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Is our confidence in the Canadian Standards Association well placed?
Broadcast: November 9, 1999 | Producer: Richard Wright; Researcher: James Dunne

CSA seal

Most people have a good impression of what the Canadian Standards Association (CSA) is and does.

Television sets are CSA-certified. So are VCRs. When you plug them in, they should work. They shouldn't give you a shock, or blow a fuse. Fridges are certified by the CSA. So are toasters, toilets, sports equipment, washing machines...

Canadian Standards Association building

The Canadian Standards Association boasts that it certifies 100 items in the average home. You could say CSA is a household word. But what does the CSA's word really mean?

CSA says it means serving the needs of Canadian consumers. The CSA claims to provide an assurance that products will live up to performance and safety requirements drawn up by association.

Thanks to one product that didn't live up to consumer performance expectations, one Edmonton roofer is doing a brisk business. He's replaced untreated pine shake on 250 homes -- long before homeowners thought they would have to.

Untreated pine shakes were granted a CSA Standard in 1993

Most wood shake roofs are made of cedar which resists rot and is proven to perform well for more than 20 years.

But untreated pine shakes are relatively new. Used in the 1980s, they were granted a CSA Standard only in 1993. They were certified despite evidence they would last only half as long as cedar.

Fred Holtslag recalls when he first noticed his roof was rotting:

"It would be back in early April '98 I noticed some dark patches on my roof top and wanted to try to determine the cause of it. So I got on my ladder and up on my roof and started poking around."

Fred Holtslag

Although Holtslag's roof was installed before the CSA standard was written, he now heads the Alberta Pine Shake Homeowners Association.

It's seeking compensation for members' rotten roofs. His own roof cost $12,000 to replace. He says it was a good example of why pine shakes should not have been certified.

John Ruddick, a forestry professor at the University of British Columbia, was on the CSA committee that wrote the pine shakes standard. He resigned from the committee in protest.

"There was really no sound scientific study done on durability," he says, "and I'd indicated that without such a study, shakes would fail in 10 years."

John Ruddick

The CSA committee put nothing in their standard about how long pine shakes should have to last. Ruddick thought that was wrong. He says the committee ignored his advice.

Ruddick isn't the only one to say CSA standards fall short of ensuring the kind of performance and safety consumers expect.

The pine shakes story is just the latest in an ongoing series brought to you by Marketplace over the years:

• Last year it was the saga of plastic plumbing. Cheap, easy to install, but there was a problem -- despite its CSA approval, the pipe leaked.
  
  
• Before that it was halogen lamps: hot enough to fry an egg. Hot enough to start a fire. Certified by CSA.
  
  
• Radiant heating panels. Installed in the attic under the insulation, they can break down and burn. Another fire hazard certified by the CSA.
  
  
• CSA-certified Crane toilet tanks. No laughing matter for thousands of homeowners whose toilets broke and flooded their homes.
  
  
• Then there was electric heat tape. Supposed to keep water pipes from freezing, it too can burst into flames.
  
  
• And finally clothes dryer fires, a phenomenon about which one fire investigator contacted the CSA on multiple occasions, but never received a reply.
  

So when the CSA ad tells you to "Think safety," maybe you should think twice.

CSA gets its mandate to draft standards and to test and certify products from government, but it's not a government body. CSA is a business, and it's income comes mainly from industry. Manufacturers pay CSA to certify their products, and they sit on CSA's standards committees, and that raises the question of bias.

CSA claims to set up balanced committees. They say they include consumers on their committees which draft product standards, so as to achieve balance.

GET INVOLVED CSA International has a network of consumer volunteers who contribute to its standards and activities. Roughly one third of these volunteers work directly on standards development committees. Others provide input through surveys, forums, and other outreach activities. For more information, contact CSA's Member Services at: member@csa.ca

We looked at the committees that wrote the standards for the products we've investigated. The seven committees included 75 representatives of industry and only six consumers.

"The committee structure is certainly under stress," says Prof. Ruddick. He believes CSA committees often do good work, but vested interests, he adds, can have undue influence and weaken the standard.

"The key element there would be to make sure, from the CSA's point of view, that the CSA person monitoring the process really is vigilant to ensure that the process works the way it's supposed to," Ruddick says.

And have they been sufficiently vigilant?

"Well, I suppose not in the case of the shingles and shakes, in my opinion, no."

So what happens when a CSA-certified product fails?

Fred Holtslag

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