Ontario Government Eliminates Double Reporting For Consumer Electrical Products

After two years of regulatory overlap and double reporting to both provincial and federal regulatory bodies, the Ontario government has addressed industry concerns and eliminated the need to report safety incidents involving consumer electrical products to the Electrical Safety Authority (the "ESA") under the Electricity Act, 1998.

In 2011, the Canada Consumer Product Safety Act (the "CCPSA") introduced sweeping changes to the Canadian consumer product regulatory regime by imposing mandatory incident reporting obligations on manufacturers, importers and sellers of consumer products in Canada. While the goal was to introduce a comprehensive and modern regime, these new reporting obligations also resulted in concurrent reporting obligations to both Health Canada under the CCPSA and to the ESA under previously-existing provincial legislation. While Health Canada stated at the time that it would work with other regulatory bodies to address this duplication, double