Cordless blinds, and the Canadian rule that made them standard

What the rule says

The Corded Window Coverings Regulations, SOR/2019-97, came into force on 1 May 2021. They replaced an earlier 2016 set, and they are far less negotiable than what came before, because they stopped describing good practice and started specifying measurements.

Two numbers carry most of it.

A reachable cord with one free end must not exceed 22cm in length when pulled in any direction by a gradually applied force reaching 35 newtons. And if a reachable cord is pulled with that same force, the perimeter of any loop — whether it already existed, or the pull created it, or the pull enlarged it — must not exceed 44cm.

Those figures are not arbitrary and they are not about tidiness. Twenty-two centimetres is shorter than the distance a cord needs to wrap a small child’s neck. Forty-four centimetres is smaller than the perimeter a loop needs to pass over a one-year-old’s head. Thirty-five newtons is roughly what a child that age can pull. The regulation is written to a body, which is why there is no version of it that a longer cord satisfies.

There is a third requirement that gets less attention and matters just as much: a cord that is unreachable must stay unreachable for the useful life of the product. A design cannot pass by hiding a cord behind a cover that pops off.

What it applies to, and what it does not

The regulations govern supply. It is prohibited to manufacture, import, advertise or sell a corded window covering in Canada that does not meet them. The text is public and short enough to read in ten minutes — it is SOR/2019-97, the Corded Window Coverings Regulations, and Health Canada’s page on window covering cords is the plain-language version. We link them because a page that states a legal number should show you where the number came from.

They do not govern ownership. The blind hanging in your hallway from 2009 is not illegal and nobody is coming for it. If a child can reach its cord, that is worth acting on today — but the reason is the child, not the law.

The distinction matters when you are being sold to. “Now required by law” applied to your existing blinds is a sales line, not a legal fact.

What actually changed on the floor

Three things, in descending order of how much they affected what you can buy.

The continuous chain loop became difficult. A chain that hangs from a header to within reach of the floor is a loop far longer than 44cm, and pulling it does not make it shorter. It can comply if it is held under tension by a device fixed to the wall, which is why you see small plastic tensioners screwed into window frames. But a tensioner is a bracket, and a bracket can be removed by whoever repaints the room. Manufacturers who did not want to depend on that went cordless.

Inner cords got designed out. The lift cords running up the back of a roman shade, or through the ladders of a venetian, are reachable on many older designs if you pull the fabric or the slats aside. Complying meant either shielding them properly or replacing the lift system, and a lot of ranges took the second route.

Cordless stopped being an upgrade. Before the rule, “cordless” was a line item you paid for. After it, spring-assisted lift and wand control became the default build for most of the market, and the price gap closed to near nothing on the common products. Motorization is still a genuine upgrade, because it adds hardware.

How each product answers it

The mechanism decides which route was available.

Rollers and zebras operate on a chain. Cordless here means a spring inside the tube, tensioned so a light pull at the bottom bar sends it up, or a motor in the tube. The spring has a practical limit — a very large, very heavy blind is harder to balance on one — and past it we specify a motor rather than a heavier spring.

Venetians have two cord systems, not one: the lift cords that raise the slats, and the ladder cords the slats sit in. A cordless venetian replaces the lift with a spring or a motor and puts the tilt on a wand. It is the product where the rule changed the most hardware.

Romans hide their lift cords behind the fabric, and that is exactly the case the “must stay unreachable” clause was written for. A modern roman uses a cordless lift or a shielded, tensioned system.

Verticals were closest to compliant already. The vanes traverse on a wand and tilt on a wand, and the chain that links the vanes at the bottom is optional — we leave it off in a house with a toddler, accepting that the vanes then move independently in a draught.

Blackout rollers are rollers, with the same spring or motor answer. The relevant difference is weight: blackout fabric is heavier than screen, so the spring has to be specified for it rather than assumed.

What to do about the blinds you already have

Three practical steps, in order of how much they help.

Move the crib, the bed and anything climbable away from the window first. It is free, it takes a minute, and it removes the reach that everything else is trying to manage.

Fit a tension device on any continuous chain, screwed into the frame or the wall, so the loop cannot be pulled away from the window. They cost very little and they are sold everywhere. Check it after anyone paints.

Then replace, in the rooms where a child actually spends time, and in that order — the bedroom before the hallway. Whether you replace with ours or anybody else’s, a cordless mechanism is the only one that does not depend on a bracket staying screwed in.

If you would rather have somebody look at what you have and say which of your windows are a problem, that is part of the free measure. We will also tell you when the answer is a five-dollar tensioner rather than a new blind — that conversation happens at the door more often than you would expect.

How a cordless mechanism actually works

Three answers cover almost everything on sale, and they behave differently enough to be worth telling apart.

Spring-assisted lift. A coiled spring inside the roller tube is tensioned to balance the weight of the fabric. Pull the bottom bar down and it stays; give it a light tug and it travels back up. It is the most common cordless roller and the cheapest to build. Its limit is weight: a very large or very heavy blind is hard to balance on one spring, and a spring that is fighting too much fabric feels either sticky going down or violent going up.

Cordless lift on a horizontal blind. A venetian or a cellular with no lift cord uses a friction or spring mechanism in the headrail, and you raise it by pushing the bottom rail up with your hand. It stops wherever you leave it. Tilt moves to a wand.

Motorized. A tubular motor inside the roller, powered by a rechargeable battery, a plug-in transformer or hardwiring. It removes the question entirely, adds a real cost, and is the only answer on a window nobody can reach.

There is a fourth, and it is worth naming because it is often the right one on a door: a wand. Rigid, cannot loop, cannot wrap, and it is how verticals have always been operated.

What a compliant blind looks like when you are standing in front of one

You do not need the regulation to check a blind. You need to look at it the way a toddler would.

Reach for anything hanging. If there is a chain or a cord, follow it to the end. Can you get 22cm of it in your hand? Can you make a loop bigger than the span of your palm and your thumb — roughly 44cm around? If either answer is yes and the blind is within reach of a floor, a bed, a sofa or a windowsill a child can climb onto, that blind is the problem in that room.

Then look at the back of the shade. On a roman or a cellular, pull the fabric gently forward and see whether the inner cords come with it. On a compliant design they do not: they are either shielded or absent.

Last, look at what is under the window. The blind is only reachable if something gets a child up to it, and the most common something is furniture that was moved for entirely unrelated reasons.

Where the risk actually sits in a house

Parents are told to worry about the nursery, and the nursery is usually the room that already got attention. The rooms that catch people out are the other ones.

The landing or hallway. Often has a window nobody thinks about, often has the oldest blind in the house, and is where a child is unsupervised for the longest stretches.

The spare room. Fine until it becomes a bedroom, and by then the blind is part of the furniture and nobody re-examines it.

Grandparents’ house. The blinds are older, the visits are irregular, and nobody has walked the rooms with a toddler’s reach in mind. It is worth doing once, out loud, rather than assuming.

Anywhere a bed or a sofa was moved. The blind did not change; the reach did. This is the single most common way a compliant room stops being one.

The furniture rule, which does more than any product

If you take one thing from this page, take this: nothing that a child can climb should be within arm’s length of a window covering.

A cot, a bed, a toy box, a chest of drawers, a sofa arm, a radiator cover. Every one of them turns an out-of-reach cord into a reachable one, and none of them is addressed by buying a better blind.

Health Canada’s own advice leads with the same point, and it costs nothing. A cordless blind and a cot under the window is still a better room than a corded blind and a cot under the window — but a cot on the far wall makes both of them safer than either change alone.

If you are buying now

Ask three questions and you have covered it.

Is it cordless? If the answer is “it has a tensioner”, that is a different answer — it means there is a cord and a bracket holding it, and the bracket is the part that fails when somebody redecorates.

Are the inner cords shielded? On romans, cellulars and venetians this is the one people forget, because the cord you can see is not the only cord there is.

And where is the furniture going? We ask this at the measure, before fabric, because it changes which rooms need what.