1. Preamble

Whereas, in 1996, the Government of Quebec enacted legislation governing reserved designations for agricultural and food products;

Whereas groups of operators, whose activity is subject to inspection by a certification body, may propose the recognition of a designation to the Minister;

Whereas the reserved designation system in Quebec has a certain number of general rules:

1. The recognition of any designation is the result of an organization’s efforts to protect it. All applications for recognitions must come from groups of producers or processors that have been instituted as juristic persons, regardless of their legal structure. These organized groups shall:
• include businesses whose responsibility is to ensure that the products meet the requirements for using the designation at all times;
• be made up of members from all the sectors involved in the production and preparation of certified products, up to the stage when the products may bear the designation;
• be representative of the majority of those who practise a given production method to obtain the product;
• have internal statutes and rules stipulating membership requirements for new applicants, as well as measures for expelling current members, if applicable.
2. The applicant organization is not the owner but only the user of the designation, which enters the public domain.
3. In Quebec, an open registered designation control system allows all those who comply with the approved specification manuals to use the corresponding designations.
4. The recognition of any designation is based on the principle of product traceability. A description of the system used to ensure product traceability at the various stages of production-processing-development, up until the product is put on the market, must be included with the application.
5. The protection provided to those who use any reserved designation, once it is recognized by the Minister, is identical for all designations, regardless of their category and type (principle of the specification manual, joint recognition procedure, system of control through certification, protection against forgery and imitations).

Through these regulations, the CARTV outlines the procedure that must be followed for reviewing all:

• Initial designation recognition applications sent to the CARTV;
• Applications to modify the specification manual included with a recognized designation;
• Applications to transfer a previously recognized designation to another designation.

In this document, the term "Board" refers to the authority whose ultimate responsibility is to recommend the recognition of a designation to the Minister.