The Board and some members of OntarioACHI have recently identified that things are again moving ahead in the political spheres in Ontario with respect to Home Inspection Regulation.
First and foremost the Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne MPP has issued a set of letters to the different ministries giving mandates as to what they are going to be requested to do over the next term.
The Ministry of Consumer Services has been renamed the Ministry of Government and Consumer Services (MGCS), has lost the Honorouble Tracy McCharles MPP as the Minister and is now headed up by the Honorouble David Oriazetti MPP. The MGCS mandate letter can be found here
The Ministry of Labour continues to be headed up by the Honorouble Kevin Flynn MPP, and the MoL mandate letter can be found here.
The OntarioACHI board has been working hard behind the scenes and we hope to have an announcement soon on discussions we have had and are about to have with the MGCS, the Ministry of Labour (MoL) as well as some DAA’s including TARION, RECO and the WSIA/WSIB.
We have also nearly completed work on a fully operational University Class Education platform which will allow ourselves, InterNACHI and other education providers to load educational material that can be tailored to the Ontario, Canada market, and have a mechanism to provide remote proctored examinations so members in outlying areas do not have to travel to colleges etc. to take proctored exams.
These are all in the final beta testing stage, and we hope to be able to announce more soon.
All members of InterNACHI who reside or work in Ontario are able to join OntarioACHI as registered members free of charge. This gives inspectors access to the message board http://ontarioachi.ca/mb as well as some of the content on the main site http://ontarioachi.ca that is not available to unregistered members.
OntarioACHI has also been working with other Canadian NACHI groups, and specifically AlbertaACHI to ensure the Canadian Certified Home Inspector certification can be managed from multiple locations and allow for cross-Canada Certification using a Canadian developed certification, locally administered and nationally recognised.
In order to start the application process, obtain and continue to hold a CCHI you need to be a paid up-member in good standing of AlbertaACHI or OntarioACHI, with talks happening in more provinces to spread this certification.
This Canadian Certification elevates the holder to a higher standard, as it requires adherence to a Code of Ethics that is enforced and application of a Standards of Practice, which aligns to the International Standards developed by InterNACHI but modified to take account of the regional differences and requirements of Ontario.
In addition to this, we are also working collaboratively with a number of other groups, notably the NHICC, PHPIC, and others to help develop a National Occupancy Standards and (NOS) and a DACUM that will assist Inspectors develop their careers and help others to identify where on a career path, a home inspector is. This process is being led by Professor Claude Lawrenson. we are hopeful he will be able to explain more about the process and its progress and have asked him to write a piece for the OntarioACHI website.
We have also just learned that the CSA process for developing a Canadian National Standard for Home Inspections has exited the Technical Committee stage, with a view to completion in Summer 2015. The next stage will be a public consultation phase. In the mean time we have asked the CSA to provide us with the outcomes of the TC stage. Even though we now have 919 registered members, by far the largest group on Inspectors in an Ontario Association for Inspectors, we were not involved in the TC stage.
We hope we will have more information soon to inform all Inspectors in Ontario of the progress and upcoming timeline.
We also now have a fully managed disciplinary system which allows proper complaint tracking and communication system to allow us to manage complaints made to the Association. As a newer Association we have a few teething problems with the ongoing communication of complaint progress, but with the help of a member of InterNACHI we have managed to iron out what we hope to be most of the kinks. Once again we thank InterNACHI members and executives for help they have given the board on OntarioACHI in this development process.
We know the next few months are going to see some upheaval in Ontario with respect to our profession, and we hope that we will be able to work together to ensure that throughout it all, neither clients nor inspectors suffer from the changes.