Public safety in private hands revisited: The case of Ontario's Technical Standards and Safety Authority

Abstract

Abstract Delegated Administrative Authorities (DAAs) are widely employed for delivering public safety and consumer protection regulatory functions at the provincial level in Canada. Although strongly supported by governments, the model has been subject to considerable criticism from legislative committees and officers, non‐governmental organizations, and the media. This paper examines Ontario's DAA experience through the case of the Technical Standards and Safety Authority (TSSA). It finds that, like other jurisdictions pursuing similar new public management (NPM) reforms, the Ontario government adopted legislation significantly strengthening its oversight and control, indicating substantial concerns about the structure and performance of the TSSA and by implication Ontario's other DAAs. Even with these changes, significant gaps are identified in the TSSA's governance and accountability structures.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 4 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.