Publisher takes CSA battle to Parliament
In a last-ditch escalation of a legal battle that could bankrupt his family business, a calgary publisher of an electrical manual is taking his fight to Parliament this week, asking senior cabinet ministers and influential committees to weigh in on the business practises of cSA Group, canada’s main producer of safety standards and certifications.
Gordon Knight’s complaints range from the legalistic to the extreme, from claims about opaque financial statements and lavish travel expenses of $15-million a year, all the way up to the claim that cSA Group allows foreign entities to exert influence, via their system of paid membership, on the safety regulations that eventually become canadian law.
In response, cSA Group dismisses the complaints as false and misguided, and said they represent an effort to deflect attention from a straightforward case of copyright infringement, in which cSA Group alleges Mr. Knight republished sections of the electrical code without permission. They are also based on a misleading description of what the cSA actually does, said Anthony Toderian, manager of corporate affairs for cSA Group.
“These allegations are baseless, for starters, and they’re simply untrue,” he said. cSA Group is not a regulator and never has been, he said, nor is it part of government, and Mr. Knight’s latest round of lobbying is “simply to deflect” from the copyright infringement lawsuit.
“we are documenting these allegations,” he said.
Mr. Knight has been involved in litigation with the cSA for several years, since it first tried to buy the company his father created in british columbia, P.S. Knight co. Ltd., which produces a plain-language guide to the electrical code, and which did good business in a construction boom. but when cSA started producing a guide of its own, the Knights became competitors. They are now countersuing for breach of confidence, alleging they had the cSA’s permission all along.
Mr. Knight said he expects he would win in court, with his claim that no private entity should exert copyright control over canadian law, but that he will run out of money before the inevitable appeals are exhausted. Instead, he is taking the fight to Ottawa, pushing for legislative reform. he has even asked Peter MacKay, the Justice Minister, for a legal opinion on the question of whether the sale of cSA Group memberships and votes to foreign entities violates the criminal code section on treason.
he also urges Parliament to formally separate the cSA’s regulatory activity from its commercial activity, and to affirm that “any article passed into law … becomes sovereign (cannot be owned by foreign powers) and public (cannot be owned by private interests).”
regarding the treason claim, Mr. Toderian said: “It’s 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 it’s [developed by] an open and transparent process that is accredited by the Standards council of canada. If the Standards council of canada thought that we were in any way allowing one party to influence … they would review that code or that standard and they would make us go back and revisit that. It’s simply not possible under the current canadian guidelines.”
founded nearly 100 years ago with a focus on railway and bridge safety, cSA Group, formerly the canadian Standards Association, is a nonprofit membership-based private company whose voluntary codes and standards on electrical work and other standards are frequently adopted as law in whole or in part, by municipal and provincial governments. It is regulated by the Standards council of canada, a crown corporation.
cSA has 8,000 members in canada and the U.S., most of whom are manufacturers. Mr. Toderian said it uses a “balanced matrix approach, which ensures that no single party can dominate.”
The group charges companies for testing and certification, and has a reported $150-million in the bank, and no debt.
“we are a not-for-profit business, but we are operating in a competitive marketplace,” Mr. Toderian said. he said the key to success in that climate is that it be able to take in revenue from the sale of its copyrighted materials, which is then reinvested in the development of new standards.