U.S. and Canada publish Regulatory Cooperation Plan

WASHINGTON -- The White House published its new Regulatory Cooperation Council Joint Forward Plan last week.

The U.S.-Canada Regulatory Cooperation Council (RCC) Joint Forward Plan outlines new federal agency-level partnership arrangements to help institutionalize the way the countries' regulators work together.

The plan seeks to improve cooperation between Canada and the U.S. in many regulatory areas, including chemicals management and crop protection. The document states that the Office of Pesticide Programs and Health Canada's Pest Management Regulatory Agency will work to develop one registration system for crop protection products for both countries.

The Forward Plan aims to remove duplicative requirements, develop common standards, and identify potential areas where future regulation may unnecessarily differ. This kind of international cooperation on regulations between the United States and Canada will help eliminate barriers to doing business in the United States or with U.S. companies, grow the economy, and create jobs.

Regulatory cooperation has to mean more than just “aligning” specific rules across the border; such a rule-by-rule approach is neither practical nor scalable enough to meet our ever-changing regulatory environments. We need to think more broadly and creatively on how to build cooperative frameworks to achieve our economic and regulatory policy goals in a more dynamic manner.

That is why the Forward Plan identifies 24 areas of cooperation that the United States and Canada will work together to implement over the next three to five years in order to modernize our thinking around international regulatory cooperation and develop a toolbox of strategies to address international regulatory issues as they arise.

Click here to read the plan.