Results at a glance: Evaluation of the Consumer Product Safety Program

Program context

In Canada, consumer products and cosmetics are not subject to pre-market approval. Industry is responsible for ensuring that the consumer products and cosmetics it makes, imports, advertises, or sells are safe. The Consumer Product Safety Program (CPSP), co-delivered by the Healthy Environments and Consumer Safety Branch and Regulatory Operations and Enforcement Branch at Health Canada promotes, monitors, verifies, and enforces compliance with relevant legislations and regulations to help mitigate any health or safety risked posed by consumer products and cosmetics.

Evaluation approach

OAE collected information from various sources, including interviews with internal and external key informants, a survey of industry representatives, case studies, and a review of internal and public documents.

The following elements made up the evaluation approach:

What the Evaluation Found

CPSP’s activities have had various positive impacts, including enhanced surveillance capacity to detect emerging issues and high levels of voluntary compliance on the part of industry. Consumers have some awareness of Health Canada’s role, but there are opportunities to further expand consumer awareness in partnership with other organizations and empower consumers to make safe choices – particularly in the area of online shopping, where changing trends in consumer behaviour introduce new risks.

The CPSP design and delivery is seen as efficient, supported by robust governance and directed effort in high-impact or high-risk areas. The Program efficiently selects tools to address emerging issues and challenges, with a focus on industry co-operation as a first course of action. Flexible features of the Acts and Regulations for consumer products, cosmetics, and vaping products, including general prohibitions, allow CPSP to respond to health or safety risks in a timely manner. It will be important to continue to revisit supporting legislation and regulations as they age, as to ensure they continue to respond to a rapidly evolving consumer marketplace.

There were many examples of innovation and experimentation in Program delivery, though for many of these initiatives, quantifiable evidence of the efficiency gained through these approaches was not yet available. Measuring impacts on efficiency will be important to identify and advance successful practices in the future.
Partnership with a variety of stakeholders has supported effectiveness by amplifying messaging, expanding intelligence, and expediting responses to safety issues. While information sharing certainly takes place, external organizations that collaborate with Health Canada in the area of product safety (including industry and consumer organizations) would appreciate more transparency around processes and factors informing decision making in areas such as risk assessment and risk management.

Recommendations

  1. Given the relevance and increasing importance of e-commerce as an issue in consumer product safety, consider ways to expand current efforts in this area to help address key issues.
  2. Examine ways to increase transparency on CPSP processes to respond to consumer product safety issues, for example by providing more information on how risk assessments are conducted and increased detail on the process for instrument choice during risk management.
  3. As the program continues to introduce innovative practices, develop and implement performance metrics to determine the success and scalability of projects.

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