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Regulatory update: Private security regs to change in five provinces |
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| Written by Brian Robertson, on Wed-June-2009 |
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 By this time next year five Canadian provinces will have entirely new private security legislation in place.
In the west, by next summer British Columbia will have completed the process of licensing and training all sectors of the proprietary industry under the new Security Services Act (SSA), which came into force last fall.
Alberta will likely have published the regulations under its new
Security Services and Investigators Act (SSIA) – which was passed last
fall but has not yet come into force.
In Ontario the testing process will be up and running – and training
will be underway - for the 60,000+ security guards and private
investigators now licensed under the Private Security and Investigative
Services Act (PSISA), which came into force two years ago.
The long-awaited Regulations under Quebec’s Private Security Act (PSA)
- which has been on the books for nearly three years now will have been
finalized, and the Act itself may finally have come into force.
Depending in part on how a change of political party in Nova Scotia
will change things, that province should be introducing its new
security legislation – tentatively entitled the Security Services Act
(SSA) — in its legislature.
In British Columbia, the Security Services Act came into force in
September. Since that time the number of licensed security personnel in
the province has more than doubled, as various sectors of the
proprietary industry (including employees of the Commissionaires,
armoured car guards and in-house retail loss prevention officers)
have all come under licensing requirements of the new Act. Many of the in-house security officers, all of whom have to be licensed by Sept. 1 may have already obtained their licence. The last
group to come under licensing will be bouncers, who will need to get
licensed by Nov. 1 of this year.
B.C. has had a mandatory training program administered by the police
academy at the Justice Institute of B.C. since 1996, but this spring
there have been a number of changes made to the training requirements,
representing the first major revision of B.C.’s training requirements
to be made in 13 years. B.C. used to have a system under which all
guard category licensees had to complete both a 40-hour classroom based
course and a 24-hour control tactics course. As of March 1 of this
year, the only across-the-board training requirement is the completion
of an updated version of the 40-hour classroom-based course. The
updates which have been made bring B.C.’s new Basic Security Training
(BST) course closely in line with the new course that will be used in
Ontario. In both cases there is less emphasis on training on
“industrial security” procedures and more emphasis on verbal
communication skills for use in conflict situations, and on familiarity
with the standardized use of force “models.”
As of Sept. 1 licenced security officers in B.C. will be permitted to carry and
use handcuffs for the first time in decades. They must, however, first
complete the JIBC’s new Advanced Security Training (AST) course, which
is an amalgam of the JIBC’s old BST2 control tactics course and a
course on handcuffing techniques. This training must be delivered by
one or more of a relatively small group of qualified instructors who
have been identified for the purpose by the police academy. In this
respect, the B.C. program seems to be anticipating the approach to use
of force training that is also likely to be adopted in Ontario over the
course of the next few years.
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