CPSC and Canada Take Positive Approach to Window Coverings

The promise of window covering designs to mitigate strangulation incidents was promoted at a joint press event by CPSC and Health Canada in Washington, D.C. Elliot Kaye, CPSC chairman, and James Van Loon, acting director of Health Canada's product safety unit, pushed the idea that ongoing innovations could drive fatality reductions. The staged press event during the ICPHSO conference included demonstrations of some designs.

Kaye praised the cooperation on the issue with Canada as well as collaboration with industry, using a sentence he repeated elsewhere at the conference: "This is the year."

Van Loon echoed the sentiment, saying, "Industry has stepped up" in standards work. However, he also noted the possibility of regulators addressing those issues. Health Canada's window covering requirements are based on CSA's Z600-14, Safety of Corded Window Covering Products. Van Loon later told PSL his agency has the option to add its own provisions.

Meanwhile, CPSC has an ANPR it launched in early 2015 (PSL, 1/12/15). It stemmed from a petition, but there also was existing contention between regulators and industry.

A technical meeting last summer at CPSC's lab (PSL, 6/1/15) marked the possible start of renewed deliberation with industry. That session saw CPSC clarifying numerous points of confusion about its desires. Those showed the two sides potentially closer than had appeared.

For example, industry had been worried that discussion of an 8-inch limit for operating cords involved the entire cord lengths, but CPSC staffers said they meant the measurement to apply to the exposed leftover at full retraction. CPSCers also clarified that their focus was broadly on elimination of accessible cords not elimination of units with cords.

Nonetheless, CPSC staff last fall wrote industry to voice concern about progress and to urge action (PSL, 11/2/15).