I suspect the lack of money to be made by doing so would likely kill it as much as anything. Licensing and certification is mostly about trying to artificially restrict a market to keep prices up. But this market is such that it is doubtful it could survive higher prices.

I was looking at your web site and noticed an interesting word in one of your equipment lists. It uses the word "toque". I had to look it up to find that it is some kind of hat. Do Canadians actually use this word? I have not had to look up a word in a long while, but that one got me.

BTW, on the same equipment list "water bottle" is misspelled as "water bootle". I least I think it is a typo. Maybe that is another Canadianism.

Yes, toque is a very common Canadian word. When it's really cold out you don't wear a hat, you wear a toque.

For example, go over to mec.ca and punch "toque" into the search engine and you'll get a lot of results back ... something like this:

Yep, that's the common term. Though when chatting with 'Murcans, I just add "watch cap" to save time.

There can be no standard of certification unless we work out this toque vs. cap business. Now I propose we outlaw toque for survival and restrict its usage to culinary. This has the support of the Chefs' Alliance. Who's with me?

I think it would be wise to cede the proper naming of cold weather gear to us Canadians, no?

Now I think you're one toque over the line.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ejvcd-JeVCQ

How about we vote on it?

Okay, after helping derail this thread I now feel obliged to post something on-topic

I'd tend to think that this type of certification is something that would need to be driven by government demands. I look at it like first aid training; corporations and other groups operating in certain spaces need to have a dictated amount of certified first aiders. This provides the motivation for the standards & levels of certification to be set and then multiple players in the training space can develop programs that meet those standards in whatever way they feel best for their target customers (for example, my wilderness first aid certification is accepted by provincial authorities to be equivalent to or surpassing Standard First Aid).

That said, there are other disciplines, like IT (my field), where there are various technical certifications which can take off but only if both the individual and (more importantly) employers believe that it is beneficial for the individual to hold such a certification. Personally, I don't believe such certifications are good indicators of skill so I don't value them highly; though I have recently got more but simply because it helped our company from a corporate partnership perspective.

To get a wilderness survival certification off the ground from this non-government mandated perspective, it would require some really good marketing to get the corporate buy-in to create the demand (I think, at least).

Actually, what could be really helpful other than certification is some form of industry association that survival schools could be a part of (even if an informal one). I've seen interesting courses offered by various companies and it would be nice if there was some way to know if the school is well thought of in the industry.

That said, even this requires a certain level of marketing and education to the potential client base but it may be a bit more easy to do than coming up with a certification to offer to the clients.

I think you are still dealing with the same problems. The majority of these schools are not real big and I suspect not horribly profitable. What incentive would there be for these guys to come together to form an association that would take up their time when they could be out hustling?

My guess is whoever would start such a trade group would want to have control over it permanently and that would doom it to being mostly irrelevant in the long run.

I wonder how big the entire industry even is. I doubt there are more than a few hundred instructors making a FT living at it. It may not even be that big.

I think there is a list of survival schools on this website somewhere. Why not just email them all and see if there is any interest? I'd be curious how many even still exist.