The Ottawa Accord

1. This Accord governs statements made in the course of selling, specifying or promoting protective, security, ballistic or blast-mitigating glazing, laminates, films, panels and applied materials.
2. It applies in every medium: printed material, websites, proposals, specifications, trade shows, spoken presentations, recorded audio and video, and content generated by any means.
3. It binds manufacturers, distributors, dealers, franchisees, installers and specifiers alike. A party is responsible for the claims it repeats as well as for those it originates.
4. It applies to any party that makes a protective claim, whatever trade that party comes from. No category of supplier is outside it, and none may be excluded from it.
5. It governs claims. It does not govern products, prices, output, territories, customers, or any other term on which parties compete.

1. Every claim about what a product does is made in one of five classes, and the class is disclosed wherever the claim appears.
   • CERTIFIED. An accredited laboratory tested a named assembly and issued a report. The claim names the standard, the level where one applies, the laboratory, the report number and the date.
   • CLIENT-QUALIFIED. The purchaser tested the article against its own requirement. The claim states that fact and nothing further. The purchaser's data is not characterized, summarized or quoted by the seller.
   • IN-HOUSE. The party tested it in its own facility. The claim states the build-up, the threat, the distance, the date and the result, and states that it is an internal test.
   • FIELD. Installed and in service. The claim states the duration and nothing more. Service history is never converted into a performance figure.
   • ENGINEERED. Designed by analysis and precedent where no standard applies. The claim describes the design basis and identifies the responsible engineer. It is never expressed as a rating.
2. Where nothing has been tested, a party says so plainly, and may offer an engineering opinion provided it is identified as an opinion. Silence, deflection, or an answer that leaves the questioner believing a test exists, is a breach of this Accord.

The following are not made by a party in any medium, in any circumstance.

• Bullet-proof, bomb-proof, blast-proof, break-proof, shatter-proof, unbreakable, or any construction asserting that a product cannot be defeated.
• A standard's level designation applied to an assembly that was not certified to it. Equivalent to, comparable with, meets the requirements of, and similar formulations are included where no certification exists.
• Resistance to a category of attacker presented as a product class. A product is described by what it withstands, not by who it is imagined to stop.
• A rating, approval, listing or accreditation attributed to a body that has not issued one.
• Any statement that a product will protect life, save lives or prevent injury.

A report is third-party evidence only where the body that produced it can be checked by someone other than the party citing it.

1. The laboratory is accredited to ISO/IEC 17025 by an accreditation body that is a signatory to the ILAC Mutual Recognition Arrangement, or is otherwise recognized for the work by a federal, national, state or provincial authority.
2. The accreditation covers the method cited. Accreditation is granted scope by scope. A laboratory accredited for one test method is not accredited for every test method, and a claim is supported only where the cited method falls inside that laboratory's published scope.
3. The laboratory is named in full, with the address of the facility where the test was conducted and the name of the person who signed the report. A trading name, a set of initials or a city is not an identification.
4. A result produced by a body meeting none of this is an in-house test, whoever conducted it and whatever it is called. It is disclosed under Class IN-HOUSE and is never described as third-party, independent, accredited or certified.

This is not a formality, and it is the provision most likely to be resisted. Accreditation exists so that a buyer does not have to audit a laboratory themselves. A testing body assembled for the occasion, operating outside any accredited scope, hands that burden back down the chain — to the engineer who wrote the product into the drawings and to the agency that signed the purchase order. They are the least equipped to carry it and the first to be named when something fails. A party citing an unaccredited report is not taking a risk. It is transferring one.

1. A party cites only reports run on its own article. A report commissioned by another party is not presented as evidence for a different product, at any level of similarity.
2. Where a party is authorized in writing to cite another party's report, the citation names whose report it is, what article was tested, and that the authorization exists.
3. A laboratory's name, mark, logo, accreditation symbol or report number is never used in a way that implies it tested an article it did not test.
4. On withdrawal of authorization, or on notice from a laboratory that a citation is inaccurate, the material is corrected within thirty days and every party who relied on it is told.
5. A report cited is identified by laboratory, report number and date, and is produced in full on request to any party considering a purchase.
6. A report is presented on its own terms: what was tested, how, and what happened. Reports run to different threats are not cross-compared or benchmarked against criteria they were not run to.
7. A report run on the basis of a standard, without certification to a level of it, is described as such and is never upgraded in later material.
8. A report is not excerpted so as to omit a condition, limitation or failure recorded in it.
9. Where a party holds any interest in the testing body, that interest is stated alongside every citation of its work.

Testing laboratories have been left to police this themselves, writing to companies that assert testing they never commissioned. The material comes down when the letters arrive. This Accord moves the obligation to where it belongs — onto the party making the claim, before the letter has to be written.

Every test method asks one question. A report is evidence of the answer to that question and of nothing else. The most consequential misrepresentation in this industry is not a fabricated report. It is a real report, accurately cited, offered as the answer to a question it was never asked.

1. A forced-entry method asks whether an attacker can create a usable opening. Its pass criterion is the absence of that opening, measured by whether a defined object can pass. ASTM F1233 and ULC S332 are methods of this kind.
2. A ballistic method asks whether a projectile is defeated. Its pass criterion is that the round does not pass and that spall does not reach the protected side. UL 752, NIJ 0108.01 and EN 1063 are methods of this kind.
3. An assembly may hold either property without the other. Passing a forced-entry method establishes nothing about projectile defeat, and a ballistic rating establishes nothing about resistance to sustained tool attack.
4. Where a forced-entry method includes a ballistic attack mode, the round is an implement of attack, not the subject of the test. A specimen may carry a perforation from that round and still satisfy the method.
5. A citation of a forced-entry method states that it is a forced-entry method, in the same sentence and in the same size of type as the citation itself.
6. The words security, protective, attack-resistant, safety, tested and rated are not used in a way that leaves a projectile threat implied where none was defeated.
7. Where a buyer's stated concern is an armed attacker and the evidence held is forced-entry evidence, the difference is put to that buyer in writing before an order is taken.
8. A performance figure is never carried across from one method to the other, in either direction, by inference, approximation or analogy.
9. In an occupied building both properties are disclosed where either is claimed. Glazing that denies an attacker an opening denies the same opening to everyone, including occupants attempting egress and responders attempting entry. Glazing that remains transparent after attack leaves the occupants of a room observable, and engageable, from outside it. An attacker who cannot enter may have no need to enter.

None of this is a defect, and none of it is a reason not to specify forced-entry glazing, which saves lives in the circumstances it was designed for. These are properties of a choice. A buyer who was not told of them was not sold to honestly, and a specifier who was not told of them cannot have weighed them.

This Article addresses a gap no existing standard reaches. Synthetic media is now cheap enough that a fabricated test can be produced in minutes and is indistinguishable from a real one to a buyer. In a life-safety product category that is intolerable, and no regulator has yet addressed it.

1. Evidence is never generated. No test report, certificate, laboratory letterhead, report number, accreditation mark, pane of glass, projectile strike, blast effect, test range or laboratory is produced by generative means for any purpose, including illustration.
2. Every document shown is a photograph or scan of the actual page, legible, with its identifying number visible.
3. Where a presenter, narrator or voice is synthetic, that is disclosed in the material itself, in the same medium, and not solely in metadata or a description field.
4. No real person, living or dead, is depicted or voiced without written consent. No employee, official, customer or laboratory representative is synthesized.
5. Generated imagery is not used to depict a product in service, an installation, or a result.
6. A clip separated from its parent material carries its own disclosure. Where content is labeled as an internal test or as a synthetic presentation, that label is burned into the frame rather than applied as removable metadata.

Claims to have invented, originated, pioneered or first developed a product, method or category are factual claims about history, and they carry the same evidentiary burden as a claim about performance.

1. A claim of origination is supported by a dated instrument that predates any competing claim: a registration, a filing, a dated publication, a dated test report, a dated contract, or a comparable record capable of independent verification.
2. The date and the nature of that instrument are stated alongside the claim.
3. A claim resting on recollection, on company folklore, or on an undated assertion is not made.
4. Where a party acquired, licensed or was supplied the technology it markets, rather than originating it, that is disclosed.
5. Where a party was formerly a customer, dealer, distributor, licensee or employee of another party in the same field, that relationship is disclosed in any material asserting origination.

This Accord does not restrict marketing, tone, humour, drama or exaggeration. Puffery — obvious overstatement no reasonable person would take as fact — is lawful, universal and untouched by anything here. Parties are free to be as vivid as they wish.

The boundary is a single test: could a buyer repeat this to a purchasing committee as a reason to buy? If so, it is a claim, and Articles 2 to 8 govern it. If not, it is color, and this Accord has nothing to say about it.

Exaggeration is not the problem this Accord exists to address. Misrepresentation of evidence is.

1. A party accedes by executing the Instrument of Accession annexed to this Accord and publishing a statement that it has done so.
2. Accession is open to any party without fee, license, membership, qualification or approval. No applicant may be refused, and no party may be expelled.
3. A party names a person accountable for compliance and publishes that name.
4. A party may withdraw at any time by publishing a statement to that effect. Withdrawal takes effect on publication and no reason is required.
5. Accession creates no agency, partnership, joint venture or association between parties, and no party acts for another.

1. To bring its existing material into conformity within ninety days of accession.
2. To produce, on the request of any party considering a purchase, the evidence for any claim it has made.
3. To correct material it finds to be in breach, to state that it has done so, and to notify any party who relied on it. Correction is a condition of continued accession.
4. To require the same of any party that markets the acceding party's products under its own name.

1. Correction is self-administered. This Accord creates no tribunal, no adjudicator, and no power in any party to determine another party's compliance.
2. Nothing in this Accord obliges a party to take, or to refrain from taking, any commercial action in relation to any other party, whether or not that other party has acceded.
3. A specifier may require conformity as a condition of tender. This is the mechanism by which the Accord has effect, and it operates at the election of the buyer, not by agreement among suppliers.

1. A public register of parties is maintained, recording the name of each party, the date of accession, and the name of the accountable person.
2. Until a standards body assumes the function, Advanced Coatings Engineering LLC maintains the register as interim depositary, without fee, and without any power over accession or withdrawal.
3. The register records. It does not certify, approve, endorse or rate any party or any product, and entry on it is not represented as any of those things.

1. This Accord is voluntary. It is not a standard, and no body has adopted it.
2. It confers no rating, approval, listing, certification or endorsement on any party or product.
3. It creates no obligation as to price, output, territory, customer, supplier, or any other term of competition, and nothing in it restricts a party from competing on any basis whatever.
4. It does not displace any law. Where the law requires more, the law governs.

1. This Accord is reviewed not less than once every two years.
2. Amendment is by published draft and a public comment period of not less than ninety days.
3. This Accord is intended for submission to a recognized standards body. On adoption of its substance by such a body, that body's text governs and this text is withdrawn.

No fee, license or membership is required. This Accord may be reproduced in full, without alteration, by anyone, including by parties that have not acceded.