Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

I'm delighted to have been invited this morning to present to you the key features of a paper that CIGI published in July of last year. The title of the paper—“Canada Needs Its 'New Approach' to Streamline Digital Rulemaking”—is squarely framed in the modernization of our regulatory framework in Canada.

I also want to thank the committee for using its resources to translate the document so you can access it in English and French. It's an excellent translation, by the way. I'm very happy to have it.

The paper's focus is about managing safety and innovation in a new world. We now have digital technologies that are clearly outpacing our ability to manage harms through regulations. The paper is about keeping Canadians safe.

The approach we propose in the paper is to modernize the Statutory Instruments Act. We recommend to formally recognize standards as statutory instruments alongside regulations, creating a completely new separate track to achieve compliance with laws, alongside regulations.

The way we look at this is that a law or legislation is about what you need to do and what the consequences are—the penalties—of not complying with the law. Regulations are about how to achieve compliance, and we argue that standards developed by accredited organizations are as efficient as regulations in achieving compliance with the law.

Today, standards are merely a footnote in the Statutory Instruments Act. They are mentioned as one category of documents that can be incorporated in a regulation. If you were to establish a separate standards track, you would give parliamentarians a power tool. You would give them the ability to force standard-setting as soon as a new technology is introduced in the marketplace. It would allow ministers to make standardization requests to the Standards Council of Canada, not for voluntary standards but for mandatory standards, standards that would have force of law once they were developed.

Now, let us be clear. It's not about prohibiting the use of new technologies, but about establishing clear requirements with industry and other stakeholders, through a credible process, to make them safe for use. When you look at the paper, you will see that we spend about 10 pages describing the standardization system, because it's operating under the radar for many of us, including legislators and regulators.

In the paper, you'll find there are more than 6,000 standards referencing federal, provincial and territorial regulations, standards that have been used by regulators since 1927, with the introduction of the Canadian electrical code. They're being used to keep Canadians safe when it comes to tangible products.

If you think about electrical safety, plumbing safety and building safety, it's all safety codes. It's all standards. If you add standards to the mandatory codes that are adopted by provinces and territories as well as by the federal government, you're looking at more than 10,000 standards that are used to keep Canadians safe. It's a parallel system, but it's an invisible system.

In Canada, we have more than 10,000 Canadians participating in the development and maintenance of standards. That's a lot of people. I would argue that there are more Canadians developing and maintaining standards in this country than there are regulators.

We're seeing the same thing when it comes to digital technologies. Here in Ottawa, we have an organization called the Digital Governance Standards Institute. They develop standards for digital technologies. Whether it's AI, electronic wallets or face recognition technologies, you have them everywhere, and we have thousands of Canadians participating in this. The paper shows as well that in Europe, in the U.S. and in the U.K., there are processes in place to direct the development of standards.

Do you want me to—