New legislation always has unintended consequences. Unintended, however, does not necessarily mean unforeseeable.

Bill C-36, the so-called Canada Consumer Product Safety Act (CCPSA), was passed by parliament in late December. It will have several consequences that are completely predictable—and very detrimental.

The CCPSA was designed to replace the 40-year-old Hazardous Products Act. It will supposedly “modernize” Canada’s regulatory regime, bring it into line with the United States and Europe and save Canadians from maiming and death at every turn by empowering bureaucrats to more easily remove dangerous products from the marketplace.

This motherhood-type goal seems to have driven out of parliamentarians’ minds the notion that they should look for some evidence as to whether the regulatory regimes we’ll be mimicking have actually accomplished what they were supposed to — or if not, what they have accomplished instead.

The U.S. enacted its Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act (CPSIA) in 2008. The

European Union’s General Product Safety Directive became mandatory

OPINION

KAREN
SELICK

“If those laws were really working to protect consumers, there should by now be several years’ statistics demonstrating that American and European consumers are safer…

in January 2004. If those laws
were really working to protect
consumers, there should by now
be several years’ statistics dem-
onstrating that American and
European consumers are safer
than they were before, or that
they are safer than Canadians.
But such evidence was con-
spicuously absent from the
testimony deliv- ered to the
Commons and Senate commit-
tees that studied this bill and its
previous incarnations.