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THE UNTOLD STORY
By Claude Balthazard, Ph.D., C.Psych, CHRL
Continued on page 27
of Ontario, the Certified Management
Accountants of Ontario and The Institute of
Chartered Accountants of Ontario. Our 1990
Act was borrowed nearly word for word
from the Certified General Accountants of
Ontario Act, 1983, also a private act – if
the Legislature was to upgrade the certified
general accountants from a private act to
a public act, why not human resources
professionals?
Work began in earnest on a new public
act to replace our 1990 private act.
Bill 138, An Act Respecting the Human
Resources Professionals Association was introduced
in the Legislature on Nov. 23, 2010.
Interestingly, this time around our new
Act would be borrowed virtually clausefor
clause from the Certified Management
Accountants Act, 2010, which itself was very
close to the Chartered Accountants Act, 2010
and the Certified General Accountants Act,
2010.
Continuing with the idea that HRPA
had to be what it wanted to become, HRPA
set out to completely revamp its regulatory
processes. HRPA knew that if it were
to be regulated by public act, it would
fall under the oversight of the Office of
the Fairness Commissioner. In 2009, the
HRPA Board of Directors made the commitment
that HRPA’s registration and
certification processes would comply with
the Fair Registration Practices Code which
is embedded in the Fair Access to Regulated
Professions and Compulsory Trades Act, 2006
(FARPACTA). In fact, HRPA went so far
as to draft a Fair Registration Practices report
as if it had been subject to FARPACTA
and presented this report to the Fairness
Commissioner. No professional regulatory
body had ever demonstrated voluntary
compliance in this way before. It made an
impression.
At the same time, HRPA began taking its
place as a member of the regulatory community
by participating in organizations such
as the Canadian Agencies for Regulation
(CNAR), the Council on Licensure,
Enforcement & Regulation (CLEAR)
and the Ontario Regulators for Access
Consortium (ORAC).
In 2011, there was big push to update
our by-laws to be in line with the bill working
its way through the Legislature – well,
as much as our private act would allow,
anyway. By then, HRPA had realized that
as a professional regulatory body, its hearings
were subject to the requirements of
the Statutory Powers Procedure Act, 1990 –
again, a big jump in terms of sophistication
of our proceedings.
In 2012, the Good Character requirement
was introduced as a condition of
HRPA membership and its rationale outlined
in a December 2012 Canadian HR
Reporter article. In 2012, with the increased
sophistication of its regulatory processes,
HRPA introduced its Code of Conduct for
Members of Adjudicative Committees and
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