, independent testing to be objectively safer than the competition.
In fact, the competition’s widget had never been run through any engineering gauntlet. The competition’s widget was an old design and its introduction predated most of the currently mandated testing. This old design is the status-quo widget, and the manufacturers of said widget were on the CSA committee that decided new product certification.
Well, Michael paid a fortune to have his widget tested to CSA’s satisfaction but, however satisfactory it was proven to be, the CSA committee wouldn’t certify the widget for use in the market. It took years of effort and expense, the expenditure of nearly a life’s savings and a relocation to the US, but no matter how many times his widget passed its tests, the CSA committee of his competitors wouldn’t certify his widget.
While we were pondering Michael’s story we heard from another caller, this time from Canada and he had a very similar story. Larry Mullen’s story is uniquely interesting, because Larry’s on the CSA’s Canadian Electrical Code Committee. Larry’s an insider.