According to the Standards Council of Canada (SCC), a standard is a document that provides a set of agreed-upon rules, guidelines or characteristics for activities or their results. Standards establish accepted practices, technical requirements, and terminologies for diverse fields.

Most standards aim to achieve an optimum order in a given context. Because they are easy to recognize and reference, standards enable organizations to ensure that their products or services can be manufactured, implemented and sold worldwide.

Standards can be either voluntary or mandatory:

• Standards are voluntary when organizations are not legally required to follow them. Organizations may choose to follow them to meet customer or industry demands.
• Standards are mandatory when enforced by laws or regulations, often for health or safety reasons.

How Other Standards Differ from National Standards of Canada {NSC}

Business or organizational standards are private and only apply to those that create them and their members where applicable. Most private standards are not publicly available. Private standards refer to standard operating procedures {SOPs} which answer the question "How does the business operate and deliver its services?"

NSCs are not SOPs but a compilation of national mandatory descriptive rather than prescriptive requirements and best practice statements informed by Normative e.g. legislation and Informative documents e.g. research, public consultations, and consensus-oriented dialogue and decision-making carried out by the Standards Development Technical Committee {TC}. The published NSC is available to the public and free to download.

Put simply, these Canadian human services industry standards were created by and for the people {interested stakeholders} to establish essential benchmarks and suggested best practices. Therefore, NSCs answer the question of what are the essential requirements to operate an AAHS business.

Published NSCs

Published NSCs do not certify service providers or accredit their programs {services, activities, etc.}, rather a Third Party Conformity Assessment Program could be implemented to evaluate whether an organization's programs meet or exceed the NSC. NSCs are descriptive requirements and conformity assessments determine whether an organization demonstrates compliance or answers the question of how the organization meets or exceeds NSCs.

Program accreditation that does not involve third-party contractual or governmental accreditation through regulatory requirements may suggest that self-attestation, self-governance, or peer review processes may determine and reflect an organization's benchmarks and its brand's performance.