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Private Members' Business

National Framework on the Durability of Electronic Products and Essential Home Appliances Act

2026-04-30 Sitting 114 Showing 1–3 of 3

A bill to make a national framework promoting durability and repairability of electronic products and home appliances. In debate, members discussed combatting planned obsolescence, providing consumers with product information, existing Quebec legislation on the issue, and the importance of being able to repair products you own.

Official Hansard ↗

Arnold Viersen

Conservative 5:10 p.m.

“This bill is too broad. Focus on planned obsolescence. Fix that problem without creating endless new rules.”

Arnold Viersen

Conservative 5:35 p.m.

“I think this bill tries to do too much by making manufacturers build products that last longer. Government over-regulates products like dishwashers, so they break faster. Now this bill wants to fix that by layering on more rules. I wish the bill directly required products to last a certain time instead of leaving details to regulators. But I'm also not sure this should be a federal law at all.”

Official Hansard

Madam Speaker, it is my privilege to add my voice to the debate on Bill C-267. As I mentioned earlier, this bill seems to be trying to boil the ocean. It is a framework bill. It attempts to do a laudable thing, to make it so the products that we buy have a shelf life that lasts a long time and they do not quickly end up in the landfill. Now, I have a cousin. I have a lot of cousins, but I have a particular cousin who has an expression, and I always think it is interesting. He says, “That is pure landfill.” Basically, he is saying that something is a poor quality product, and if someone purchases it, they might as well just take it straight to the landfill because, by the time they put it to work, it will not do the thing they need it to do or it is poor quality. I always think of that when we talk about this particular bill. Life is generally a series of trade-offs. Particularly when people are purchasing a consumer product, there are a lot of trade-offs. It is an interesting thing to me. Earlier today we heard the Leader of the Opposition say that, when Liberals see something moving, they tax it. When it is still moving, they regulate it, and when it stops moving, they subsidize it. This is essentially the subsidizing part of that equation. Over the years, we have seen Liberals pile on requirements, one after the other, whether it be around water use, energy use or products that can be used. Now we see that products do not necessarily last as long as they used to. Take a dishwasher, for example. With all of the energy requirements and all of the water requirements that have gone into them, it seems that, when someone buys a dishwasher nowadays, it does not advertise how well it does the dishes, it advertises how little water and how little energy it uses. I actually want a dishwasher that does the dishes. The other thing is the dishwasher that my mom had seemed to last for 30 years, and the dishwashers I buy seem to last for 10 years. Members can see the issues that we have now. Here we are. Consumers are frustrated with the fact that they have an expectation that the products they buy do not seem to be lasting as long as they expect them to last, nor can they get the parts for them. This is reality. As the government has layered on regulation after regulation, or this or that code, it has not necessarily been the market that has driven that. It has been regulation. Now we are seeing that the government is going to put a solution for all of these created problems on the back end of it and say, “Oh, now manufacturers have to make sure their product lasts a particular length of time.” There is another bunch of problems around this as well. Planned obsolescence is something that drives me crazy. I come from the automotive world and am an auto mechanic by trade. With older vehicles that had the 12-valve Cummins, for example, there was no planned obsolescence for it. It outlasted the vehicle they put it in by a factor of three or four. If the car or truck that engine was in rusted away, which would be after about 10 years, that engine was taken out and moved into another vehicle. They can often been seen for sale, and the pickup truck that it is in is very worn out. They take the engine out and put it in another piece of equipment, because that engine did not have planned obsolescence. It was built it to last, and it lasts. Again, we see more concerns around efficiency and other concerns. On the flip side of it, these other products that do not last long end up in the landfill. That Cummins engine, probably designed in about 1990, is still operating, and because it is so good, it will be taken out of the pickup truck it is in and stuck in another piece of equipment, saving it from the landfill. Members can rest assured, it will continue on. I have a lot of expectation and no concern, because that technology has been around probably since the 1970s, that the engine will do another 30 years in whatever piece of equipment it is in. Because it is so well built, it is very well supported. There are a dozen companies that support it with aftermarket parts. Because it is so popular and well known, there are a dozen companies that copy it, build other pieces for it, build attachments and these kinds of things. These are all great things. We see this also with airplane technology. A lot of airplanes are flying around today with 1930s technology in their engines, because the industry figured it out. The progression of aircraft went from 1912 to the 1930s, and that is when it really dialed in on what an airplane engine ought to look like. Since then, only minor tweaks have been made to that. Because of that, there are a host of companies that work hard on creating a product that is well serviced and lasts a long time. It does not ever really end up in the landfill, because they just keep rebuilding it and keep working it over. The two examples I gave, airplane engines and Cummins engines, are of things that were designed entirely by the market. They were not constrained by a lot of government regulation whatsoever. That reality does exist. We see the bureaucratic growth of the government. I am going to talk particularly about the appliances the bill is trying to capture. I do not necessarily think there is opposition to putting in place a mandatory minimum on how long they should last, a benchmark for warranty, essentially. That has been done in the automotive industry. There used to be a regulation on small collision repairs. If someone ran into a pole at less than 30 kilometres an hour, there was a test for that. If that happened and the repair had to be made, it had to cost less than $2,500 or less than $300, depending on where one was in the world. It was helpful that the government made this benchmark saying that as a result of a certain kind of a collision, it should not cost more than a certain amount to repair a vehicle. There is the capability of doing that kind of thing. I wish the bill had contemplated many of those kinds of things. We can put in law, and the House can be responsible for it, that a certain product should last a certain length of time. We did that with the airlines. We debated whether that was a good idea or not, but we could have done it with this bill as well, saying what the timelines for consumer products ought to be, and we could have built a schedule for that. We can do all that in the House. However, this bill is much like the Liberals' approach to a lot of things. They get a great idea, such as going to space, or whatever it happens to be, but then they do not put the details in the bill. They do not do the hard work of governing the country. They say to just trust them; they will get the minister on it. The minister will use their pen and decide all the things that need to go into it, working with this or that particular stakeholder. Parliament is dedicated to building the laws of this country. I understand that a bill to regulate a whole bunch of particular products might be a large bill, but that has not stopped the government before from introducing large bills. That could be, but I do not understand. Last, sometimes the government gets out of its lane a bit when it comes to provincial jurisdiction. I know that a number of colleagues have raised concerns around provincial jurisdiction, that this bill would perhaps cross some of those lines. We are concerned about that as well. Perhaps the issue should be left to the provinces. I know that in particular when it came to tractor regulations, there was—

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Fraser Tolmie

Conservative 6:05 p.m.

“I want to fix a real problem. But this new regulation won't help. It adds more rules and costs to businesses that are already struggling. We need real action, not just more talk and process.”

Official Hansard

Madam Speaker, you are looking well and it is great to have you in the chair. I want to talk about a principle most Canadians would consider common sense: If someone owns something, they should be able to fix it. Canada has already done meaningful work on this file. Bill C-244 and Bill C-294 removed copyright barriers that were being used to block repairs on digital devices. The member for Swift Current—Grasslands—Kindersley, a close friend of mine, introduced Bill C-294 specifically because he understood what those restrictions were doing to agriculture, mining, construction and forestry industries in Saskatchewan. He named them explicitly. Those bills were real, they targeted action and they deserve credit. I want to thank the member for Bourassa for bringing this bill forward. He has identified a genuine problem and put in the work to bring it here. The frustration behind this bill is legitimate. Canadians should have better options when the products they own break down, but this bill is not the right answer and I will explain why. When governments get the right to repair right, they act where the need is greatest. They create actual rights, not frameworks and not consultation processes, but rights. In 2023, Colorado became the first American state to pass an agricultural right to repair law, the Consumer Right to Repair Agricultural Equipment Act. It guaranteed farmers and independent mechanics access to the software and repair materials needed to fix tractors and other agricultural equipment. That was a law. It created real rights in one day. The Federal Trade Commission then filed an antitrust lawsuit against John Deere in January 2025, alleging the company had monopolized the repair market by withholding diagnostic tools. Earlier this month, a class action lawsuit against John Deere settled for $99 million, with a 10-year commitment to make diagnostic tools available to farmers and independent shops. There are now 16 states that have active agricultural right to repair legislation. American farmers running John Deere equipment now have legal tools their Canadian counterparts do not. This is a competitive disadvantage baked into the regulatory gap. Prairie producers are already carrying cost pressures their American competitors do not face in the same way: industrial carbon pricing, fertilizer costs, higher fuel costs and input costs that cannot be passed down to a buyer who sets the price on global commodity markets. Canadian farmers are price-takers. They absorb every additional cost at the farm gate. This is one more structural disadvantage stacking up. My riding of Moose Jaw—Lake Centre—Lanigan is bigger than Switzerland. It is five square kilometres bigger than Switzerland, with 41,290 square kilometres of agricultural land, rural communities and some of the most productive grain and canola in Canada. Across the entire riding, there are three authorized John Deere service locations. Colorado figured out how to give its farmers real options. This bill would not give the farmers in my riding any. I want to be clear this is not a criticism of equipment dealers. They serve their customers well and are part of the communities I represent. They play a vital role. The problem is the software lock. A farmer near Craik or Tugaske cannot hand their local mechanic the diagnostic tool they need because the manufacturer controls access to it. If someone has the right software, the repair takes an afternoon. Without it, they wait for the one authorized technician who has the key. In Saskatchewan, harvest windows are measured in days, not weeks. A two-day repair delay is not an inconvenience; it can be a crop. The agriculture sector made exactly this case during the government's own right-to-repair consultations in 2024. The National Cattle Feeders' Association told ISED directly that farmers face an uncompetitive scenario and are forced to accept the costs and repair schedules of manufacturers. The Ontario Federation of Agriculture called for legislation compelling manufacturers to provide access. Alberta Grains, representing over 18,000 wheat and barley farmers, submitted that producers were so frustrated with repair monopolies that some would rather operate less advanced equipment they could actually fix. Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada held its own targeted round tables specifically on farm equipment and interoperability. The sector showed up. The government ran dedicated round tables on the exact gap this bill would leave open, and the bill before the House today does not contain the word “agriculture”. The bill before us has two problems. The first is what the bill fails to do and the second is what the bill would do. On the first point, the bill's scope is explicitly for electronic products and essential home appliances, defined as devices intended for regular household use. That definition closes the door entirely on agricultural equipment. A framework covering dishwashers and smart phones but not combines is not a right-to-repair framework for the producers who feed this country. On the second point, this bill would not just address repairability. It would establish minimum durability standards and a federal regulatory framework over consumer product design and manufacturing. I understand the consumer appeal of that. Canadians are right to be frustrated when products are built to fail, but we need to be honest about what this bill would be. It would be a new federal regulatory layer over a broad category of consumer products on top of provincial consumer protection regimes that are already moving on this file. Quebec's Bill 29 is active. Ontario is advancing its own legislation. The provinces are acting. Ottawa adding a parallel federal durability standards framework on top of that provincial action is not simplification. It is duplication. The Canadian Federation of Independent Business just released its report entitled “Canada's Entrepreneurial Drought”. Canada is in a sustained period where business exits outpace new entries every single quarter. In Saskatchewan specifically, net business creation has been negative for most of the past decade. Regulatory compliance costs Canadian businesses $51.5 billion annually, with nearly $18 billion of that attributed to pure red tape. About 87% of small business owners say that excessive regulation significantly reduces their ability to grow. This week, leading Canadian industry groups told the Financial Times that federal red tape is costing the country more than Trump's tariffs. Nutrien, headquartered in Saskatchewan, chose to build a $1-billion port in Washington state over Canada's west coast, citing Canadian regulation as a key factor in that decision. This is not the moment to add another federal framework to the pile. I cannot support this bill. It is not because the right to repair is wrong, as it is not. It is not because the member for Bourassa's concern is misplaced, as it is not. I oppose this bill because it would deliver a new regulatory framework when the provinces are already at work.

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