A long-simmering spat between human resources professional associations in B.C. and Ontario is hitting the boiling point over what the B.C. association considers its eastern cousin’s brazen overstepping of boundaries.
Ontario’s Human Resources Professionals Association (HRPA) shrugs that off and claims that its B.C. counterpart, the Human Resources Management Association (HRMA), has no legal authority to regulate the use of the professional designation “certified human resources professional (CHRP),” which the B.C. association grants.
That means that people in B.C. who the HRMA has not granted permission to use the CHRP are able to say that they are a CHRP and there is no sanction that the HRMA can impose.
That’s why the Ontario association is marketing itself in B.C., calling its new certification, “certified human resources leader (CHRL),” the “gold standard” for human resources leadership in Canada.
The B.C. association, in turn, believes that its Ontario counterpart is spreading confusion in the industry and harming the human resources profession by granting three designations – its new CHRL and “certified human resources executive (CHRE)” as well as the Canada-wide standard, the CHRP.
The Ontario association is keeping the CHRP designation, which has legislative protection in Ontario, but has downgraded it to be the lowest of its three designations even though it is the highest professional designation for a human resources professional everywhere else in Canada.
“If you want to use the CHRP designation in B.C., go ahead,” said Claude Balthazard, who is vice-president of regulatory affairs at the Ontario-based group. “No one can stop you.”
That’s because unlike lawyers and dentists, whose regulators have power granted by provincial law, B.C.’s human resources professionals lack a regulator that has similar statutory clout.
No B.C. law authorizes the HRMA to operate, nor does the province have a law that restricts who can say that they are CHRP-certified.
The HRMA plans to make an official submission to the provincial government within the year, urging a law to be passed to give the HRMA authority to regulate the use of the CHRP designation.
“We believe the HRPA is overstepping its boundaries because they are the regulator in Ontario; they are not the regulator in B.C.,” HRMA CEO Tony Ariganello told Business in Vancouver.
But Balthazard questions the B.C. group’s authority to regulate non-members, explaining that there are two ways that a designation can be protected against misuse.
One is that the designation is trademarked and the other is that a body authorized by a legislature is empowered to regulate the designation’s use.
Ontario’s HRPA has trademarked its CHRL designation Canadawide. Because the HRPA owns the CHRL and CHRE trademarks countrywide, it can protect those marks everywhere in Canada, Balthazard said. No one owns the trademark for the designation CHRP, but the Ontario legislature has given the HRPA the power to regulate the use of that title in Ontario.
“In time, all three designations will be protected by statute in Ontario,” he said.
In the rest of Canada, outside Quebec, no organization has legislative authority to forbid anyone to use the CHRP designation, Balthazard said.
The HRPA has had self-governing status in Ontario since 1990. Disagreements with other provincial associations likely prompted the HRPA last year to leave the federal umbrella body of human resources associations known as the Canadian Council of Human Resources Associations, Ariganello said.
He told BIV that all other provincial human resources associations want to use a single designation – CHRP – for all human resources professionals.
Their goal follows the same principle that accountants recently employed when they simplified their designations.
Ariganello was CEO of CGA-Canada when that group came to terms with counterparts that governed the use of the accounting designations CA and CMA.
“One of the big reasons we did that was because there was market confusion and stakeholder confusion,” Ariganello said. “Many wondered what were the differences between the three designations.” •
