Editor’s Note: CRE emphasizes the importance of the U.S.-Canada Regulatory Cooperation Council’s Joint Forward Plan is our Data Quality Alert on EPA’s analysis of the economic benefits of neonicotinoid-treated soybean seeds. See pp. 12-13 here.

From: The Office of Management and Budget

Posted by Howard Shelanski

U.S. Federal Departments and Agencies together with Canadian Ministries have been working to develop new frameworks for cooperation since the release of the U.S.-Canada Regulatory Cooperation Council (RCC) Joint Forward Plan last August. Collectively, these documents outline major objectives for bilateral cooperation over the next three to five years in specific areas of regulatory activity.

The Regulatory Partnerships are a significant step toward deepening our cooperation efforts.  The newly developed frameworks outline how U.S. and Canadian agencies will manage cooperative regulatory activities moving forward.  The frameworks address such issues as governance between the agencies, means for obtaining input from stakeholders, and ways to promote more effective and efficient regulatory engagement between the two countries for the ultimate benefit of both countries’ consumers, manufacturers and producers.  As Executive Order 13609 states, in meeting shared challenges involving health, safety, labor, security, environmental, and other issues, international regulatory cooperation can identify approaches that are at least as protective as those that are or would be adopted in the absence of such cooperation while also reducing unnecessary differences in regulatory requirements.

As I stated in my August blog post, Moving Forward on International Regulatory Cooperation, “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 about how to build cooperative frameworks to achieve our economic and regulatory policy goals in a more dynamic manner.” And as outlined in the Regulatory Partnership Statements and detailed Work Plans released today, the United States and Canada are already demonstrating this broad and creative thinking through cooperation activities, including:

U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Pesticide Management Regulatory Agency

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