Justice committee  I agree with what she said. Is that succinct enough?

Justice committee  Let me add very quickly to it. You spoke about the ability of Parliament or of committees to oversee the use of changes to regulations. I can only tell you that the standards world is changing faster than I've ever seen in the last 20 years. To keep up with new technology, new standards are being brought forward all the time.

Justice committee  Yes.

Justice committee  Yes, it is.

Justice committee  Yes. There has been a huge amount of discussion internationally on accessibility, and there are all sorts of different options. Accessibility in some countries means freely available; in other countries it means available on a website. There are two test cases, in the United States and in Israel, in which the Supreme Court of Israel has ruled that accessibility to a standard means that it is accessible on a website to be read page by page, with no ability to copy, etc.

Justice committee  My only thoughts would be that it could be promulgated outside of Canada as any number of standards are, but unless they're referenced into law within this country, they don't have any standing in that law. I'm not sure how anyone could be found guilty of breaching something that was in place in Europe.

Justice committee  I'm not exactly sure what you mean by exclusively, sir.

Justice committee  Let me try and clarify that. If a department sets up its own regulation, it does it under its own rules. It wouldn't qualify as a standard from our point of view. That's simply a regulation. Where the federal staff, civil servants, sit on any kind of standards committee, national, regional, international, they are one of sometimes 20, sometimes 200 people who bring the technical expertise to that committee.

Justice committee  If it was a static process to reference a standard, it would reference a particular standard that had been produced and it would say, “That is the standard for Canada: this date, this version”. It could be updated and nobody would have changed it.

Justice committee  Yes.

Justice committee  That's a complicated question. Let me put it to you this way. I only speak of standards. I'm not speaking about other documents that would be referenced in regulation. The standards system is really quite solid. To address your comments directly, my concern is not the static or ambulatory referencing.

Justice committee  To be clear, sir, it's already happening. It's not as if this is a change. It's not like an outside agency that's adopting these into regulation. It's a government department. It's within the control of the government forever. I would still come back to the need for Treasury Board to develop guidelines so it's done consistently.

Justice committee  You're absolutely right in that there are concerns whether it's an international standard...whatever document, any document that you've referred to. That's why we believe very strongly that there needs to be Treasury Board guidelines set up so that there are certain processes. All of this is happening already.

Justice committee  I'm not an expert.

Justice committee  Thank you, that's a good question. No, it's a decision of the organization developing the standard as to whether they would go through our process and be designated a national standard of Canada.