The federal government detailed its key consumer protection priorities within 38 mandate letters to ministers made public in December.

Those ‘marching orders’ to ministers include some significant and ambitious commitments to long-standing consumer protection issues. Still unarticulated, however, is a cohesive national strategy or plan to guide consumer protection and empowerment.

But could you take those individual mandates, parse them, sort them into major theme areas and from that de facto construct the federal government’s priority objectives for protecting and empowering Canada’s consumers?

A new Consumers Council of Canada publication, Federal Mandate Letters and the Canadian Consumer attempts to do exactly that. The report compares the exercise to assembling a jigsaw puzzle in which “none of the pieces fit together, have few adjacent colours or patterns to match, and important pieces of the larger picture are missing altogether.”

The report is available for purchase through the Council’s online store.

Other recently released Consumers Council of Canada publications and public submissions include:

• Energy Supply Issues – Weathering a Perfect Storm – This discussion paper is designed to inform a general audience about current issues in energy supply. It discusses multiple threats simultaneously emerging, from rising demand, severe weather, cyber security threats and the transformation to “green’ electricity grids.

• Submission to HSO/CSA Consultation on National Long-Term Care Facilities – Whether in public or private facilities, long-term care residents are paying consumers of a variety of services. As such, many existing standards can be useful in examining how to better protect those consumers.

• The Erosion of Investor Protection in Ontario – A discussion paper that describes a series of actions by the current Ontario government that have undermined investor rights and protections.