I received a response from Consumer Product Safety, Health Canada about my reporting of the novelty lighters (as per yesterday’s posting “Holy Flaming Tractor’s Batman!“).
Lighters are subject to requirements under the Lighters Regulations. Some of the requirements do include labelling, performance and child resistance requirements. However, the child resistance requirements do not apply to all lighters. Lighters exempted from this requirement is determined by their import value at time of importation. Importers of lighters do have certain obligations to ensure that they are able to provide our Department with documentation showing that specific designs of lighter ignition mechanisms are in fact child resistant. This documentation which we may request from an importer is based on a test group of 100 children of a specific age group having tested surrogate lighters (not with fuel) with specific designed ignition mechanisms – at least 85% of this test group of children must not be able to cause ignition of the surrogate lighters. Therefore, we cannot rely on what we as adults may think what is child-resistant, or not ,based on our abilities to cause ignition of the lighter.
I should also mention that unfortunately the current Canadian requirements do not address the fact that these lighters were designed as cars and trucks which may appeal to a young child to play with.
We would however be interested in receiving additional information with respect to the lighters that you noticed at this specific store as we would like to enter this information into our complaint/incident database for reference and further follow up with the company responsible for the XXXX stores*.
I was provided a list of questions which I will address later. Hopefully, we can get these things pulled from the shelves.
*[Note: I am keeping Mum on the store until I get a chance to get another look at the items]
Mudpuddle 