About 20 years ago, an idea was officially floated to standardize the descriptions of life jackets across North America, in terms of how they’re designed and the performance characteristics they have. “You look at the Great Lakes, the boundary waters, the main coast, Nova Scotia—there’s a lot of shared space,” says Gordon Colby, certifications manager at Mustang Survival. “It seemed very sensible at the time.” ¶ This kind of standardization required input from multiple governments, agencies and others, and was also intended to align with Europe’s system. “The best bureaucratic minds got together and said, ‘OK, how can we make this more complicated and less useful?’” Colby says with a chuckle. ¶ Now, nearly two decades later, that standardization is actually happening. The US Coast Guard recently finalized a rule…
