On January 5th, 2015, the CSA published a series of amendments to existing electrical law. The CSA decided not to subject these legislative amendments to public review. Or, more bluntly, the CSA decided to violate the law. And they’ve been violating these public review laws in each new legislative amendment to electrical law since 2006.

“So, what to do with Sahi.” That was the discussion.

Restore CSA: Moore’s Response Takes Fifty-One Weeks (and counting!)

The Canadian Standards Association…

…recently hired a new lawyer, joining the half dozen or so lawyers already engaged on RestoreCSA issues. But this new lawyer is unlike the others.
The CSA’s new counsel is Mr. Glen Jennings. He’s a criminal defence attorney.

Hewlett-Packard Recalls CSA Certified Products

We know that CSA has been selling influence over legislated standards and that manufacturers have been trading money for influence on CSA standards committees. We also know that CSA safety testing sometimes doesn’t involve any testing at all. We know that in practice, the CSA certification sticker means almost nothing.
What we don’t know is what went wrong with this certification.

Casualties in Cleveland;

RestoreCSA has a copy of a PowerPoint presentation given to CSA executives on the subject of potential fallout from false certification. Within this document, the CSA is fretting that they had to disclose “test results to confirm compliance.” Why were they worried? Because the test results didn’t exist. The presentation plainly acknowledges that consumer products are being certified despite “a lack of test data to support compliance.” Separately, we have a CSA executive’s handwritten notes from that meeting, and they’re impressive too. This executive indicates concern about “failing results” being noticed by government regulators. And they were under heavy scrutiny. As though the government was on to them, the notes refer to worries about “the need to report by tomorrow.” The notes also use the term “Gianluca.” What do you suppose that means?
In this crooked context, the victim was falling fast. The CSA kept threatening him with termination unless he started signing documents that he knew he shouldn’t sign. In one heart-rending discussion, we were told of the pressures he experienced at CSA. “He kept refusing, he just… I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m… I just need a moment.” And after a moment, the core of the problem: “he was raised honest, it’s just how he was.”
At the end of his days, “he was very worried about not having any money for bills.” He had no job. The CSA had “eliminated” him, apparently he wasn’t cooperative enough. Of CSA’s engineers, one insider confirms, they “run [the new engineers] through in about two-year intervals just to keep enough ‘paper’ on file to maintain the certifications. Then they get rid of them before they learn too much about how we operate to where they could be a threat.” The victim, it seems, caught on to CSA’s system too quickly. And worse, “he was talking about CSA too much afterward to others.”

Restore CSA;

Lets review. In 2010 the CSA was caught running an eight year-long counterfeiting operation in the sales of fake safety certifications of modular buildings. The CSA was caught falsifying test results, skipping entirely whole ranges of safety tests for consumer products, they have been selling blank product certifications to manufacturers, they’ve even had CSA secretarial staff authoring their engineering reports. This is the context in which the CSA is testing and certifying Canada’s operating room equipment. At the same facility. By the same staff.

“Good morning, my name is Oscar Jensen. I am 1 of 5 private investors of a consortium we call COPI (Consortium of Private Investors). […] We have come across the Dominion Airships website and we are very intrigued with the innovation.” So began a saga, a sideshow to the big show in CSA’s fight against PS Knight Co.

Restore CSA;

Its not just that CSA leadership is living large while the little people’s paycheques are getting smaller. Its how the leaders are getting their money.
A lot of “mostly long term mid level Canadian CSA staff are in the process of being whacked over last 2 weeks […] and not with the generous packages that were once the norm when Rob Griffin was in charge […] and I’m sure they have stories to tell you”. Indeed they do.
It turns out that getting more money means shifting CSA jobs to other countries. China now has a large CSA staff, of locals of course, not Canadians. And the CSA has a new facility in India. The Calcutta Standards Association? Then there’s the expansive CSA operation in Cleveland, and the CSA is moving even more jobs south later this year. Consumer product safety certifications for all of Canada are already handled out of Ohio. The Cleveland Standards Association? There sure are a lot of foreigners running Canada’s standards regulator.

Depends on who’s suing them: Is the Canadian Standards Association (CSA) a private not-for-profit corporation, or is it an agency of the Federal Government?

Minister of Industry, James Moore, claims that “the CSA is not government-mandated” and is “not a regulatory body,” that it “has no regulatory role in Canada,” and that the CSA “does not report to the Minister of Industry either directly or indirectly” and “does not report to the Standards Council of Canada.”
Likewise, the CSA claims that its a private, not-for-profit corporation founded in 1919.
So we did some digging.

Restore CSA;

From among these documents, the anonymous insider identified one particularly revealing example of [Canadian Standard Ass’n] certification. The insider quoted the “Master Contract” and report numbers for a product that had been submitted for CSA safety testing. This product was failed by the engineer assigned to test it (though we have copies of the tests, we’ll decline to name the honest engineers for obvious reasons). That’s a good failure, by the way, the product did not comply with minimum safety standards and failed its safety tests, so the engineer rightly failed it. That’s what they’re supposed to do. After that failure, the product manufacturer resubmitted the same product, with no changes or improvements, for retesting. The product was failed a second time, on this occasion by a different CSA engineer. Again, this engineer acted correctly. RestoreCSA has long maintained that there are good and decent people in CSA’s house of cards, they’re just not in charge of the place.
So what happened to the failed product?

Question for @SaskPower – were those faulty smart meters CSA approved? http://t.co/KTcwZDLJuV

— Katewerk (@katewerk) August 6, 2014

“I think his job was just to hide stuff“.

Notes from the Enron School of Accounting;

We don’t know the travel expense breakdowns, as between airfares and hotels for instance, because the CSA is exempted from the Freedom of Information Act as well as the transparency and accountability requirements standard to other government entities. So we ran the numbers we did have. It turned out that the CSA’s 2013 travel budget would cover 74,256 return airfares from CSA’s Toronto office to Ottawa each year. That’s 297 return airfares to Ottawa per workday or, if you prefer, its 12 return trips per hour, every hour, on a 24 hour day, each workday, for a full year.

A Canadian Standards Association “Certified” home.

And a new site – CSAStory.ca

Dear Minister Moore;

We have not received your response to our letter of 04 December 2013 regarding the above noted matter. Likewise, we have not received your response to our letter of 21 January, 2014 reminding you of our December letter. Neither have we received your response from our letter of 15 April, 2014 reminding you of our previous two letters. In the twenty-eight weeks since our first correspondence we have received no answers to any of the six questions that we have submitted to your Department on the above noted matter.

You can contact him here. I just did.

As widgets go, this was a big one, it arrived on a pallet, tied down with steel strapping. The product was thoroughly tested by a man named Mustafa and the widget failed all of its safety tests. The [Canadian Standards Ass’n0 sent the product back to the manufacturer for modification.
So far, so good. The manufacturer was pretty big, nearly as big as their widget, and the steel strapping that they used was company branded. That is, their company name was printed on the strapping…

This is just astonishing.

Restore CSA;

Mustafa is a manager at CSA, he has a staff, a whole group of engineers report to him. Throughout the years of his rule, every engineer knew to tow the line, that Mustafa wanted products certified without regard to actual testing or safety. “If an employee did not push these projects through, they were harassed and eventually removed from the company.”
Some employees wanted these practices cleaned up, but they suspected that Internal Audit’s Cindy Mao would betray them rather than protect them, and some knew that HR was up to its neck in whistleblower firing practices. Several employees, on their own, turned to CSA executive Rich Weiser to clean out the corruption and to protect them from Internal Audit. And Rich Weiser had the power to clean the place, he was the CSA’s Executive Vice President for US & Mexico.
One by one, these employees approached Weiser’s office, each unaware that others had come before them, and each hoping to help restore CSA. Kathleen Decker is Rich Weiser’s assistant, and she wasn’t a fount of kindness. She told them “to quit or commit suicide.”

You see, the [Canadian Standards Association] had an informal policy in its testing facility that every new product should fail the first test, that way the CSA can charge twice for the same certification. So by this standard, the first test didn’t need any actual testing per se, the product was predetermined to fail for financial reasons.
Manufacturers are generally aware of these practices but there’s not much they can do about them. Its just a cost of doing business. Safety certification is mandatory, the CSA is unavoidable, so double charging is a sort of tax that everyone grumbles about but eventually it gets paid.

But wait! It gets better.

“We want to talk to you about Cindy Mao.”