Provincial & Territorial Trade

The Standards Council of Canada (SCC) is committed to maintaining strong and effective relationships with Canada's ten provinces and three territories.

From a standardization perspective, many challenges including trade disputes, health and safety concerns and environmental issues face Canadian provinces and territories. The SCC facilitates provincial and territorial access to the National Standards System (NSS) with the aim of encouraging dialogue, information exchange and providing possible solutions to these challenges.

A very important mechanism for provincial and territorial interaction is the work of the Provincial-Territorial Advisory Committee (PTAC). The advisory committee is composed of 13 members - one representative from each province and territory - who offer advice and recommendations to the SCC Council and promote cooperation and communication between the provinces, territories and the SCC. Part of PTAC's work involves maintaining relationships with several other provincial and territorial groups.

The SCC advocates partnership approaches between the provinces and territories and other stakeholders in the National Standards System that are mutually beneficial. Two of the most recent examples of such partnerships include:

• Ontario's Safe Drinking Water Act - which call for all laboratories in the province that test drinking water to be SCC accredited.
• The SCC-Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources Sustainable Forest Management agreement  which establishes a mutual confidence between Ontario's regulatory framework and the SCC's voluntary third party accreditation system.

The SCC is also interested in the large volume of trade that takes place among the provinces and territories and it cooperates with PTAC and the Advisory Committee on Trade (ACT) to monitor issues related to the Agreement on Internal Trade  (AIT) that may influence the SCC.

The AIT is an agreement between the federal, provincial and territorial governments aimed at reducing and eliminating trade barriers and maintaining an open and stable domestic market.

As part of the update of the 2009-2012 Canadian Standards Strategy (CCS), and with reference to Chapter Four of the Agreement on Internal Trade (AIT), the SCC and PTAC are examining issues related to interprovincial procurement in order to promote the use of standards to remedy possible trade impediments.

As a first step, PTAC elected to focus upon one economic sector, namely Oil & Gas, primarily in terms of procurement by this industry in the Provinces of British Columbia, Alberta and Saskatchewan.
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