Jonathan English

Behind Canada’s lack of elevators is our reliance on rules mostly written by and for the United States. Standards regulate the fine details of how something must be designed, built, maintained and tested, but they also indirectly define the bounds of the market—who is able to enter and compete in it, and who is not. While nearly the entire world has harmonized on a single set of European-derived elevator standards, North America writes its own. You can sell the same elevator from Switzerland to New Zealand and almost everywhere in between, but not in Canada. This locks us into a tiny market because even the United States is only 5 per cent of the global elevator market—it has fewer elevators than Spain. While the provinces adopt these standards and use them as the basis for their regulations, in practice the standards themselves are written and updated mostly by the elevator industry itself.