I can appreciate your position on this matter, and in fact it mirrors my original question posed to ESA – “What is the legal basis for the Registry, since Regulation 438 does not mention it?”. You are quite correct in saying that Regulation 438/07 does not mandate the registry. In fact there is no specific legislation that says that ESA must create and maintain such a registry. The regulation DOES require reporting of “serious incidents” [see Clause 8].

How can ESA go ahead and demand registration? It’s simple – they are the AHJ in Ontario and have the legal mandate through the Electricity Act and the Regulations to protect the safety of the citizens of Ontario in whatever way they decide is appropriate. If they decide that a registry of manufacturers is the way to handle the problems with non-compliant products that is within their purview.

I think that making the statement that this is a ‘tax grab’ is an unfortunate knee-jerk reaction. On the other hand I don’t know that this process will actually help control the problem that it is intended to address.

In the mean time, I would recommend the following to everyone that disagrees, but wants to be able to continue to do business in the province: Pay the registration fee and register with ESA.

THEN:
Write to the Minister of Small Business and Consumer Affairs, the Honourable Harinder Takar, infosbcs@ontario.ca.
Write to the Premier of the Province, the Honourable Dalton McGuinty, https://www.premier.gov.on.ca/feedback/feedback.asp, or go to his web site and get the physical address and WRITE.
Write to the head of ESA, Mr. Bob Stelzer, bob.stelzer@electricalsafety.on.ca and the VP of Regulatory Affairs, Mr. Peter Marcucci, peter.marcucci@electricalsafety.on.ca.

These are the people who must listen and who can change things.

I am not now, nor have I ever been an employee of ESA, nor does our company have any other relationship with ESA for any purpose. We are an independent product safety consultancy located in Ontario.

Keep the comments coming!

Thanks for letting our readers know about this free guide. The EU also publishes a number of free guides:

Community legislation on machinery : Comments on Directive 98/37/EC
http://ec.europa.eu/enterprise/mechan_equipment/machinery/guide/content.htm

Machinery : Useful facts in relation to Directive 98/37/EC
http://ec.europa.eu/enterprise/mechan_equipment/machinery/facts.pdf

There are a number of other guides on other related directives, such as Low Voltage, EMC and Pressure equipment. For the complete list see:

http://ec.europa.eu/enterprise/newapproach/standardization/harmstds/publicat.html

A link to more general information, including guidance documents and the text of 2006/42/EC can be found at http://ec.europa.eu/enterprise/mechan_equipment/machinery/index.htm

For any readers that considered going to the 2008 IEEE PSES Symposium but chose not to go, Steve Brody of Brooks Automation gave an excellent presentation on the changes that the new version of the directive will bring for machinery manufacturers. His presentation is available to IEEE PSES members via the PSES web site: http:www.ieee-pses.org.

Also, the IEEE’s Toronto Section is in the process of forming a joint Chapter of the Product Safety Engineering Society and the Industrial Electronics Society. I’ll post more information here as things develop.

Doug Nix
Compliance InSight Consulting Inc.

Jon Severn
Editor