Alberta keeps CSA B51:19 while Ontario, BC and Manitoba enforce the 2024 boiler code

What the bulletin says

The short answer: CSA B51:19 stays in force in Alberta by ministerial order.

The bulletin explains that Alberta's Safety Codes Act normally brings a replaced code into force automatically on the first day of the month that follows one year after the new edition is published, unless the minister orders otherwise. In this case the minister did. The bulletin's note 2 states that Ministerial Order TCS:007/25 declined to adopt CSA B51:24, so CSA B51:19 remains in force under the Pressure Equipment Safety Regulation.

Other entries on the same list show the automatic rule working as usual:

• The ASME Boiler and Pressure Vessel Code is listed at its 2025 edition.
• ASME B31.9, building services piping, is listed at 2025.
• ASME B31.1, power piping, is at 2024; the bulletin says the 2026 edition is expected to be declared in force on October 1, 2027.
• CSA B52, the refrigeration code, is at its 2023 edition.

Rev.13 replaced Rev.12, which ABSA marked as withdrawn.

How other provinces have moved

Alberta's decision stands out because three large markets went the other way:

Technical Safety BC's bulletin adopted the 2024 edition with no BC-specific deviations. Manitoba's bulletin lists the 2024 edition's key changes, including new requirements for boilers in cyclic service, a new Declaration of Conformity form in place of the statutory declaration, and revised optional rules for servicing historical boilers. Quebec, as our report on its draft pressure-installation regulation shows, has proposed naming CSA B51:19 explicitly.

Analysis: what a two-edition country means for the trade

This section is our analysis. It is not a statement from ABSA or any regulator.

For a residential boiler installer working in one city, this is background. For three groups it matters more:

1. Suppliers and manufacturers' reps who sell across the Prairies and into BC need paperwork that matches the edition each regulator enforces. A Declaration of Conformity form accepted in Manitoba is a 2024-edition document; Alberta is still on 2019 rules.
2. Multi-province commercial contractors should check the edition per job, not per company.
3. Anyone writing technical content should stop saying "the current CSA B51" as if there is one. There isn't, as of October 2026.

On the marketing side, accuracy is the selling point. A commercial buyer who reads "we work to CSA B51:24" on an Alberta contractor's site may wonder whether the company knows its own province. A short regional page that names ABSA and the edition it lists is more credible. Our Alberta page does this for the province, and our regulation content service builds the same kind of page for a contractor's own site.

Questions we couldn't answer from the documents

Good reporting includes the gaps. Three questions remain open after reading ABSA's bulletin:

• Why Alberta declined the 2024 edition. The bulletin cites Ministerial Order TCS:007/25 but doesn't explain the reasoning, and we didn't locate a public statement of it.
• Whether a later edition will be adopted. The bulletin doesn't say whether Alberta plans to skip to a future edition or revisit the 2024 one.
• How cross-border paperwork is handled in practice. Manufacturers registering designs in several provinces deal with this daily, but we found no public ABSA guidance specific to the edition split.

If ABSA publishes more, we'll update this story and change its updated date. In the meantime, the safest assumption for anyone writing about Alberta work is the one the bulletin states: the 2019 edition is the one in force.

Related reading

ABSA is also the subject of our Alberta gas codes story, which explains why the 2025 B149 gas codes did come into force in Alberta on schedule. For Ontario's side, see TSSA's Revision 1.

BoilerNews.ca reports on boiler regulation for marketing and business purposes. We are not engineers, inspectors or a contractor, and nothing here is compliance advice; confirm requirements with ABSA.