ENSU Committee Meeting

STANDING COMMITTEE ON ENVIRONMENT AND SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT

COMITÉ PERMANENT DE L'ENVIRONNEMENT ET DU DÉVELOPPEMENT DURABLE

EVIDENCE

[Recorded by Electronic Apparatus]

Wednesday, September 16, 1998

• 1339

[English]

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gar Knutson (Elgin—Middlesex—London, Lib.)): My name is Gar Knutson and I'm the vice-chair of the committee. The chairman, Charles Caccia, has asked me to sit in for this session.

I would like to begin by welcoming our panellists today. As you know, we're looking at CEPA after second reading. We're looking for your ideas on what amendments are needed, if any, and your general comments on the bill.

• 1340

I don't know if the people at the end of the table have a particular order, but maybe they can introduce themselves.

[Translation]

Mr. Stéphane Gingras (regional coordinator, Great Lakes United): Good afternoon. My name is Stéphane Gingras and I represent Great Lakes United.

[English]

Mr. Burkhard Mausberg (Executive Director, Canadian Environmental Defence Fund): I am Burkhard Mausberg of the Canadian Environmental Defence Fund.

Mr. Craig Boljkovac (Member, World Wildlife Fund): I'm Craig Boljkovac with the World Wildlife Fund.

Ms. Julia Langer (Director, Wildlife Toxicology Program, World Wildlife Fund): I'm Julia Langer, World Wildlife Fund.

Mr. Gary Gallon (President, Canadian Institute for Business and the Environment): I'm Gary Gallon with the Canadian Institute for Business and the Environment, Montreal.

Ms. Dolores Broten (Executive Director, Reach for Unbleached Foundation): Dolores Broten with Reach for Unbleached.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gar Knutson): Ms. Langer, are you prepared to go first? You're the first on the list.

Ms. Julia Langer: Sure.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gar Knutson): Is your presentation going to include the use of the television?

Ms. Julia Langer: I have overheads.

Thank you for the opportunity to come to the committee to talk about CEPA. Actually, I think I sat through at least 10 clause-by-clause sessions prior to the passage of CEPA in 1988. I won't say it's necessarily nice to be back, but it is good to be back.

I want to focus on one main topic. The World Wildlife Fund is an organization that is focused on the protection of biodiversity—our roots are working on endangered species—but it's very clear that the world's biodiversity cannot be conserved in an environment filled with harmful chemicals; thus some of our work on pesticides and increasingly on endocrine-disrupting chemicals, which will be the focus of my presentation.

People and wildlife have been exposed to chemicals on an ongoing basis for the past 40 or 50 years. It's not only chemicals that are acutely toxic, kill-you-dead pesticides and industrial chemicals, but increasingly we're realizing that there are carcinogens, neurotoxins, teratogens, and a new kind of classification of chemicals of effects that are endocrine disrupters. This work was pioneered and a thesis put forward by a colleague of mine, Dr. Theo Colborn, and popularized in her book Our Stolen Future. I think some of you may have seen or read this book. It does give a very public account of the issue.

I want to say in a nutshell why we're concerned about endocrine disrupters and why we think they have to be addressed in more detail in CEPA and through the process of amendment of Bill C-32.

The endocrine system is a system in our body that regulates all sorts of activity, from conception through to death, and hormones, which are what the endocrine system produces, are the messengers within our body that tell our body how to grow, how to develop. Hormones fit receptors in the body like a lock and key. I'll try to illustrate this graphically.

• 1345

You have hormones in the body that are sending signals to your cells to tell it when to grow, when to develop. This applies to all sorts of different tissues: the brain, the sexual organs, the skeletal structure. Hormones control pretty much everything in our bodies.

Some chemicals we are now seeing having the ability to disrupt the hormonal system, the endocrine system. Some of them can act by mimicking hormones. As you see in the diagram, a hormone that fits a receptor in a cell sends a signal and tells the cell what to do, tells the DNA how to express itself. However, there are chemicals that can act like hormones, like estrogen, like testosterone, and can send wrong messages to the cell. Similarly, a synthetic chemical could block a message to the cell. So if you have a very important message you're waiting for on your cell phone and the signal is blocked, that message is not going to get to you, and that could be a very important message. During embryonic development, when the developing organism is most in need of hormone signals, this can cause irreversible effects.

This is to illustrate the severity of the problem that synthetic chemicals could be causing. In many lab studies, environmental studies both on humans and wildlife, these effects are starting to show up.

This would be perhaps a minor issue if it were just a few chemicals implicated, but to date we have a very long list—around seventy or so—of chemicals that are implicated. The more studied ones are some of the banned pesticides—DDT, 2,4,5-T, mirex, toxaphene—but also a list of a couple of dozen pesticides that are still registered for use in Canada. Similarly, on the more industrial chemical side, you have chemicals like nonylphenol ethoxylates, used in soaps and detergents, salites, found in plastics, bisphenol A, another constituent of plastic, and then again some of the more studied organo-chlorines.

Why is this only just starting to come up? We've been exposed to chemicals for the past forty or fifty years, so why are we only starting to hear about endocrine disruption now? I've tried to show it in a chronological way. My generation is the generation that was most exposed in the womb. You and I are all sitting here with chemicals in our bodies that our grandparents were never exposed to. Our mothers, however, grew up in a generation when there were many of these chemicals being produced and disbursed into the environment. In that sense, my generation, loosely speaking, is the most exposed in the womb. It is in the womb that these hormonal signals can be interfered with. Naturally, we're only starting to see those effects. It doesn't happen, bang, to the entire population, but in the current generation, as we reach reproductive age, we're starting to see those effects.

In wildlife, which have a faster generation time, these effects have been more visible and more obvious. In that sense, wildlife is the canary in the coal mine. We already have a great deal of evidence about endocrine disruption from the wildlife community. Some of the work that World Wildlife Fund is doing on beluga whales and work that is being done by Canadian Wildlife Service in the Great Lakes has been leading edge.

How does this relate to CEPA? Our argument is that neither the current CEPA nor the proposed amendments that have been tabled are adequate to catch endocrine disrupters in the first instance, nor are they adequate to address endocrine disrupters even if they were caught by some ad hoc mechanism. There are certain tools that need to be incorporated into CEPA in order to make that happen.

• 1350

We've looked at various initiatives in Europe, in the United States, and in Canada where these tools have been worked on to a greater extent than we have worked on them in Canada. Those tools may sound a bit fuzzy and kind of motherhood, but they basically are translating the precautionary principle from a principle into action. They operationalize that principle that is well stated in Bill C-32, the weight of evidence approach, and sort of translate what is being bandied about as an approach to decision making about scientific information into an operational mechanism for identifying priority substances like endocrine disrupters and then other modifications that come along that would allow us to take action.

The initiatives I wanted to highlight—and we've presented a brief that would outline these in more detail—are from the International Joint Commission. Basically, the International Joint Commission has taken a real stab at operationalizing it, at setting some guidelines as to how one would employ the weight of evidence approach. This is very key for endocrine disrupters. You are never going to get 100% proof that chemical A causes effect Y with endocrine disrupters, because everybody is exposed to multiple chemicals, and you cannot tease out what one chemical is doing and what one effect would be. Multiple chemicals have multiple effects.

The other thing is that it's incredibly low doses of chemicals, levels that may have been considered safe in the past, but we're finding effects lower and lower and lower, in some cases beyond what you might be able to detect in the environment. So establishing the exposure effect link of cross-multiple generations is going to be very difficult. But what the IJC has shown us is that what you can do is take a body of evidence and put that together to give you a confidence level about whether something is of concern or not. We have to get away from the notion that we're ever going to get 100% proof, especially on endocrine disrupters.

Another initiative that's under way in the United States is called EDSTAC, Endocrine Disrupting Screening and Testing Advisory Committee. This committee was mandated by U.S. law to develop a mechanism to screen thousands and thousands of chemicals for endocrine disruption. They are going to get to the point where they can screen 80,000 chemicals. This is the kind of system we need to have in place, not an ad hoc system like the current bill has, where it's the substances list committee and it's sort of “I think this chemical should be on the list”, or “I don't”. I've been through that process; it doesn't work very well. We need a really focused screening and testing committee, a process that is going to give us a made-in-Canada list of concerns.

The others are European initiatives. The first is the Oslo-Paris commission, a recently signed agreement that basically committed multiple nations to the precautionary principle and to target dates and phase-outs on a multiple list of chemicals, including endocrine disrupters. Then there are the European Union and individual European countries who are acting using the precautionary principle on endocrine disrupting chemicals.

We've put forward some very specific proposed amendments to Bill C-32, which address the definition of toxicity, the definition of virtual elimination, a definition for endocrine disrupting chemical, and methodologies for operationalizing the precautionary principle and the weight of evidence approach. This I trust can be looked at in more detail.

• 1355

One of the key things we would like to leave you with is the sense that we do not have an adequate mechanism right now to address these chemicals. The toxic substances management policy that is being codified in this version of the bill is based on persistence and bioaccumulation, which is not going to capture endocrine-disrupting substances. As you saw from the list that I put up, maybe there are a dozen or so that are highly persistent and bioaccumulative; the rest are not. These could be hit-and-run chemicals: you'll never see a residue in the body; you'll never be able to look at a person who has a reproductive problem when they're 25 and be able to trace it back to an exposure that happened at day 56 of gestation. This is not going to happen. We have to start looking beyond persistence and bioaccumulation in order to capture some of these important chemicals.

I will leave it to others to look at the bill in a sort of broader context. We are certainly concerned about not only identifying chemicals as endocrine disrupters, putting them on lists, getting some timeframe for action, but that the fundamental aspect, which others have talked about—the harmonization, the integration for the harmonization process—is an overriding concern. You can get a good list, you can get a good definition, but if you can't then act on it it's all for naught. So I would urge you to look at that as well, to try to make sure that once you identify chemicals of concern, you can take the precautionary action that's necessary.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gar Knutson): Thanks very much for that.

The plan is that we'll hear from all of our panellists and then we'll throw it open for questions.

Next on the list is Mr. Mausberg, from the Canadian Environmental Defence Fund. Welcome back to the committee.

Mr. Burkhard Mausberg: Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you for once again inviting the Canadian Environmental Defence Fund as a witness.

You've got a huge bill in front of you in Bill C-32. It covers a whole range of topics: ocean dumping, air pollution, toxic chemical pollution, biotechnology, and so on. The bill is so huge that we are only going to comment on one part of it today, but it's a part that applies to the whole bill, and that is part 2, public participation. This part is going to apply to all these various parts of the bill because the public participation part is the one where citizens are given an opportunity to engage in the activities under the act once the bill passes Parliament. We are only going to make comments on that part today.

We did present a paper, and I would like to just warn you that it's still in a draft format. Because we're going almost clause by clause, I want to make sure that I talk to our legal beagles before I submit to you a final version to make sure all the legalities are actually true the way I have written them. I am not a lawyer. I hope to have your patience in being able to submit to you a written version within a week or so.

This is also, I should say right from the start, a joint effort between the Environmental Defence Fund and the Institute for Environmental Law and Policy and the Canadian Environmental Law Association. So you may see similar language in the analysis of part 2 further down the line.

What does part 2 actually say, at the end of the day? If you get rid of the language, what does it actually do? What does part 2 do to encourage public participation? I can see four succinct elements.

The first thing is an environmental registry. That is a tool that contains certain notices about the act. The minister can publish things on this registry, presumably over the Internet these days, and you track what the registry actually says about the act.

There are certain whistle-blowing protection mechanisms also. In the bill they're called voluntary reports. It allows employees of corporations to report on potential violations and still have some protection without having to fear losing their jobs. So that's the second part within part 2.

The third part is a broad right to request investigations. Let's say you as a citizen see something wrong and you think there may be something wrong in the act or somebody is doing something wrong. You can formally request the minister to undergo an investigation, and the minister has up to 90 days to respond, blah, blah, blah. Well, that's about the same thing the current CEPA has in 108.

• 1400

So part 4 then, and the final one, is the right to sue, where citizens are given a new civil right. It's called the environmental protection action.

Again, just to review, the four parts are the registry, the whistle-blower protection, the right to request an investigation, and the right to sue. That's what really, at the end of the day, is in part 2.

I submit today that if this act passes with this part as it's currently written, you will be deceiving the Canadian public. You will be telling them that this act has something called public participation, but the actual words in the act do not give you public participation.

We're going to go through quite quickly what I mean, because that's a very dramatic statement.

I want to put this in context. In May the committee did do a report that received considerable media attention and put considerable pressure on the minister on enforcement. What the committee found was that there were five prosecutions in 1996 and 1997 under CEPA. That's not even one per province.

So public participation and the right to sue should, in my view, provide an opportunity for citizens to go ahead and enforce the act. Obviously, there are a whole bunch of problems on why the act is not being enforced. You identify them in here. One real opportunity is for citizens to be able to use the act and go ahead and enforce it.

That's the context in which I want to talk about this perceived right to sue, the environmental protection action. When you do look at the literature, if I may call it that, that the minister released in releasing this draft act, it is saying that, yes, Canadians will have a new right to sue. Well, let me tell you what this right actually means.

The first thing is, you actually have to have environmental harm. Something has to be polluted, destroyed, damaged, whatever.

The second thing is it has to be significant, whatever that means. I don't know what's significant to you or to me. It's probably different.

The third thing is you then have to do a formal investigation, a request to the minister for an investigation, and then the minister has 90 days to decide or sit on it.

The fourth thing is that you can only even think of launching an action if the minister's response is “unreasonable”. I don't know what unreasonable means, but we're now at the fourth stage.

The sixth stage means that if the perpetrator recognizes that there is someone interested in maybe suing them, they can go ahead and say, oh, sorry, we're going to do something about it. If you're going to violate the law, hopefully you'll get away with it, but someone may catch you. You can then go to the department and say, wait, we're going to fix it; don't sue us, we will fix it.

You're getting to stage number seven, which is that you can go in front of the court after you meet those six stages. Either you're really old by that time or you're broke, because you have to go through so many hoops and probably hire so many lawyers and do so much analysis of it. The court can then just dismiss your case because it's in the public interest to do so. Again, I don't know what public interest means.

Before you can actually seriously file an action in court, a citizen has to go through all these steps in order for it to be useful.

These restrictions, within part 2 of the act, are much more restrictive than the enforcement provisions of the endangered species bill. The endangered species act was submitted in the last Parliament and it died on the order paper, so I have no idea what's happening to it in terms of the political process. But the sections in there were more open than the sections in this particular act.

The sections of the Ontario Environmental Bill of Rights Act are not as restrictive as these, and the Bill of Rights in Ontario applies to all the various statutes dealing with the environment. This one only applies to CEPA.

So you have this incredible restriction before you can actually go ahead and sue someone and take legal action because someone broke the law. At the end of the day you are not being given a right. There are too many hoops.

The final thing I want to leave you with is that before you even want to launch an action—let's say, for example, that all those hoops are eliminated and you don't have to go through the request for investigation, you don't have to argue that the response of the minister was unreasonable, you don't have to argue that it's actually a significant environmental effect, what you are still left with is you can only sue after the damage has been caused.

• 1405

This committee released a report called It's About Our Health! Towards Pollution Prevention. If you take the pollution prevention principle, you may want to think about having the right to sue for imminent harm, i.e., I can sue someone if I know they are going to do harm before they actually do it. That for me is a preventative principle.

So I would encourage the committee, with my help, if you wish, to rewrite part 2 and not give what I might call deception to the Canadian public that we are actually given a new right to sue.

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gar Knutson): Thank you very much, Mr. Mausberg.

Next we'll go to Gary Gallon from the Canadian Institute for Business and the Environment. Welcome back, Mr. Gallon.

Mr. Gary Gallon: Thank you very much, Mr. Chair. The Canadian Institute for Business and the Environment is a policy think tank on behalf of the environment industry, which is about $15 billion a year and employs about 143,000 people. So we are in a position to have some concern about this particular act.

The institute itself has produced a number of papers, which we have left here with you today for your research staff. One is a review of studies and reports on environmental economics. Another is the analysis of five Canadian environmental cost studies. The third is voluntary environmental measures, the Canadian experience.

We want to congratulate you on your work to date here in the committee on behalf of the environment and the environment industry. It has been excellent. Your recommendations have been excellent.

We are approaching here today four areas related to the current proposed bill. They are, first, the lack of resources, financing, for Environment Canada to proceed to implement the Canadian Environmental Protection Act. The second is the effect of the harmonization agreement with the provinces. The third is the weakened definitions of pollution prevention and virtual elimination. The fourth is the lack of the precautionary principle being operationalized inside the act itself.

Going back to resources, the Canadian Environmental Protection Act will not be enforced if there are not resources to do so. The Environment Canada budget has been cut 35% from the heady years of the early 1990s to today's budget of $551 million for the fiscal year of 1998-99. That amount is actually smaller for environmental protection, because of that $551 million, $192.8 million is for weather reporting. That leaves only $358 million for environmental protection. This is the only ministry within the OECD countries that has combined weather reporting with environmental protection. As a result, we see things like Environment Canada's capital spending for environmental protection dropped to zero and Environment Canada's spending for the Canadian environment industry strategy dropped to zero.

Even the new $150 million allocated to the climate change program is going outside of government. I have talked to ministry officials in NRCan and Environment Canada. They're not being provided with additional resources for their people to work on climate change. They're being taken off water, toxics, and air pollution and put on climate change. They're being asked to double up their responsibilities. In the process we're getting neither good environmental protection under CEPA for water pollution and air pollution nor are we getting a very good program for climate change. So the lack of resources becomes an impediment to implementing CEPA.

Let's go to harmonization. Harmonization has turned out to be a code word or government-speak for disharmonization. It allows the provinces to act of their own accord at their own levels of environmental protection. It effectively moves Environment Canada and the federal government out of national environmental protection.

• 1410

Therefore, what I would like to see with regard to the proposed Bill C-32 is a new look at paragraphs 2.1(d) and 2.1(l), which state that the Government of Canada should “endeavour to act in cooperation with governments—” and that the government should “act in a manner that is consistent with the intent of intergovernmental agreements and arrangements—”. These should be rewritten.

The first one, to act in cooperation with governments, was in the old act. It's the second one that has the problems. You should rewrite it in such a way that it is the national interest that is the highest command of the land for protecting human health between provinces and among provinces. There should be some new wording to reflect that, rather than to have the federal government subservient to the provinces in intergovernmental agreements such as the harmonization agreement. That agreement is being carried out by CCME, the Canadian Council of Ministers of the Environment, but its budget has been cut in half, so its ability to help the provinces carry out the harmonization agreement is not there.

Then we go the third point, the weakened definitions of “pollution prevention” and “virtual elimination”. There what we would like to see is the added word “use”—not only the release of these pollutants, but the use of these toxics should be involved in the definition of pollution prevention, at the plant gate, and in the process of virtual elimination.

This is done by the United States under their environmental protection act, it's done by Germany, France, and Sweden. Why can't Canada also have that same ability and same definition to effect better definitions of pollution prevention and to effect then programs around both the use and release? Why in pollution prevention would we deal with release? That takes us back to pollution control, capturing at the end of the pipe. That really is pollution control. That's a 1968 definition.

The fourth point is the precautionary principle. It is clear that we continue to fight over the science of the harm to the environment. As a result, there is no effect in trying to move quickly enough to protect human health from the environment. That's why we need the precautionary principle operationalized in the wording of the act itself.

In fact we would be in much better shape with the United States and our OECD partners if we were to harmonize our act with theirs. We are in a state of free trade with the world. We are expanding free trade boundaries. Yet Canada could be in a position to make itself a pollution haven or backwater for environmental protection if it doesn't have the same free trade parameters related to environmental protection.

Let's take for example the national pollutant release inventory. That inventory looks fairly good in this new act; there's some good support for it. However, it reports on only 176 contaminants, whereas the U.S. toxic release inventory, its sister inventory, reports on 600 contaminants. Canada's NPRI doesn't report on the most important pollutants: dihydrogen oxides; sulphur dioxide; acid rain; particulates; PM-10s. These need to be reported on. Certainly for the companies operating in Canada, their U.S. subsidiaries are reporting. They can do it here.

Fifth are the matters related to the cost-effective application of the law. There are a number of references to cost-effective use of environmental protection in Canada. The problem here is that weighing the economic benefits with the environment benefits has been done uneconomically. In other words, it's been done without proper economics.

• 1415

For example, the parameters of the DRI Standard and Poor's study for the competitive impact on climate change to Canada were designed by Environment Canada, Natural Resources Canada, Finance, five ministries altogether. When you saw the study you found that it only dealt with one economic aspect, and that was the negative impacts on the competitiveness of the fossil fuel industry—coal, oil, and natural gas. It did not deal with the other economic impacts of competitiveness of new energy efficiency equipment, or competitiveness of design and implementation of new renewable energy sources. It did not deal with the fact that Canada became a leader in the competition for technology on environmental protection from tough regulations in the seventies and eighties. It was a leader, but now it's a follower, and becoming more so, and will have to buy its technology from Sweden and Germany and the United States when it finally catches up on climate change.

We need the cost-benefit studies, the need to design in or to write into this act the proper wording for designing benefit-cost studies, as they do now under the EPA in the United States. Then you will be able to get the right economic parameters. You may want to write in using green accounting principles accepted in Canada, which there are now, and using environmental economics, which is a whole new well-established discipline from economists in North America and Europe. That could be added into the act. Then you would have the true cost-benefits from your environmental protection from CEPA.

Finally, on cost-recovery mechanisms, the government has written it up in Bill C-32. There are a number of cost-recovery elements to this new act. It appears to be going along the lines of the new program review that tells Environment Canada to collect money. Each ministry must generate revenue, must be a business now. What they end up doing is saying you shall do cost recovery for companies that require an action under the act; you shall require cost recovery for environmental permits or for allocation of fines.

I was with a working group in Environment Canada, with industry there at the table. It was for environmental assessment. Industry said yes, we will pay an environmental assessment fee, but we have the right to design the environmental assessment. You then compromise the act by that. Also, industry, and rightly so, complains about double taxation—“Well, we pay taxes; why do we need to pay another tax in order to proceed with the undertaking?”

We must be very careful to make sure that we do not have those who are paying fees distort the law or the application of the law to environmental audits or other aspects related to the fees.

I leave you finally with compliance and enforcement. You've been very good on your recommendations on it. I'm reminded of the booklet written by Environment Canada, “Enforcement and Compliance Policy”, which is a policy within Environment Canada written in 1988, reprinted in 1992 and again in 1994. Compliance monitoring means to accomplish inspections by inspectors, mandated reporting, sampling, enforcement by officials, and monitoring of substances and releases. I'm seeing this policy slip away in the current proposed Bill C-32. It's important to refer back to this policy as it is now and make sure those points are in the act.

Thank you very much.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gar Knutson): Thank you very much, Mr. Gallon.

Next we have Mr. Gingras.

[Translation]

Mr. Stéphane Gingras: I want to thank the members of the committee for inviting me here today to discuss the Canadian Environmental Protection Act. Great Lakes United is a coalition of 170 organizations operating in the vicinity of the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence, all of whom are deeply concerned about protecting the ecosystem of these regions.

We have chosen to cover parts 4 and 5 of the bill because we feel they are the most relevant to the work we're doing every day. However, this is not to say that we endorse the provisions in the other parts of the proposed legislation.

• 1420

We must emphasize that, without thorough amendments to the bill as currently worded, we cannot support its passage in the House of Commons. Specifically, we are concerned about the provisions in part 4 concerning pollution prevention which, has my colleagues have mentioned, are extremely weak.

This is no longer the 1970s when we controlled pollution with filters and water treatment systems. Today, pollution prevention is being practised on a global scale. The use, distribution, sale and production of certain chemicals that contaminate the environment is banned. When chimneys are filtered, solid waste is found. Pollution is merely being transferred from one medium to another.

We also have some concerns about part 4 which fails to contain any enforcement measures to deal with firms that discharge toxic substances into the environment. Mention is made only of substances deemed toxic under the Canadian Environmental Protection Act. We believe that all businesses that produce toxic discharges and report them under the Domestic Substances List should be required to submit a pollution prevention plan with clear discharge reduction deadlines. This was one of the recommendations put forward by the task force set up to study pollution prevention.

Moreover, we are deeply disappointed with part 5 respecting toxic substances and somewhat concerned even. The definition provided of "virtual elimination" is not at all consistent with Canada's commitments under the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement. Accordingly, this definition must the revised.

The International Joint Commission pointed out on numerous occasions that the virtual elimination of toxic substances in the Great Lakes basin was possible only if the use, distribution and production of such substances was eliminated. The current definition of virtual elimination in the bill refers to discharges "below any measurable quantity". This rather vague reference raises a host of technical questions.

Earlier this afternoon, mention was made of the need to take a precautionary approach. Clearly, because of science's limitations, we will never be able to clearly establish a link between the discharge of toxic substances into the environment and certain harmful effects on human health or on the environment. What we must do is take a more pragmatic approach, one which will allow us to come up with a definition on the basis of the intrinsic properties of substances, that is to determine if these substances are carcinogens or teratogens, rather than develop a model based on exposure levels or on the number of cancer cases linked to the discharge of toxic substances into the environment. This is another aspect of part 5 which in our view is extremely important.

Over the past three years, I've had the opportunity to participate in a strategic option process initiated by the federal government. Industry representatives were invited to come together and discuss possible ways of controlling substances identified as toxic under the CEPA. I found this to be in extremely cumbersome process. The recommendations ultimately put forward generally called for industry to voluntarily reduce emission levels. Whether or not these recommendations will produce any concrete results remains to be seen. This situation is totally unacceptable given the recommendation whereby the CEPA should stipulate clearly deadlines within which the federal government must act when a substance is declared toxic as well as the procedures it should follow.

• 1425

In my brief, I talk about a substance called perchloroethylene, a solvent used by dry cleaning industries. Seven or eight years elapsed before the industry took steps to reduce perchloroethylene emission levels in Canada. During all those years, the industry discharged 38,000 tons of PERC into the environment.

I question this process because it is cumbersome and the response time is slow. The government should be forced to react more quickly to the presence of toxic substances in the environment.

In conclusion, I would like to comment on three other issues, which may seem somewhat unrelated. It is very important that Canada, which showed leadership on the question of exporting hazardous waste to developing countries at the 1994 Basel Convention, once again show leadership and call for a ban on the export of hazardous waste to non-OECD member countries, as was agreed to by the parties to the convention. The text of the agreement signed should be included in the CEPA.

I would also like to comment on the taxation issue. Environment Canada should have the right to tax environmentally harmful activities and to build up a fund that could be used, for example, to clean up contaminated sites in Canada, to set up pollution prevention programs, to assist industry or to prevent pollution of a more global nature in Canada. That's very important. Environment Canada must be given the means to do the job that needs to be done.

Thank you.

[English]

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gar Knutson): Thank you very much, Mr. Gingras. I think you win the prize for being briefest, which is always good.

Miss Broten.

Ms. Dolores Broten: Thank you. I'm very pleased to be here this afternoon.

Before we start, I want to thank this committee for all of your folks' time, both this afternoon and over the long years of the last while. You've all been working very hard.

Let me introduce myself. I describe myself as a working environmentalist, which means I work full-time and get paid part-time. I'm editor of the Watershed Sentinel, which is an environmental newsmagazine with a circulation of 3,000. I'm also executive director of the Reach for Unbleached Foundation. Last June, through the Canadian Environmental Network's toxics caucus, I was honoured to be the environmentalist on the Canadian delegation at the first international negotiating committee for a global treaty on persistent organic pollutants—POPs, as they call them in the press.

Reach for Unbleached has also been a founding member of the pulp caucus of a transboundary zero toxics alliance, which includes environmental organizations from the five states of the U.S. Pacific Northwest and British Columbia.

We started Reach for Unbleached in May 1991 on a small island at the north end of Georgia Strait in British Columbia, Canada, in response to dioxin contamination of shellfish beds from pulp mill effluent. It started as a campaign to encourage consumer acceptance of unbleached or oxygen-bleached paper for most uses. Reach for Unbleached is now a national foundation and a registered charity with a broad focus on technical issues and on toxics in its work towards sustainability in the pulp and paper industry.

My work brings me into constant contact with grassroots activists, as well as federal and provincial ministry personnel, not to mention my colleagues who actually work in the pulp and paper industry.

I am not a lawyer, and having read the substantive submissions from West Coast Environmental Law and Canadian Environmental Law and all the other law organizations that we're blessed to have in this country, I can only say that I am glad there have been others carefully dissecting the legal language and the intent of Bill C-32. I fully support the concerns raised by these legal folks. I am especially perturbed by the issues raised by West Coast Environmental Law in their May submission around the confusion of roles of Parliament, cabinet, and the minister in Bill C-32 as it is now.

My comments are going to be more general than the legal dissection, and drawn from the experience we have at Reach for Unbleached with some of these issues on the ground—you might almost say from the bottom up. Our perspective is one of encouraging improvement in environmental impact. Our specific experience is with the pulp and paper industry, one of Canada's most important, both economically and environmentally. We judge Bill C-32 from our estimates of how or if it will help us do our job.

• 1430

I want to highlight four areas: harmonization, information and community right to know, toxic substances, and pollution planning and regulations.

Harmonization. Like most environmentalists, we at Reach for Unbleached are not fans of harmonization. We believe that a strong federal role in environmental protection, including regulation and inspection, is critical.

British Columbia signed a harmonization agreement on the administration of federal and provincial legislation for the control of liquid effluents from pulp and paper mills in September 1994. This agreement expired in March 1996. We critiqued this agreement and found that information, criteria, and standards were never developed, as had been promised—actually signed—in the agreement. This agreement has been renewed, and I've been told—this is hearsay—that the British Columbia provincial inspection and enforcement was so unsatisfactory that the federal and provincial officials involved are now actually targeting a couple of mills by name each year for inspection.

The province, on the other hand, has argued that the $250,000 paid by the federal government in 1995 to carry out federal inspection requirements was inadequate. In reality, the money went into the provincial general revenue and the regional offices that had to do the inspections never even saw a penny of the payments. All they got was more work and no more money.

Personally, and with no intent to offend the many dedicated provincial regional officials—and there are lots of them—I do think the federal presence on the ground helps preserve some distance between government and industry. Environment ministry personnel, both federal and provincial, have often been recruited from the pulp industry, and even if not, they move in the same social circles in small resource-extraction towns. The distance created by working for Ottawa helps preserve a dynamic relationship between the players. If I had my way, I'd even suggest the feds should be rotated after a few years' service, like they do with the RCMP. You only work in a town for a few years and they move you out, so you don't get too close.

Information and community right to know. The environmental registry, or perhaps some other document, presumably on the Internet, of course, should be expanded to include all the available monitoring results accessible. At the moment, most of the information is not available.

People working in the ministries don't have time to post what sampling is compiled, and sometimes the information is hidden behind passwords, so the general public can't access it without going through some kind of screening from the officials. For example, in the technical working group evaluation of cycle one, environmental effects monitoring for Canada's pulp mills, all of the evaluations are protected by a password. So you phone a bureaucrat and they tell you the password. Why should you have to go through that?

Nonetheless, almost all of the available information out in British Columbia is from federal sources, including the national pollutant release inventory and the environmental effects monitoring reports. It's my belief that if government refuses to carry out its necessary role as a regulator and passes to this voluntary pollution prevention model that seems so popular, then public access to real technical information and measurements is the only actual tool we have left to protect the environment.

• 1435

On toxic substances, to cut to the quick, Reach for Unbleached agrees with the precautionary approach to toxic substances regulation suggested last year by the Swedish parliamentary environment committee. If a substance is persistent and bioaccumulative, it should be banned from release to the environment. It's simple, it's quick, it's neat, and in the long run it's cheap. Then of course we have to deal with the endocrine disrupters on top of that; I recognize that. But get the persistent ones, get the bioaccumulative ones, just by definition. Save a whole whack of money.

One way to think about this is, in the light of all the new information about the harm caused by DDT and its breakdown products, consider how much DDT and DDE there would be in all of our mothers' milk if we had not moved to restrict that pesticide due to its impact on birds. Twenty years later, the science is emerging about the impact on mammals, including humans, and just think if we had done nothing for 20 years.

By the way, the suggestion in Bill C-32 that actions to protect the environment should be taken only if they are cost-effective is really offensive. This is especially true for someone with the B.C. experience. Thousands of kilometres of our foreshore have been contaminated by pulp mill effluent contaminated with dioxin, even as that is measured by Health Canada standards, which are a thousand times more lax than the new standards proposed by the World Health Organization. The science in 1989-90 was just emerging around dioxin, or some of it. But the pulp mills did indeed argue that it was unaffordable to deal with this problem. Of course, we all know now that when required by legislation to clean up their effluent, they're able to manage it after all.

Incidentally, because that regulation applied only to effluent, despite the much publicized clean-up B.C. coastal pulp mills still produce one-sixth of the inventory dioxin in Canada. An industry and government working group has been studying this problem for years, looking for a voluntary solution. The simple and doable solution is to take the pulp logs out of the salt water within three weeks, before they soak up too much chlorine. But these guys haven't been able to figure that one out yet.

In terms of toxics, I think our experience in Canada shows that the bar to determine what is toxic is far too high under our current policy. However, after the tortuous and torturous process of getting a substance labelled toxic, if after you do all of that and the only result is guidelines and voluntary reduction and pollution prevention plans— you know, I get to the point where I think it just doesn't make any difference what kinds of definitions you use, because it doesn't matter.

Now we go to pollution prevention planning and regulations. In theory, pollution prevention is a great idea, a very seductive idea. In reality, in my experience so far, it hasn't actually worked.

I was a member of a public advisory committee on pollution prevention planning for the Elk Falls pulp mill. After about two years of meetings and lots and lots of delicious sandwiches, but before any changes in mill systems were actually made, the company management withdrew from the process. Even before that, it was obvious that progress would be very slow, since during the brainstorm sessions when we were talking about problems and what we could do about them, the company representatives systematically pointed out that any pollution prevention that required initial investment was not to be considered. This got to the point where even the mayor of the town and the chamber of commerce representative were joining the rest of us and we all called it excuse number 32: we can't afford it.

I would like to attach or circulate a report from our MillWatch publication, which explores a study called “When Pollution Prevention Meets the Bottom Line”, which was published in Environmental Science and Technology. In this study it was found that voluntary pollution prevention measures were never enacted, despite their potential to save the company money, due to investment cycle priorities. The study concluded that only regulation would have made the pollution prevention goals important enough to override the other financial factors a company has to juggle.

• 1440

To sum up, to me, Bill C-32, although it has some promising concepts, also has the potential to become an enormous generator of empty rhetoric and a hodgepodge of powerless initiatives with no environmental effectiveness. In B.C. we call this kind of process a “talk and log” show. You sit around and talk about it forever, but what's going on out in the environment keeps on happening.

How to fix it? Straighten out the jurisdictional confusions, increase the right to know and the access to real information, return to a serious regulatory framework and forget all the soft stuff, all the voluntary guidelines and feel-good rhetoric. That stuff industry will do on its own, with the help of their public relations firms.

Thank you.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gar Knutson): Thank you very much, Ms. Broten.

We've been here for about an hour and I wonder if people need a five-minute break. Mr. Casson was the first to nod, so we'll take a five-minute break and then come back for questions. We're scheduled to go to 5.30 p.m., although I don't know if we need that long. If we can limit the break to five minutes and not fifteen minutes, we'll finish that much earlier.

• 1442

• 1450

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gar Knutson): We'll begin our round of questions with ten minutes from the Reform Party, then ten minutes from the Bloc, and then we'll go over to the Liberal side. Mr. Gilmour, we'll begin with you.

Mr. Bill Gilmour (Nanaimo—Alberni, Ref.): Welcome.

My first question is to Julia Langer. As I mentioned earlier just briefly, it took me back to my previous life, when I had the honour of escorting your honorary chair, Prince Philip, through the forests of Vancouver Island a number of years ago.

Perhaps you could clarify something in your presentation. A number of the endocrine disrupters that you had mentioned, specifically DDT and 2,4,5-T, are already regulated under the Pest Control Products Act and through Agriculture Canada. Perhaps you could clarify this, because these are already regulated under other acts. What are you specifically asking us to do under CEPA that isn't covered in another act?

Ms. Julia Langer: I think this is the heart of the issue. There is a whole universe of chemicals out there that don't necessarily respect the kinds of divisions we might like to slot them into. In some cases some of the better-studied substances, such as DDT, PCBs, 2,4,5-T, toxaphene, and mirex, are coming up as endocrine-disrupting chemicals, but they are also persistent, bioaccumulative. They have a lot of black marks against them. So they have been, at least in Canada, dealt with under one act or another. It shouldn't really matter under what act they are dealt with. But there is a whole other range of substances, including pesticides but also industrial chemicals, that are still in active use and that lab work and ecological studies indicate are endocrine-disrupting substances, and we have to capture them in one way or another.

Certainly the Pest Control Products Act, which is now under the authority of Health Canada, not Agriculture Canada, should have a similar, parallel screening, testing and management regime for endocrine disrupters. I look forward to the time when perhaps this committee will have the opportunity to review proposed amendments to the Pest Control Products Act, because they are long overdue. I work on this area, and they are very long overdue.

But where you have overlap—and in our brief we gave a perfect example, tributyltin, which was a priority substances list one, back in 1988. It was evaluated under CEPA, but only the non-pesticide aspects. The major uses for organotins, which are classified as pesticides, were not evaluated. So they came out with a definition of non-toxic. When it's an estrogen, it creates imposex or intersex; it creates hermaphroditic animals. This is an estrogenic substance. It's persistent, it's bioaccumulative, yet it's non-toxic under the definition of CEPA because they looked at a teeny-weeny number of uses and left everything else unexplored. This is a perfect example of something falling through the cracks.

If you could require the Pest Control Products Act to have similar kinds of screening, testing and precautionary action requirements, that would be the perfect situation. In the absence of that, I would suggest that if you have a substance that overlaps between industrial and pesticidal applications, you do the evaluation for the substance as a whole. If precautionary action is required, then it should be taken regardless of whether or not it is a pesticide. But I hope the Pest Control Products Act can be fixed as well.

Mr. Bill Gilmour: Okay, thank you.

My next question is to Burkhard Mausberg on the subject of the right to sue, as we were talking at the break.

• 1455

I have some difficulty when you say that anything that has the ability to do harm should be legislated under this act. If you're a drowning man, water is causing the problem. So virtually anything under that limited a scope could be harmful.

The arguments I hear are that if you were, for example, to get a well-funded group—take Greenpeace, for example, and this is not a shot against Greenpeace, it's just that they are a well-funded group—they could grind the process to a halt through litigation in the courts if the right to sue didn't have a balance.

The people in Environment Canada feel they've struck that balance, and these are the hoops you don't like. Industry doesn't like it from the other side. They would like to see it gone. As a committee, we have the difficulty of trying to also find that balance. Perhaps you can give me some comfort in that if you leave the right to sue too loose, it leaves it open to anyone and it can be abused. I'd appreciate your comments.

Mr. Burkhard Mausberg: You mentioned a whole bunch of things. If I talk to my colleagues at Greenpeace, they may disagree with you on how well funded they are. I know donations towards environmental groups have gone down significantly over the last four or five years, so they may not agree with you. But I got the drift of your comment.

Let me address the first one on anything harmful. Maybe I wasn't explicit enough. My point was that the act currently says you can only litigate if there is a significant harm done to the environment. So you have to break something within the act, which then causes significant harm. I think we should be able to litigate if you break the act per se, regardless of what that harm is.

Let me give you the analogy of when you steal. If I steal $1 million from you or $10, it shouldn't really matter; I steal from you. I'm taking something that is not mine. As a society we say, I shall not steal. Whether it's $10 of $1 million, I don't do it. If somebody breaks the act, we can say something very similar. You are contravening what we as a society agreed are certain standards of protection for human health and the environment.

That would be my response in terms of that comment. That's the first part.

The second part would be, if you were to put in a restriction, if you were to say not any harm, where would you make that boundary? If I steal $10 from you, are you going to let me get away with it? If I steal $100, would you let me get away with it? It's the same the other way around. If my action happened to destroy five miles of ocean front in Nova Scotia because the ocean dumping sections have been violated, is that enough or is that not enough? If I release five kilograms of hexamethylphosphoric stuff, or whatever the stuff is, or two kilograms— Where do you actually define what is what the act currently calls significant? I don't know what is significant.

It may also very much depend on the receptor. As Julia said, a millionth of a gram of a certain hormone disrupter at a certain time may be significant, but for me, I can eat it for my breakfast; it doesn't matter because I'm a grown adult.

So what is significant really becomes a very difficult definition.

You mentioned another thing that we always hear and that's balance. I submit to you, sir, that the system as it is, is already inherently imbalanced. That is, if I expect to use the court system, if I myself or you or somebody in your constituency expects to use the court system, the imbalance already exists because I have to find representation, a lawyer. I have to pay for fees in order to access that system. My use of that system inherently already puts me at a disadvantage because I have to fork over cash. It's as simple as that. So depending on whether the balance is right or wrong, you can argue that it's already imbalanced because I am required to put a whole bunch of money down to have access to the system.

• 1500

Regardless of that, if I look at some of the other laws in both Canada and the U.S. where these kinds of rights are codified but were not as restrictive as this, i.e., a right to sue exists under the Ontario Environmental Bill of Rights, which is for all the acts, which is really important— It's quite different. For all environmental things in Ontario, I have this right to sue. This one is only for CEPA.

If I ask you how many cases have been launched since that bill was put into law five years ago and I tell you two, that's not really that much of an imbalance. Michigan had a similar law where all of a sudden businesses were allowed, if they put their money down, to access the courts, and the same thing happened. There were a very limited number of legal actions that came forward that occupied the courts. Face it. Just because we have access doesn't mean we're going to use it, because it's going to cost you a lot of cash.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gar Knutson): Do you want a supplementary?

Mr. Bill Gilmour: I hear what you're saying. Perhaps that's why the act as it's written now has the minister as the arbiter, basically saying okay, what is significant? You mentioned five miles of beach. There has to be some point where you can say yes, there should be action taken.

Again, you haven't really answered my question about frivolous action that has taken place that can be used for another vehicle. For example, the spotted owl in the Pacific northwest had little to do with the spotted owl and a lot to do with stopping logging. To use this legislation—if it was too easy to access, it could be used for nothing to do with toxic chemicals, but another avenue. That's kind of what we're trying to reach here. Perhaps balance is the wrong word, but a middle ground so that it stops the polluters, fines the polluters, but it doesn't open the gates for people who want to use it for another agenda.

Mr. Burkhard Mausberg: I'm sorry, I didn't answer that. My comparison to the Ontario Environmental Bill of Rights and to Michigan was an attempt to get to that question, and that is, the standard, if you wish, of those laws that citizens access for enforcement are a lot lower than what is written in the current bill. You didn't see a flood of these things. With the Ontario Environmental Bill of Rights, it's much easier to access the courts because it doesn't impose those restrictions, and in Michigan it is the same. You only have several actual legal recourses.

So the experience of other laws gives us some indication that we're not going to get that kind of flooding of the system, if you wish.

Mr. Bill Gilmour: Thank you.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gar Knutson): Madame Girard-Bujold.

[Translation]

Ms. Jocelyne Girard-Bujold (Jonquière, BQ): Ladies and gentlemen, I want to thank you for your presentations. I was truly impressed by the quality of your submissions.

I'm new to the Standing Committee on Environment and Sustainable Development. This is my very first sitting and therefore I'm very interested in everything you have to say. I will have many subjects to research further in the coming days.

I see that for the most part, you have focused your attention primarily on parts 4 and 5 of the bill. Mr. Gingras, Ms. Langer and Ms. Breton have said that this bill is merely for show. I hope that's not the case.

Mr. Gingras has indicated that the bill is weak when it comes to pollution prevention plans and that it also comes up short in terms of enforcement measures. Ms. Langer talked about the discharge of toxic substances. Each one of you talked about many subjects. I would like you to tell me what we have to do to improve this bill. Mr. Gallon also mentioned that Environment Canada lacked the proper funding to enforce the legislation.

• 1505

Therefore, we need to focus on what we have to do. You said that the Americans were doing some positive things. Perhaps we need to harmonize our respective efforts.

Mr. Gingras also alluded to measures that were being taken in the United States to deal with companies that pollute. Censure isn't enough. What we need is to create a fund which would help us work toward everyone's ultimate objective, namely eliminating pollution.

Therefore, I'd like one of you to explain to me what we could do to move forward. Thank you.

[English]

Mr. Gary Gallon: The best way to move forward is to work with the cabinet and the Minister of the Environment to implement the aspects of the legislation. Existing CEPA is good, but many aspects of it are not implemented. The new CEPA is good, and we've suggested changes to it today. However, the changes will not be that effective if implementation is not there.

Then you come to the question of cost-effective implementation. We've made a number of recommendations there, and I think these are important to repeat. We have made them in other fora.

There is a part of the law that says publish the names of the offenders. Publish the names of those who are complying with voluntary initiatives or not. Give those who are complying with ARET a published list in the Globe and Mail newspaper, the Montreal newspapers, and for those who are not, publish their names. We have recommended that on a number of occasions. It's cheap, it's easy. It's not real enforcement going to the plant gate, but it is effective. It does embarrass the companies. Therefore, under these voluntary initiatives it's never been applied. Well, it's time to apply it.

The other thing is on the national pollutant release inventory. There are 176 contaminants on the list. There are less than one-third of the U.S. 600 on their toxic release inventory. The U.S., Sweden, and Germany have done all the toxic work on those 400 to 600 that are on all of their lists. Instead of us spending money trying to re-invent the wheel or determine their toxicity, adopt the science that has already been developed amongst those countries in the OECD group, and it's cost effective. What happens though is that it's environmental protection effective, and it's being resisted, at every fora that I have seen Environment Canada host, by those who would be affected by it.

So I think it's important for this committee to help push along implementation of whatever we agree to on new CEPA.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gar Knutson): Any comments?

[Translation]

Mr. Stéphane Gingras: Regarding pollution prevention, if we look at efforts in this area, we find that businesses themselves have been reluctant to implement pollution prevention plans. There are structural and organizational problems to contend with, and the will to invest in the environment is lacking. The general belief is that environmental protection is a costly undertaking.

Studies conducted by various organizations have borne this out, which leads us to believe that companies are not likely to act voluntarily when it comes to pollution prevention. Action will come only if the government devises a framework within which businesses must act and develop pollution prevention plans. Failing this, businesses will not act voluntarily on pollution prevention.

We as a society need to make some decisions. Do we want to act to prevent pollution? I think the answer to that question is yes. If so, we need a government regulatory framework. Businesses must be required to develop pollution prevention plans containing clear deadlines, and companies that fail to act must be fined.

• 1510

Businesses that are unwilling to act in this area have an advantage in that the draft legislation makes no provision for a government framework. This part of the bill needs to be amended, in my view. Otherwise, it is nothing more than pious wishes. We want companies to act voluntarily to prevent pollution, but we know full well that they won't unless a framework is in place or unless they are being compelled to take action.

[English]

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gar Knutson): Ms. Langer.

Ms. Julia Langer: I wanted to put this in a framework. In 1988, when CEPA was passed—and I'll stick to my focus on endocrine disrupters—endocrine disruption, hormone disruption, was not even in the vernacular. Nobody even talked about it. All of this science has emerged, and emerged very quickly, and there's been an incredible dedication of resources to this issue since 1990.

In that sense we have an opportunity. This is the window of opportunity, when CEPA is being reviewed and amended, to actually move forward with a new concept, with something that the scientific community has already said is a hypothesis that's been proven. So what we have to do is take that proven hypothesis but operationalize it for regulators and for policymakers and for the public. The no-cost ways of moving this agenda forward are to forget about the 100% proof idea, forget about the standard risk assessment methodology that we've been using that looks at high doses and extrapolates to low doses to try to get a no-effect level that does not hold out with regard to endocrine disrupters.

So it's new methods. It's not new money and paying. It's new approaches. We have to embrace and be willing to take precautionary action, not just when we have 100% irrefutable, absolute proof. This is a new approach, not necessarily a new program or a new department or a new branch. That's what we need to see specified and laid out in the act so that it then becomes the modus operandi for the various departments.

I've heard Environment Canada staff say—I've been on panels with them—that we have enough wildlife evidence to act. Yet we don't see any action. I think we also have to build into this act a mechanism for environment and health to work together so that the health of people does not trump the health of wildlife and therefore we get paralysis. Those are really approaches and ways of thinking and ways of implementing, not necessarily programs or budgets or whatever.

I think that's the major frustration here. We shouldn't be too frustrated about it, because in effect we're only dealing with this in the past ten years. But if we don't deal with it at this round of amendments, then I think we will have lost an opportunity.

Coming from a wildlife organization, this is the area where the wildlife impacts that we see out there in the aquatic community, in birds, in mammals, have to tell us something about what's happening to us.

I wanted to leave you with a quote from a scientist in the U.S. who works with alligators. He basically frames it this way: People love to think that we're different from other animals and we certainly love to think we're different from insects, but at the cellular level we are fundamentally the same.

So when it comes to these kinds of chemicals, we have to start looking much more broadly, looking at the wildlife, looking at ourselves, looking ahead, and doing things in a precautionary mode, or we will have lost the opportunity, because the consequences are quite grave.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gar Knutson): Ms. Broten, and I would just ask you to be brief.

Ms. Dolores Broten: I will be.

Further to Julia's comments around that, there's also a new test that's been developed at the University of Guelph that can screen something like 70 chemicals a day for DNA damage. So if you put in some of those broad filters—persistence, bioaccumulation, DNA damage, endocrine disruption—kapow, at the top, then it's not your problem. Then it's up to the people who want to make a product to find an alternate process.

• 1515

The other thing that I think is really important is that all of our governments are so captured by a non-social welfare agenda that the only other defence we really have is community information, because we've reached the point where if the government refuses to do its job, we have to let the people have the information and let the chips fall where they may. That's where we're going, really fast.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gar Knutson): Thanks very much.

I have Mr. Pratt next.

Mr. David Pratt (Nepean—Carleton, Lib.): Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I'd like to echo the comments of my colleagues on the other side and thank all of you for your presentations this afternoon. They have been extremely interesting. I think the committee has certainly benefited from them.

I was drawn to a comment made by you, Ms. Broten, in connection with your presentation. Talking about harmonization—and, Mr. Chair, if you'll indulge me, it's a little bit off topic—you said that in reality the money was absorbed into provincial revenue. You were talking about the $250,000 paid by the federal government to the B.C. provincial government to carry out federal inspection requirements. You said that in reality the money was absorbed into provincial revenue and the regional offices that had to do the work never actually saw a penny of the revenue. Is that hearsay, or do you have some tangible evidence that that was in fact the case?

Ms. Dolores Broten: I have gone back and examined the budgets, and the regional office budgets, everybody's budgets, were cut. So the money never got through to where it had to go. In the meantime, the regional office had about a third more work by administering the federal regs. So, yes, I can prove it.

Mr. David Pratt: Okay.

Ms. Dolores Broten: Doesn't that happen with a lot of federal transfer payments? They just disappear?

Mr. David Pratt: We don't like to think so.

Ms. Paddy Torsney (Burlington, Lib.): Don't get him started.

Mr. David Pratt: I'm not sure we have time to cover that this afternoon.

Ms. Dolores Broten: That is preventable, but I don't know how you prevent a provincial government from cutting its own budget to its own environment ministry, even by the equal amount of a federal payment. It's still not going to get to the guys who are doing the work.

Mr. David Pratt: Thank you for flagging that for us.

Ms. Dolores Broten: Thanks for noticing.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gar Knutson): Mr. Laliberte and Mrs. Kraft Sloan.

Mr. Rick Laliberte (Churchill River, NDP): Thank you, Mr. Chair.

With the priority substance list requiring cooperation and in screenings with Environment Canada and Health, this vision of seeing a harmonization internationally, how can we correct this? You're saying Canada could take and regain a lead in international leadership on environment, but if this CEPA is passed, it seems like it will be obsolete the day it is passed. We'd be dealing with something we should have been working on for the next millennium as opposed to the industrial revolution, when it started.

The other one was this. In dealing with the precautionary principle, the two main terms here that I think you're challenging this committee on, aside from the lack of resources, problems with harmonization, cost-effective problems, voluntary measures—those are kind of hangovers, but the bright side is you want to bring pollution prevention, in capital letters, neon lights, whatever, as much as you can—that should be the big part of CEPA, and also the precautionary principle. If you put two spotlights on those, it seems like that's what all of you are saying that's the highlight of CEPA that we should be working on. How do we get there? That is my question. What do you expect from us to get that in the act?

Ms. Julia Langer: I think others might want to address pollution prevention because they've worked on definitions. I'll tackle the precautionary principle.

• 1520

In our brief I tried to make it step by step so you could touch and feel it, so that it would be operational. These are some lessons we've picked up from the work of the International Joint Commission.

For instance, I've spelled out a bunch of criteria that would allow us to ask, is there enough of a body of evidence that something goes to the priority list, not just an ad hoc process but some criteria? And what are the kinds of consequences from that substance being in the environment, in our bodies, in the bodies of wildlife, etc., that would then require precautionary action? Some of the criteria are that it is irreversible; that it is severe; that there's a reduction in metabolic function or a defensive mechanism of the body; that there's a trans-generational effect likely.

You start putting these together in a package, and you end up with more of— It's almost like a path to action, rather than saying “Is industry going to do it”, or “Is it cost-effective?” It gives you much more explicit guidance, which is what we're looking for in a modern piece of legislation. If we don't do that we will really be left in the dust, because the European Union is doing this. Under the OSPAR convention a whole range of European nations are entrenching the precautionary principle into their laws.

So that's the focus of our proposed amendments: to amend the definition of toxicity, to amend the process for selecting priority substances, and to put something into the act in clear legal language that says when one must take precautionary action.

Mr. Gary Gallon: Just speaking in addition to that, there are simple things that can be done under the current CEPA or under the new CEPA related to pollution prevention, for example.

The toxic release inventory of the U.S. requires pollution prevention reporting by its companies. In Canada they do not. Environment Canada held a series of seminars to work out pollution prevention reporting under NPRI. I attended those. There was stiff resistance, and Environment Canada backed off.

It's simple just to move forward, because it's the same companies, whether it's General Motors, Celanese Canada— They're already doing this in the U.S.; it's very easy to just have them do it here as well. I mean, they have the same computer reporting mechanisms out of their head offices in the States. They can certainly do it for Canada.

Under the national pollutant release inventory it showed that for 1995-96 there was a reduction of 14.9% in pollution in Canada of the 176 pollutants. But the fact is that half of that was one mine shutting down, ending its 20-year life, BHP Island Copper Mine on Vancouver Island—a mine by the way that in 1971, when I was with SPEC, we also did environmental work on. Once that mine shut down, its useful life done, it cut in half all of the emissions reported in Canada. So the reduction was really only 8%, not 14.9%. And Alberta is only 2.2%. So there are some actions that we need to take very soon to increase our environmental reduction processes in Canada.

Mr. Burkhard Mausberg: You asked what the committee can do to include pollution prevention in CEPA. There are four easy ways, very simple, albeit dramatic.

First, you can ban chemicals. Banning a chemical is the ultimate in prevention. You can't prevent any more. If you don't allow DDT to be sprayed or you don't allow PCBs to be made, that's the ultimate in a ban.

Second, you can require a reduced use of certain chemicals. You can very clearly say this chemical shall not be used for—I don't know—to take the paint off airplanes, and so on. You can make very specific reductions in use requirements, and you can do that through importation limits and so on.

• 1525

The third very direct one you can do, and this has been something that has been shown to work in the U.S., is pollution prevention planning. You require someone to actually sit down, look at their process, look at their product, look at their raw materials, and think prevention and develop a plan to implement that. That's a very sort of heavy-handed approach in some ways, but it's a simple approach. If you plan ahead you can reduce. It's like financial planning: if you sit down and think about how you're going to spend your money you're going to be much better off.

The final one is if you allow me to sue on imminent activity—i.e., if someone is going to pollute—if you allow me to actually sue prior to that, then I think that would get us to what's prevention as well.

[Translation]

Mr. Stéphane Gingras: Briefly, regarding the priority list of substances, how is it that in Canada, a limited number of substances are identified as toxic under the CEPA? Countries with whom we do business, for example OECD countries, have identified many more substances as toxic.

There is one simple thing that we could do here in Canada. We could import these lists and declare all of these substances to be toxic. How do we explain the fact that a substance deemed non-toxic in Canada is considered toxic in France, England or Denmark? This raises the whole issue of how the toxicity of a substance is determined in Canada. It is an extremely lengthy and complex process.

One solution would be to simply adopt the same list as certain OECD countries. This approach would be just as a valid given that these countries with whom we do business have declared these to be toxic substances.

[English]

Mr. Rick Laliberte: I just wanted to add something that you had mentioned, and that's recommendation 8, creating a fund. Are there examples of legislation elsewhere in the OECD that create funds for cleaning contaminated sites? Are there formulas created? As an example, seeing the Sydney tar ponds this summer, there are drastic effects in the immediate community. What are we going to do, and how are we going to address them in the future if they occur again?

[Translation]

Mr. Stéphane Gingras: As far as contaminated sites in Canada are concerned, it's clear that we have a problem because we are dealing with past contamination. Sometimes, it's difficult to find out who is responsible for that contamination and to get them to pay for cleanup operations. Consider the case of the Irving Whale. Irving refused to ante up the $40 million needed to raise its barge from the bottom of the St. Lawrence.

We must act with an eye to the future. We must allow Environment Canada to tax environmentally harmful activities. Any revenues raised through taxation must not go into the Consolidated Revenue Fund, but rather be dedicated to specific cleanup operations, once companies have ceased their polluting activities.

Take the mining industry, for example. It should be required to cover the cost of decontaminating sites that it has polluted. Any money collected should be used to rehabilitate these contaminated sites. I believe we should work toward that goal. We must be forward-looking.

It is somewhat more difficult to deal with past contamination. As I said, in some cases, it is impossible to take legal action against companies responsible for this contamination. Ideally, these companies should be tracked down, prosecuted and made to pick up the tab, because ultimately, Canadians are the ones who must pay for the contamination and who must pay the health-care costs of those who were exposed to substances discharged into the environment because a site was contaminated.

• 1530

There is also work to be done on this front, but from a more constructive and positive standpoint, we must look to the future and address the problems of future contamination and develop systems which will enable Environment Canada to work toward achieving its target.

[English]

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gar Knutson): Miss Broten, and then we'll move to Miss Kraft Sloan.

Ms. Dolores Broten: One thing we could do is have, and in British Columbia we do this a bit with the pulp mills— You have a fee to pollute for your toxic substances, and that fee goes up every year. So you have an incentive to move to pollution prevention planning, because eventually it's very, very expensive to release that substance. I see that working with the mills. They're in a hurry to ratchet down their emissions, because it's getting to be like half a million dollars, a million dollars. That hurts.

And then the Ministry of Environment, in theory, should get the money, not general revenue.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gar Knutson): Miss Kraft Sloan.

Mrs. Karen Kraft Sloan (York North, Lib.): Most of the industry committee groups that have come before our committee have said that they have been reasonably satisfied with the consultation process that's gone on with the development of this new CEPA legislation. I'm referring to consultation outside of presentations before the committee, so I'm talking about direct contact with Environment Canada officials. They would like to see this particular piece of legislation go very quickly through the committee, or in a very timely manner.

Any of the health groups, the labour groups, the environmental groups, environmental law associations, have grave concerns about the legislation. I'm just wondering what the consultation process outside of committee has been like for you and your organization. What type of consultation have you been entertaining with Environment Canada officials, and to what degree?

Mr. Gary Gallon: The Canadian Institute for Business and the Environment has not been consulted on CEPA on this latest round on Bill C-32.

Ms. Julia Langer: I don't think there's been any consultation for quite a long time. A group of us met with the minister about a year ago last December and said there are a lot of things broken here that need fixing, and maybe there is an opportunity for some targeted consultation, because we understand that we are not necessarily on the same page with industry, and we should have an opportunity for consultation for that kind of discussion. But nothing has happened since.

Mrs. Karen Kraft Sloan: Would anyone else like to comment?

[Translation]

Mr. Stéphane Gingras: I have to say that it hasn't been our impression that the government has been very receptive to us. Rather, we feel that the government has been more receptive to industry. It hasn't been easy. I tried on several occasions to meet with the minister to discuss the strategic option process which is directly tied to enforcement of the CEPA, but I haven't had any luck. Generally speaking, we haven't had a sense that we have had the government's ear as far as this bill is concerned.

[English]

Mr. Burkhard Mausberg: Just quickly, I have had very little contact with ministry and department officials on this, but we did have, prior to this, up until about a year ago— Before that, we actually did have good contacts and good consultations with the CEPA office as environmental groups.

I guess the area where consultation was not very good was with different government departments; that is, the kinds of departments like Natural Resources or Industry Canada, or to some degree Health as well, and Agriculture and Agrifood. The blunt impression was that the environmentalists could go to Environment Canada and the industry guys could go to Industry and Natural Resources and so on. There was very little interaction with other government departments.

Mrs. Karen Kraft Sloan: Thank you.

• 1535

This is for Julia Langer from the World Wildlife Fund.

You had stated that our generation is the most exposed generation in regard to endocrine disrupters particularly and you have prepared a very substantial brief—indeed all of you have, and I really have to compliment you on what you've been able to produce for the committee, because I know how limited your resources are. I was wondering if you could recite for us the impact of endocrine disrupters on human capacity. If you could relay that, it would be very helpful. I know you've talked a little bit about it, and you had a slide presentation, but the reality is that this is an emerging field. There has been a lot of significant research done in the past decade or so, as you have indicated, but I believe it's an area where a lot of us aren't as educated as we should be, and some of the effects are tremendous. If you could go over that again, that would be helpful.

Ms. Julia Langer: I'll try to do that briefly. There are a couple of principles about endocrine disruption that you have to keep in mind, and I've tried to put that in our brief, because it changes how you look at these kinds of chemicals.

First, we're dealing with effects that are transgenerational. So as an adult exposed to a particular chemical that may have an estrogenic or an anti-estrogenic effect, I may not be affected; but if I were pregnant, the embryo, the developing fetus, could be. And the same would apply to wildlife. So you have to think about the effect on the developing organism, not necessarily a direct effect on the exposed adult.

The other consideration is that very low doses can be effective. Hormones in our body work at a trillionth of a gram—parts per trillion—so levels that may have been considered safe previously in terms of cancer or direct acute effects can be active in terms of their effect on the hormone system.

Then there's the shared biochemical strategies that I mentioned. We're all pretty much the same—insects, alligators, frogs, humans—so the effects that can be manifested are the same kinds of effects. Those would be anything that is controlled by hormones, and that's a long list because hormones control the development of the reproductive system, the primary and secondary sexual organs.

As an example, in the human, at day 56 of gestation, long before most people know they're pregnant, you need a very clear hormone signal to actually determine the expression of male or female sex. Every human starts by default as a female, and it's a hormone signal that turns off the development of the female reproductive tract and allows the expression of the male reproductive tract. So if you don't get that signal, basically you get that kind of estrogenic effect and you can have feminization of the offspring. The genetic code is still the same, but it's the genetic expression that has been tampered with.

So in birds, in alligators, in mink, in polar bears—there's a whole range of animals where you've seen feminization effects. And not only is the feminization of the physical structure, but there are also behavioural effects, because hormones are also responsible for the development of the brain and nervous system, especially thyroid hormone, so interference with thyroid hormone at a critical time during embryonic development can skew the wiring of the brain.

There are studies that show—this is in human studies—mothers who ate Great Lakes fish with elevated levels of contaminants. It didn't affect them personally, but the children who are born have now been tracked for 14 years, and 14 years later these children are suffering a 6.2 IQ deficit compared to their peers—and this is adjusted for socio-economic factors. This is a real effect on their intelligence, their hyperactivity. It's all related to the hyperactivity and attention deficit disorder, those kinds of neurological behavioural outcomes.

• 1540

Those are the main areas where you would see effects on reproductive outcomes. When an animal or even a person is affected, when the development of their sexual organs is affected, then that's a functional deficit and fertility problems can result. When an organism, be it wildlife or human, is affected from a neurological behavioural perspective, they're not as fit in society; and for an animal that can be— If they don't do the “cluck, cluck, cluck”, then they're not desirable within their species and that impairs their ability to reproduce as well. There are so many subtle things here, but it's physical and functional deficits that we have to be concerned about.

Mrs. Karen Kraft Sloan: When we take a look at human populations overall, we're talking about real impairments to human capacity, intellectual capacity, development, the way we interact with each other, our ability to reproduce. All of these things have been documented as being affected by these endocrine disrupters.

Ms. Julia Langer: I would say the highest order of proof is in the wildlife community, because we're able to study them in the same way as we don't study humans. We don't do experiments on people, except maybe inadvertently, and increasingly in the neurobehavioural deficit area because there's much more ability to study people's behaviour. I would also say there's starting to be more evidence in terms of fertility and declining sperm count, etc.

So we are amassing a body of evidence, but it has to do with our ability to survive, reproduce, adjust socially, integrate socially, all of those factors, and it all traces back to the hormones in our body, especially the hormones in our mothers' bodies when we were developing.

Mrs. Karen Kraft Sloan: You were talking about one-trillionth of whatever. I'm not a scientist. Is this a measurable quantity?

Ms. Julia Langer: There are hormones that act, for instance, at less than a trillionth of a gram, so yes, that's certainly measurable. But it's incredibly minute. So in that sense low levels can have a big impact.

One of the reasons our traditional risk assessment model is not going to work for endocrine disrupters— I don't want to get too complex about this, but usually we do high-dose testing, so we inject some rats, or whatever, with huge doses and then a few lower doses and a few lower doses and then extrapolate backwards.

For traditional kinds of effects like death, or even cancer, you can extrapolate; I mean, cancer is a bit debatable. But what you have with endocrine disrupters—and this is showing up in laboratory tests—is an inverted U-curve. So at a very low dose you get not much effect. As you increase the dose—it is still very low—you get a bigger effect. But as you increase the dose more, you get a drop-off in effect; it just kind of overrides the system. So we could be doing all sorts of traditional high-dose testing and be completely missing these kinds of subtle effects.

Mrs. Karen Kraft Sloan: So we're talking about a real qualitative change in terms of how we think about doing tests and assessments and all of those things.

Ms. Julia Langer: It's a very different kind of evidence that we would have to be looking for.

Mrs. Karen Kraft Sloan: So given the kind of definition that we have for virtual elimination as currently written in CEPA, would these types of substances be captured?

Ms. Julia Langer: Well, there are two parts to that. One is the definition of toxicity and how one defines toxic, and the current definition would not capture it. I think we have to add a definition of endocrine disrupter. I think we actually have to try to get away from this “one chemical, one exposure, therefore effects” kind of analysis, because we'll never get that kind of proof. That way we'll be able to confidently declare certain things toxic and not be missing these effects, not have anomalies where you have tributyltin, which turns organisms into hermaphrodites, not declared toxic. You would actually capture that.

• 1545

Then the definition of virtual elimination comes into play, because you want to do something about those things. And in doing something, if you define virtual elimination as release but only tiny, tiny amounts into the environment, when tiny, tiny amounts actually can have an estrogenic effect, then why bother having gone through the exercise of putting it on the list if your definition of elimination is not really elimination?

Mrs. Karen Kraft Sloan: Thank you.

How many substances have been screened under CEPA in how many years?

Ms. Julia Langer: I can tell you exactly.

Mr. Burkhard Mausberg: It was 44, and it was groups of substances.

Mrs. Karen Kraft Sloan: You're saying 44 substances?

Mr. Burkhard Mausberg: PSL-1 had 44. Priority substances list one had 44 substances. Some of them, although substances, were actually classes of substances.

Mrs. Karen Kraft Sloan: Okay.

Mr. Burkhard Mausberg: There were a couple of examples—

Ms. Julia Langer: Chlorinated waste water.

Mr. Burkhard Mausberg: Yes, chlorinated waste water from sewage treatment plants. So you have more of a class category.

How many— It took about five years or so. During those five years, the federal government did not actually generate new data; it was all done with existing data. So it didn't actually start its own laboratory tests.

Of those 44—I'm trying to remember the math—I think 23 or 25 were declared toxic; 13 or 11 were declared non-toxic; and 12 were actually neither toxic nor non-toxic—sort of a legal limbo, and by default then they were non-toxic.

Ms. Julia Langer: I was appointed by the minister at that time, Sheila Copps, to the second priority substances list panel, which didn't follow exactly on the heels of the results of the first priority assessment list; it delayed a few years, so we're already behind the eight-ball. It was felt, I guess, by the department that 44 was too many and they arbitrarily said that they'd like a new list of 25. It was a multi-stakeholder process and completely ad hoc. I mean, having sat around that table—it was a nomination process, and people brought things to the table—I nominated, for example, among other things, nonylphenol ethoxylates, which are endocrine disrupters, and bisphenol A, a constituent of plastics, also considered an endocrine disrupter.

One of my colleagues around the table happened to work for a company that no longer makes nonylphenol ethoxylates but still makes bisphenol A. Which do you think got on? Nonylphenol ethoxylates, and not bisphenol A. This is our priority substances list process.

Mrs. Karen Kraft Sloan: Are you telling me it's not science-based?

Ms. Julia Langer: I would not say it's science-based. It's sort of pick a chemical and fight for it. That's how it works.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gar Knutson): Mr.— Craig.

Mr. Craig Boljkovac: Yes, I have an unpronounceable last name, even for myself on the best of days.

One thing you mentioned, Mrs. Kraft Sloan, was you asked how many were screened under CEPA. Actually those 44 chemicals went through an assessment process, which was a much more detailed process.

Mrs. Karen Kraft Sloan: Okay.

Mr. Craig Boljkovac: Bill C-32 puts forward a screening process for the universe of chemicals in Canada that are presently in use, which is something that's called the domestic substances list. It's about 20,000 chemicals. What we're asking for is— And actually that's where the bill itself is quite strong in some ways, because the proposal is to screen them for persistence of bioaccumulation and inherent toxicity.

Mrs. Karen Kraft Sloan: Right.

Mr. Craig Boljkovac: We're also asking that the ability of the chemical to disrupt the endocrine system be added.

So there is commitment from the government to go ahead with the screening process to capture more chemicals than the 44 substances that were examined, probably at the cost of many hundreds of thousands of dollars over very many years. To be able to put them directly on a new priority substances list, without the horse-trading that Julia went through because of someone's business interests or whatever, is something we would certainly push for and support.

• 1550

Mrs. Karen Kraft Sloan: I wanted to ask you about EDSTAC, which is going to be screening 15,000 chemicals for endocrine-disrupting effects by the end of 1999. They're looking at 15,000 chemicals, but strictly on the endocrine-disrupting effects. How is that possible?

Mr. Craig Buljkovac: That's the American process; it's different.

Ms. Julia Langer: I'll give you a short background to this. When endocrine disruption hit the radar screen in the early 1990s, industries and academics very quickly started collaborating on research. It's a bit of a dance, but I think there is an unprecedented level of interest and collaboration on this area.

The U.S. was amending its pesticide law and its drinking-water law, and basically said the developing embryo is the most sensitive organism we're talking about and endocrine disruption has all sorts of new effects we haven't accounted for. They basically mandated, through those two pieces of legislation, that children would be protected, first and foremost, and everything else would be protected as a consequence. That's a bit debatable in terms of wildlife. They would screen and test a huge load; originally it was 80,000 chemicals, and I think it's been pared down to 15 priority chemicals for endocrine disruption.

The action that will be taken following that screening and testing process is not clear, but they have this mandate to protect children, so those two things are going to have to come together. This is under way. Their methodology has been proposed and now they have to implement, with dates, times, targets, and appropriations in the law. It's interesting when you look at U.S. law. We just don't write our laws in the same way, but it would be good to have that kind of intent.

Mrs. Karen Kraft Sloan: Right.

An earlier witness today from one of the industry representative groups indicated that it's very important that we as legislators take a look at what's going on around the world—that we take a look at the North American context, what's happening in the United States, and certainly with some of our big trading partners in Europe. This is an area they're moving on. I would think, as Mr. Gallon and others have pointed out, that this puts Canadian industry at a disadvantage when they know their products are going to be banned or significantly reduced in other countries.

Thank you.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gar Knutson): Are you finished?

Mrs. Karen Kraft Sloan: For now.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gar Knutson): I wonder, Ms. Langer, if I can take you through your presentation fairly quickly and actually go through the specific recommendations on amendments to the bill. Can we start with what you think would be the priority?

Ms. Julia Langer: What I've tried to put forward is a bit of a package to operationalize the weight-of-evidence approach and the precautionary principles, so that we could get at endocrine disrupters. I suppose it's not my area of expertise, but if you had the weight-of-evidence approach and precautionary principle in place in the act, then you would also have an easier time dealing with neurotoxins or teratogens. I'm just not an expert in that field.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gar Knutson): But you make a reference to wanting Environment Canada to have an overriding ability to regulate these things, as opposed to Health Canada per se.

Ms. Julia Langer: No, I wouldn't say overriding. I'd say if you have evidence from wildlife that you have an impact in the wildlife community, there should be an ability to act with dispatch and that you do not have to prove human health effects before acting. That was my only point.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gar Knutson): That's the point there. That's different from making the general point about the bill being residual then.

• 1555

Ms. Julia Langer: Yes. Now, the point about the residual nature spoke to Mr. Gilmour's point whereby if you have a substance that falls under CEPA jurisdiction and is also a pesticide, and if the pesticide act is not dealing with it from the perspective of harm to the environment or human health, then CEPA should be able to act on the substance, not only the non-pesticidal aspects.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gar Knutson): Can we just quickly go through these?

Ms. Julia Langer: Yes.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gar Knutson): Of the language you are suggesting, is there a particular clause that jumps to the top? I know we have to have a definition clause; I don't have any questions with recommendation 2. On the other recommendations, is there one that sort of leaps forward as the most important one?

Ms. Julia Langer: I would say that we need to be very clear about the definition of toxicity.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gar Knutson): Which recommendation is that?

Ms. Julia Langer: Number 2.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gar Knutson): Recommendation 2.

Ms. Julia Langer: No, that's the definition, that's the number. Recommendations 3 and 4 together address this issue of definition, so you can basically say “Does this have the ability to disrupt the endocrine system?” rather than “Is this getting into the environment in a quantity or at a point in time when it is actually having an endocrine disrupting effect?” The definition has to allow for that inherent hazard endocrine disruption—

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gar Knutson): I understand the rationale. I just want to have a technical discussion about what words go where.

Ms. Julia Langer: Okay.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gar Knutson): So you're saying in recommendation 4 that this just gets tagged onto clause 65. Have I got that right?

Mr. Craig Boljkovac: Yes.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gar Knutson): And did you make any comments about the clause 65 that's in the bill? That can stay as is, is that right?

Mr. Craig Boljkovac: The recommendation above is consistent with this committee's recommendation in It's About Our Health!, where the criteria for entry into the environment and the creation of conditions, a risk assessment approach through the potential for exposure, are taken out of the definition. So the definition is changed in that regard in clause 65. Then we propose that you add a recommendation for a second paragraph that operationalizes weight of evidence.

Ms. Julia Langer: In other words, we have not put forward language for amending the existing clause 65 as it is in Bill C-32 yet—I'm sure we could come back to you with that, or others have—but have specified some additional language to reflect the concern specifically about endocrine disrupters.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gar Knutson): So I take it the toxics caucus, or whatever it's called, of the environment movement is giving us language on clause 65?

Mr. Craig Boljkovac: Actually, our brief refers to a brief that you will be receiving next week from the Canadian Institute for Environmental Law and Policy and the Canadian Environmental Law Association, which a number of people have referred to today. I think it's a 250-page brief or so. It has very detailed legal language and we've been working closely with them.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gar Knutson): Yes. My worry is that we'll be swamped with it and the usefulness of the brief will be limited because it's too voluminous.

Mr. Craig Boljkovac: They have proposals for clause 65 in terms of direct legal language, though. Make sure you highlight those with them, and I can pass that message along as well.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gar Knutson): And the World Wildlife Fund would consider that as a priority?

Ms. Julia Langer: Yes. The definition of toxicity, clause 65, because everything flows from that. If you can't correctly define what's toxic and bump it up into a priority for action, then you haven't got to ground one.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gar Knutson): What would be next in your priority list?

Ms. Julia Langer: I would say that the definition of virtual elimination, because then—

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gar Knutson): I'm sorry, that's recommendation number—

Ms. Julia Langer: Recommendation 5, and that's your action point.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gar Knutson): And you've given us language on that?

Ms. Julia Langer: Yes, and I'm sure that's compatible with what other organizations will have submitted.

• 1600

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gar Knutson): Okay. What would be the next priority? Does anybody else want to jump in on the specific point of what language—

Mr. Stéphane Gingras: Mandatory pollution prevention planning for companies releasing under NPRI.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gar Knutson): This is clause—

Mr. Stéphane Gingras: Clause 4.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gar Knutson): Have you given us language on that?

Mr. Stéphane Gingras: I cannot for specific legal language because I'm not a lawyer. But what we said in our brief is:

We recommend that every business that reports toxic discharges in accordance with the Domestic Substances List be required to develop and implement a pollution prevention plan with discharge reduction deadlines that should be made public.

Actually there's a mistake in the translation. It's actually the NPRI.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gar Knutson): Are you privy to this 250-page brief that we're getting? If you are, are you satisfied with the language there? Does it address mandatory prevention? Do we know?

[Translation]

Mr. Stéphane Gingras: I don't believe so. As I recall, they are asking that companies that discharge toxic substances into the environment, substances identified as toxic under the CEPA, be required to develop pollution prevention plans.

Great Lakes United is asking that this be a requirement as well in the case of all toxic discharges reported under the Domestic Substances List, as is the case in the United States. This would mean that any company reporting a toxic discharge under the Domestic Substances List would be required to submit a pollution prevention plan, perhaps a five-year plan, containing specific discharge reduction targets. As for the legal language, I'm not a lawyer.

[English]

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gar Knutson): As one committee member, I know I find it useful when people come with specific language to replace— I don't know if you have the resources of lawyers, but if you would like to send us something, this member would appreciate that. I would appreciate that.

Mr. Mausberg.

Mr. Burkhard Mausberg: Are you asking specifically for legal language as related to parts 4 and 5 toxics and pollution prevention?

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gar Knutson): What I'm really driving at is this. I'm sort of beginning the discussion of the 250-page memo, which we haven't seen yet, and saying what are your priorities? I've asked Ms. Langer what her priorities are. It's on the record here, but I don't know that it's— What are the key points? Can we make a few changes to the bill that might have really good results? That's what I'm asking.

Mr. Burkhard Mausberg: That's a really tough question, though.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gar Knutson): Well, it's one that has to be asked and it's one that you have to have an answer to. It's like my kids; if they ask me for too much, they'll get nothing.

Mr. Burkhard Mausberg: I'm not saying it's not a fair question; I'm just saying that this is the kind of question for which, if I were to give you a good, solid answer, I would need some time for deliberation.

I can tell you that several of the people you see in front of you and many others will meet next weekend. The CEN toxics caucus will actually have a two-day meeting to discuss this larger brief. If you wish, I can bring the suggestion forward that we give this committee a list of priorities of what clauses, including this legal language, we think could be a priority.

It's a tough question, but it's a fair question.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gar Knutson): Thank you for that.

My colleague and friend, Mrs. Kraft Sloan, wants to jump in.

• 1605

Mrs. Karen Kraft Sloan: If I can help with this, I think what our chair is doing is going to be very useful and productive.

Whoever of you are members of the CEN toxics caucus may want to confer and have a group submission, but again, individually you may have your own priorities and you don't need to get into discussions about those if you can't reach a consensus. So it would be useful to get something from each of you as to what your priorities are.

Thank you.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gar Knutson): Ms. Torsney.

Ms. Paddy Torsney: I thought Ms. Langer had something else to say.

Ms. Julia Langer: I don't want to necessarily discuss the 250-page submission by CELA and CIELAP, which covers the entire bill. I think I mentioned that our submission from World Wildlife Fund focuses explicitly on endocrine disrupters. My two priorities are quite generic in addressing clause 65 and the virtual elimination definition, which will also be addressed by others.

I would say my third one, looking through my quite narrow brief—and this might not help you in terms of the big picture—is a requirement for screenings, recommendation 8, which says let's look at the DSL and screen it through for endocrine disrupters. But do recognize that this is very focused on the endocrine disruption issue and it wouldn't necessarily be picking from however many recommendations there are—

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gar Knutson): I understand. My initial question to you was do we need all of this? Do we need every single word that's in your brief—

Ms. Julia Langer: Yes, but—

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gar Knutson): —to deal with endocrine disrupters? That was sort of where I was—

Ms. Julia Langer: I think that having identified a definition of toxicity, a definition of virtual elimination, and a screening methodology would be a very significant step forward in terms of addressing the issue of endocrine disrupters.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gar Knutson): All right.

Mr. Mausberg, if I can just take a few minutes, the clause on citizenship suits in the endangered species bill, the one you made reference to, how is that different from the clause we're looking at in the bill today?

Mr. Burkhard Mausberg: I can't give you that answer directly, and in part because I didn't actually do the comparison to the endangered species bill. I've actually never read the bill. I read the Ontario Bill of Rights to make the comparison.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gar Knutson): That's fine, then.

Mr. Burkhard Mausberg: There are certain parts in the written brief that make that direct comparison, and I'll give you that within the week.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gar Knutson): That's fine. I don't necessarily need it within the week.

Mr. Burkhard Mausberg: But if I can answer your question about priorities—

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gar Knutson): Yes, sure.

Mr. Burkhard Mausberg: —I wasn't quite sure where you were leading with that. But I think there are some direct priorities in terms of legal language that we have submitted, and to be on the record, I think you should delete subclause 22(1).

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gar Knutson): Can you just hold on? Subclause 22(1) does—

Mr. Burkhard Mausberg: That subclause says:

22.(1) An individual who has applied for an investigation may bring an environmental protection action if

And that's the first hoop. If we can delete subclause 22(2), the deletion of those two would be a great priority for us.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gar Knutson): You don't think we should give the minister the time to respond in a reasonable way?

Mr. Burkhard Mausberg: I don't know. What this clause says is that you can only bring an action after you have requested an investigation and after the response by the minister was unreasonable.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gar Knutson): Yes. What's wrong with that?

Mr. Burkhard Mausberg: Well, what does “unreasonable” mean? I don't know what that means. Why do you have to—

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gar Knutson): The court would make a determination. It would be a question of fact, and they would make a determination as to whether or not the minister acted reasonably.

Mr. Burkhard Mausberg: The question is— well, there are several questions. First of all, why would you give that authority away to the courts when you're currently drafting the legislation? I mean, Mr. Gilmour has pointed out that there is all kinds of fear that the courts may be overloaded and then the decision-making power may be too much into the courts. So by drafting the bill, we may want to avoid having the courts, which are non-elected, make those decisions.

• 1610

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gar Knutson): Well, you're arguing that citizens should have easier access to the courts.

Mr. Burkhead Mausberg: Yes, exactly. That is the point. And if we delete subclauses 22(1) and 22(2), we will get that.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gar Knutson): And I'm saying let the courts decide whether the minister has acted reasonably, and now you're arguing that the courts can't decide whether they're overburdened. So your narrow point is inconsistent with your broader point.

Mr. Burkhead Mausberg: Let me go back to your question. Your question was why should this clause be deleted; why should the minister not have the opportunity to respond to that?

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gar Knutson): Yes. I think that's reasonable.

Mr. Burkhead Mausberg: Let me respond to it in another way, then, without inherent inconsistency.

You think somebody breaks the law—

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gar Knutson): They steal $10 from me.

Mr. Burkhead Mausberg: They steal $10 from you. I have to go and ask the minister to investigate whether or not this person has stolen $10 from you.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gar Knutson): Yes.

Mr. Burkhead Mausberg: Then that minister is going to decide, within 90 days after launching the investigation, that they may have actually stolen $10 from you. So I can go to a third-person adjudicator to be told that was actually the wrong thing to do and therefore I should get my money back and stop the action. I'm saying go directly to the third-person adjudicator without having to go to the minister to ask permission to do that.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gar Knutson): And what I'm saying is that if my kid was at camp and stole $10 from somebody, I'd like the camp administer to just deal with it in a reasonable way, rather than calling the police. I'd rather they just work it out among the parties, and that's what this clause does. If a pulp and paper mill or a steel mill is polluting, you go and make the complaint, the minister goes to the steel mill, and they clean up their pollution, or whatever. Everybody's happy at the end of the day and we just work it out. That's voluntary compliance at its finest.

Mr. Burkhead Mausberg: That would work, I guess, if we had a record of stringent enforcement. Your own committee has said that's actually not the case. So either we're going too often in that direction and letting people “get away with it”— I'm not saying your son should get away with it; at the end of the day, your son should learn a lesson from having stolen $10. Maybe we're getting too personal here in our examples. But maybe there should be a lesson associated with the fact that I have just taken private property from someone.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gar Knutson): Okay. I think my ten minutes is up, so I'll leave you with the final word.

Mr. Gary Gallon: Before you do go, just to answer your question on priorities on changes to the bill, we have two at the institute. The first one specifically relates to harmonization in paragraph 2(1)(l) regarding “act in a manner that is consistent with the intent of intergovernmental agreements and arrangements”.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gar Knutson): Yes. Are you aware the department has already admitted to us that there's some difficulty with that?

Mr. Gary Gallon: No. It was deleted?

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gar Knutson): I didn't say they had deleted it, but the Department of Justice have agreed with your position that, as written—

Mr. Gary Gallon: Oh, very good.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gar Knutson): You may want to take a look at the proposal that's floating around to amend it and comment on that.

Mr. Gary Gallon: It seems to be taken care of by the first, “endeavour to act in cooperation with governments”, which was in the original CEPA.

As for the second point, we'll provide you with some wording to help out with operationalizing the precautionary measures principle.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gar Knutson): Okay.

[Translation]

Mr. Stéphane Gingras: Could I list three priorities? Seriously though, the number one priority as far as we're concerned is the definition of "toxicity". Undoubtedly, you will find much consensus on this issue in the submissions of the various organizations that are appearing before your committee.

[English]

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gar Knutson): This is clause 65?

[Translation]

Mr. Stéphane Gingras: That's right, the definition of "toxicity". Our second priority is the definition of "virtual elimination" which must be amended in order for Canada to meet its commitments under the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement.

• 1615

Our third priority is pollution prevention. That is critically important to us.

[English]

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gar Knutson): Thanks for that.

I sort of get the sense that people are anxious to finish the meeting and go. If I'm wrong, people can jump in and tell me.

Mr. Mausberg and Ms. Broten, did I miss your hands up?

Ms. Dolores Broten: No.

My priorities are at the end of my presentation, and I'm not lawyer enough to— We'll ask CELA to help us next week, and make sure our things are in there. But the CELA presentation is line by line correct.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gar Knutson): You've read it?

Ms. Dolores Broten: I've read the draft.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gar Knutson): Mr. Mausberg.

Mr. Burkhard Mausberg: I have an ignorant question.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gar Knutson): They're the best kind.

Mr. Burkhard Mausberg: I really do want to know, what's the process and the time line within this committee towards getting this bill passed or not?

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gar Knutson): We expect to start clause-by-clause around Thanksgiving, possibly not until after. We had that discussion this morning in public in this room, so I'm not telling you anything secret.

Mr. Burkhard Mausberg: Then do you expect there's a report that would be written that would be submitted to the government?

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gar Knutson): No. After second reading the committee, under parliamentary law, has the power to make amendments as long as those amendments don't defeat the principle of the bill. They have to be in congruence with the general principle. That's a legal question as to what— This bill is very broad. It's about preventing pollution. So there's lots of scope; you could still fit within that.

If I were teaching a classroom, I would say the committee has the authority to amend the bill. Politics enter into it, of course. I'll talk to you off the record about what that means, if you want.

Mr. Burkhard Mausberg: I guess the other way of asking is can we expect a new Canadian Environmental Protection Act before Christmas?

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gar Knutson): It has to go through us and then there has to be a debate at report stage in the House of Commons. Then there has to be a third reading debate, and then it has to go to the Senate. So I would think not, but that's just one person's opinion.

Mr. Gary Gallon: And I would say on the other side that we from the environment industry community want you to take as much time as you can for making a proper bill and act. We had expected something sooner, but now we think we might get something better, with some endocrine disrupter language and with some better language related to the bill. The 1988 Canadian Environmental Protection Act is a good act, and now it looks like this act is going to be improved with time. So we won't be pushing you for time.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gar Knutson): Mrs. Kraft Sloan.

Mrs. Karen Kraft Sloan: I just wanted to get on the speakers list, when you're finished, Mr. Chairman.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gar Knutson): I am. I was about to bang the hammer and finish.

Mrs. Karen Kraft Sloan: If the committee could indulge me, just going back to the precautionary principle, I hear a lot of people say this is sort of voodoo science; it's not really science-based; how can you do all this stuff; it's going to cost a lot; you're jumping ahead and you're going to cause a lot of cost and mayhem to the system. In fact I have a nifty little quote that says “In practice, it is a recipe for mischief that licenses phobics to overlook the risks of regulation and the perils of technological stagnation”.

A lot of critics see this, as I said, as sort of voodoo science; it's not pragmatic and it's not based on science. Just about every group that comes before this committee says that endangered species legislation should be science-based, or CEPA should be science-based, or this approach should be science-based, climate change should be science-based. I'm just wondering how you respond to some of these critics, if anyone wants to contribute to that, please.

• 1620

Ms. Dolores Broten: All the pulp mills in Canada are under a program where they have to do environmental effects monitoring. This is big-time: consultants, scientists, the whole thing. The question is, does their current effluent harm the environment, and specifically fish, because it's really the Fisheries Act driving that. They've completed their first three-year cycle of testing. They've had industry scientists and government scientists in consultations all the way across the country. I've read almost all of those evaluation reports.

The answer is that they couldn't figure out the science because it's a real-world ecosystem. They don't even know what fish to look at. I mean, they're really floundering. And they figure it will be 20 years of these cycles before they have the answer. In other words, it's going to be 20 years before we know whether that effluent needs to be cleaned up any more or not.

Mr. Gary Gallon: Just to add to that, in 1971 I started with the environmental issues, and then they were debating DDT and chlorinated organics—yes or no, the science to ban their use. The same with 2,4,5-T, a real dioxin-laden type of herbicide, yes or no. To this day, they continue to debate whether or not they are really toxic. Yet we took the precautionary action of banning their use.

North America and Europe have benefited by rational decisions made by rational people to move quickly where the science is not all in. So in some respects the kind of scientific-based approach is a buzzword for inaction: if you don't want any action, do the science. By the way, the science will take 20 years and cost you several millions of dollars per chemical.

In fact we have seen the benefits since 1971 of taking action prior to all the science being in. There's enough science out there to show us that there is harm. I've just come back from third world countries, and they are hurt. They are polluted in the air and in the water they drink because of the inaction. And we have been benefited economically and health-wise by the action we took before all the science was in.

Ms. Julia Langer: I just want to give you a bit of a quote from the International Joint Commission, which addresses this issue of science and that it's hokey science. It states:

The need for more than cause and effect science does not mean abandonment of science. It does require new types of evidence and new ways of assembling evidence. Above all, it requires a willingness to act on an integrated body of evidence rather than wait for irrefutable evidence of a cause-effect link.

If I try to put myself in the shoes of not necessarily the chemical manufacturers, but the users of chemicals, industries who use chemicals in standard processes for cleaning, etc., nobody wants to be causing harm to the environment and health. You can bet that people are looking for ways to minimize their impact on the environment and health, because nobody wants to be left holding a smoking gun.

I think we have to be looking on the positive side of this, looking at what we have, how we can use it, how we can get a jump on issues so that we don't get run over by them in three or four or ten years' time. You can't push a string, but I think there's enough there that you can actually sort of start rounding things up and putting things in a new perspective and actually, hopefully with some proactive sense of the issues, get some attention to some of the key bad actors.

[Translation]

Mr. Stéphane Gingras: May I briefly add something to that? There are different ways of approaching this from a scientific standpoint. Scientists have found that a linear approach, that is the traditional exposure level/response model doesn't work. New scientific models are emerging and calling into question the linear model.

• 1625

We talk about a systemic approach, whereby we try to integrate different components because reality is a complex thing. This requires considerable time, energy and money. To say that this is not science is to deny completely a whole new way of grasping and understanding reality.

Of course, traditional science is rooted in our society and must not be discarded. However, there are other methods that can be employed and other ways of understanding reality. For example, we can rely on biological indicators and so forth. We mustn't dismiss these as being outside the realm of science.

[English]

Mrs. Karen Kraft Sloan: I think in some respects it may refer back to even more ancient forms of wisdom the first nations of this country practise and the idea of seven generations in the future and doing no harm. I guess as legislators we have to be concerned and we have to put our emphasis on the side of the public interest as well when there is any kind of doubt.

Thank you.

The Vice-Chairman (Mr. Gar Knutson): I'd like to thank everybody for coming today. I hope you've found it a good use of your time.

The committee will continue in its deliberations. We meet again tomorrow at nine o'clock.

The meeting is adjourned.