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.”

The money machine;

An executive position at the [Canadian Standards Association] is a pretty cush gig. The CSA’s only oversight is the Standards Council of Canada, an outfit run by former executives of the CSA. The Council is run by Industry Canada, which for years had as its senior advisor a member of the Board of Directors of the CSA. There seems a circularity to these relationships. The cush gig extends to money, the CSA being indeed a money machine. They can compel people to buy their products and they can charge whatever they wish. The CSA is exempted from the accountability and transparency requirements that they drafted for others to follow. They have acquired for themselves thirty-six offices around the world located for practicality at major industrial centres like the Brook Hills Golf Resort and the Bluegrass Yacht and Country Club. They also spend over $65k per day on travel though, in fairness, RestoreCSA is hearing noises from the CSA’s CFO group that the $65k per day they officially reported as travel expenditure wasn’t really spent on travel. In the Mike Duffy mindset, one shouldn’t take expense reporting too literally.

Inside the Canadian Standards Association…

…there’s a division called the Notices Group. This division is supposed to “help ensure that your products continue to meet the latest standards requirements.” In theory, the Notices Group sends updates to certified manufacturers to advise of changes to various product safety standards. There is no prescribed regularity to such notices, they’re sent at CSA’s pleasure. And that’s where the trouble starts.
Updates from the Notices Group usually require retesting of an already tested product. Upon receipt of Notices Group updates, quoting CSA documentation, “in most cases, re-submittal of samples and / or documentation for testing and / or evaluation by a CSA Group certifier is required.” And, of course, the CSA runs a lucrative product testing facility. So, in sum, the CSA has the power to mandate retesting of certified products whenever it suits them, and then they charge the manufacturers for all that mandated retesting. Its like printing money, and its a pretty big incentive to issue plenty of updates.
This isn’t just a potential problem. According to whistleblowers, whenever CSA has a slow quarter the Notices Group starts churning out new updates. Said one insider, the “updates were for revenue only, a shakedown.” “There were updates without amendments that applied to product lines, [the CSA] charged companies anyway, [and this was done] regularly.” The substance of such updates is usually cosmetic, just enough to justify the new billings. “The Notices Group would up the standard arbitrarily in order to bill for an update. This is called ‘revving the report’.”

Cross-Border Influence;

Last year, the National Post reported our growing suspicions about [Canadian Standards Association’s] relationship with foreigners. In response to the Post’s queries about CSA selling influence to foreigners, the CSA’s Anothony Toderian claimed that “its simply not possible for us to do that. There’s no way that we can give influence over the Canadian Electrical Code to anybody because its developed by an open and transparent process…” (etc. and so forth).
Well, during 2012, Mr. Tom Buchal of Intertek Energy Services was “given influence over the Canadian Electrical Code.” In fact, the CSA lists him as an author of that legislation. And he lives on US Route 11 in Cortland, New York.
Then there’s Watts Reliant, Inc., whose Engineering Manager, a man named Dustin Allcorn, was also given influence over the 2012 Code. He’s from Springfield, Missouri. Mr. Dave Clements is another author, and he lives in Richardson, Texas. […]
Then there’s the really awkward part. The CSA knows that its not supposed to be giving influence over Canadian law to foreigners, much less selling that influence. They know this, they’ve admitted this internally. We know they know. Know why?

Meet Mustafa the Manager;

Requirements for one duration safety test on the Viking cooktop prescribed three days for which Mustafa had allocated only four hours of time. At risk of insulting the intelligence of the reader, one cannot compress seventy-two hours of duration testing into four hours, it offends the laws of physics.
The engineer responsible for this testing complained, in the parking lot. Hence the argument. Mustafa advised the engineer, in colourful and creative language and at high volume, that the engineer would indeed find a way to cram seventy-two hours of testing into four hours “or I’ll cancel your vacation.” Well, that’s incentive.
That’s also pretty normal at [the Canadian Standards Association]. On one occasion, Mustafa conducted a month-long duration test in two days. Or so says the product file, and so confirms our sources. But, again, the laws of physics get in the way. What CSA claims as having happened isn’t physically possible. The file may indeed record a magical result, but that result says more about CSA practices than the flexibility of the laws of physics.
So what happened with the Viking cooktop? Well, “he ended up copying off the previous certification for a similar product, itself having been copied from a previous certification for a similar product, making the results of the current ‘test’ meaningless.” That cooktop, so thoroughly certified as safe, is now on sale across the land. This is how CSA does safety certifications of consumer products. These products are in your homes.

“Why am we not hearing this on the news?” you ask. “The heavy investigative lifting has already been done!”
Well, with so many in media now married to politics, the journalistic offspring are too lazy to steal.

Restore CSA;

The [Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission] has been paying the Canadian Standards Association (CSA) millions of dollars to develop nuclear safety regulations on its behalf. That’s a problem because the CNSC is responsible for regulations, not the CSA, and because the CSA has no background whatsoever in nuclear safety.
[…]
In May of 2013, RestoreCSA contacted the CNSC. We wanted to know which CNSC regulations had been outsourced to the CSA and at what cost. To our happy surprise, they furnished some data. Here’s what we found therein.
Eighty-two percent of current CSA nuclear standards are included in the CNSC regulatory framework. That’s a lot of outsourcing! In trade for the use of CSA’s standards, the CNSC pays over $500k per year to the CSA. But the CNSC also “contributes” 440 person days to the CSA’s nuclear committees. We asked the CNSC if the cost of this contribution was included in the $500k per year figure. The CNSC replied on May 30, 2013 that staff contributions are external to the $500k per year figure but they couldn’t tell us what the actual staff value was because “the financial value of the staff effort in Table 8 has not been calculated at this time.” But the CNSC Evaluation Report notes that the “additional costs to Standards development borne by CNSC staff” was internally estimated at $495,563 in 2012.
In sum then, the CNSC is sending $1,008,888 to the CSA every year in payment for the CSA’s development of the CNSC’s nuclear regulations.
But what about the 440 person days of CNSC staff time? What do you suppose those CNSC staff are doing? Lets recall that the CNSC is Canada’s nuclear regulator, they’re our national nuclear experts. The CSA on the other hand, has no nuclear expertise at all. In this context, on September 23, 2013, we wrote to the CNSC to ask some pointed questions. What, exactly, are these 440 person days for?
[…]
Alright, if the CSA has no nuclear expertise whatsoever and only brings administrative assistance to the committee, if the CNSC would draw on the same nuclear expertise if they formed their own committee, if the CNSC is actually mandated by the Government to do all of this, and if the CSA’s administrative services are astoundingly expensive, then why is the CNSC washing regulations through the CSA?
Consider that the Nuclear Safety and Control Act contains the following provision: “Nothing in this section relieves the [CNSC] of liability in respect of a tort or extra-contractual civil liability to which the [CNSC] would otherwise be subject.” In contrast, the CSA has been repeatedly afforded broad immunities from civil litigation, well beyond those typical to the civil service. Washing nuclear regulations through the CSA affords a greater degree of immunity to the CNSC for any liabilities associated with them.

But according to official filings of the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission (CNSC), the CNSC furnished “440 person days” of labour in “contribution” to the work of the [Canadian Standards Association] and another half million dollars in payments from the CNSC to subsequently access that work. In rough figures, the CNSC is transferring one million dollars per year to the CSA for the development of nuclear regulations. And the CNSC of course, isn’t a “major organization involved in that sector,” the CNSC is the Federal Government.
There’s actually quite a story behind this activity. It seems that the CNSC is legally accountable for its regulatory activity, whereas the Government has given the CSA broad immunities from litigation. In this context, the CNSC appears to be spending its “440 person days” developing nuclear regulations as they are mandated to, and then “contributing” the work of their own staff to the CSA in order to make the CSA responsible for that work. Then the CNSC pays money to the CSA to access the regulations that CNSC-come-CSA staff developed. This is what’s called an in-and-out process, though its more commonly known as “laundering”.

But there’s plenty more.

The Moore we ask, the less we know;

You see, if one were to ask the current Minister of Industry whether the [Canadian Standards Association] is a government regulator, the answer would be “no.” But if you asked an agency within Industry Canada, as we once did, the answer would be “yes.” If you were to ask the CSA if they were part of government they would say “no.” Unless you asked one of their foreign offices, in which case the answer would change to “yes.” If Industry Canada asked the CSA the answer would be “no.” If The Competition Bureau asked them, and they did, then the answer changes to “yes.”
See the problem?

Sheila Copps, from the comments;

I didn’t know I had so many small dead fans. On a serious note, as was mentioned in a previous comment, the CSA is a national organization. The federal industry committee is being asked to take a look at what has been going on. Perhaps your readers could send support for this suggestion along to the Honourable James Moore.
For more info, check out the RestoreCSA.com website.

In this context, I would like to receive the Government of Ontario’s response to the following questions:
1. Does the Province of Ontario believe that private companies can own public law?
2. If public law cannot be privately owned, what is the basis for royalty payments made by the Province to [Canadian Standards Association]?
3. Does the Province of Ontario pay royalties to any other lobby group or private company in exchange for submissions made to any legislative committee or any Provincial Ministry?
4. If there is no basis for royalty payments made by the Province to CSA, will the Province of Ontario commit to an immediate termination of all such payments to CSA and an attempted recovery of past payments made to CSA?
5. Does the Province of Ontario agree that if public law cannot be privately owned, and if dissemination of public law is in the public interest, there is no basis for restricting the private dissemination of public law?

Good for her.

Restore CSA;

The [Canadian Standards Association] has been providing influence over the drafting of Canadian law to a variety of foreign governments, foreign owned companies and to the citizens of foreign countries.
Care to verify that? A partial list of CSA committee members, the folks who draft law, is available here. But its only a partial list, mind you.
The CSA claims that their public list includes “all CSA Corporate Supporters,” but sources inside the CSA have furnished us with an internal membership list, and it doesn’t match the public list. Their internal list is much, much longer. And its crammed with foreigners. […]
We were also surprised to learn that CSA is selling access to, and control of, Canada’s laws from the United States. Right now, if you want permission to read certain Canadian laws, you have to phone to Ohio and make a payment to CSA’s US office. Then you can read the laws that apply to you. Its true, the CSA’s Lisa Eberman runs this operation from an office in Cleveland, OH.