:
If we could begin the committee meeting, I'd like to welcome our witnesses.
Before that, with the members here, we're going to do some planning. If we're going to do this, we'll probably have to get our clerk started on it right away.
As everyone knows, we will have clause-by-clause for on December 7, and it should be finished on that day.
I'm assuming the motion will be made tomorrow. I have talked to Mr. Rodriguez about it. It will probably go ahead, and we would finish Bill C-288 on December 7. It would leave us with Monday, December 11, Tuesday, December 12, and Thursday, December 14, available next week.
I would propose that Tim work on the report over Christmas, and when we come back, he would then have a report for us to go through, discuss, change, and so on.
The minister has offered to come from 3:30 to 4:30 on December 11. I would propose that we could extend the meeting, because we would be scheduled to talk about interdepartmental cooperation and legislative overlap for CEPA on that day. We would have the minister on the December 11, and we would then go into the regular CEPA committee for our regular session.
I'll finish this, and then you can see the whole plan.
On December 12, which would be a Tuesday, we would do the final round table, which we would schedule. We'd need to get witnesses for it now, because it's only a week away.
For any questions to the international group that were broken up by the fire alarm, we have their testimony. We don't have the questions, but we could take care of those on that date.
On December 14 we would provide our final recommendations to Tim, and he would then have January to work on those. When the committee comes back, he could have a draft report for us, which we could then discuss, of course, before sending it on to the government.
That's a suggestion. It's not a motion or anything. I would need unanimous consent to go ahead with that approach. It would be largely for planning purposes that we could proceed in that way.
Are there any comments? Mr. Silva.
:
Oh, great. That's good.
I'm going to focus on the Canadian Council of Ministers of the Environment's Canada-wide standard for dioxins. But that is only as an illustration of my point. The same kinds of points could be made about other subjects that are subject to Canada-wide standards, such as ozone or particulate or mercury, or even the CCME guidelines for water quality or risk assessment to determine if a substance is CEPA-toxic.
My illustration using dioxin is about a process I am having some trouble with. I think the problems are endemic to a baroque structure of committees and internecine power struggles that allow government to abdicate its responsibility to protect human health and the environment.
The main conclusions--the take-away messages--are, first of all, that we don't believe CEPA 1999 needs substantive revision. We believe the law is capable of dealing with Canada's environmental problems. There may be the odd fix required, but there's nothing really wrong with CEPA.
The problem lies in the relationship between the federal and provincial governments. Much time and money is being wasted in multi-stakeholder, interjurisdictional consultations that merely confuse the lines of accountability. There is a culture of inadequacy in the bureaucracy among politicians and the ministers who do not have the will to make CEPA live up to its potential to protect the environment and Canadians' health.
Finally, despite all of that, I would say that we do need a mechanism to reactivate the Canada-wide standards system in the event of significant changes, such as technological improvements for pollution prevention, new industrial developments that will change pollution levels, or new science. That mechanism doesn't seem to exist now. I'm not sure you have to rewrite CEPA in order to have that mechanism; you might just need to redesign the process.
My organization, Reach for Unbleached, is a national foundation. It is a Canadian registered charity with a focus on consumer education and pulp mill monitoring. We work for a sustainable pulp and paper industry by making pulp mills clean up and by promoting clean, environmentally preferable paper. Over the last decade and a half, we have worked in alliance with pulp unions, first nations, international environmental organizations such as Greenpeace, and citizens groups in most of the forest towns of British Columbia.
We participated as a member of the Canadian delegation in the negotiation of the United Nations treaty on persistent organic pollutants, the POPs treaty, and we've worked on numerous Environment Canada and British Columbia toxics-related processes. Our work is cited by grassroots campaigns all over the world.
I'm also the editor of the Watershed Sentinel news magazine, which is in touch with dozens, if not hundreds, of other grassroots organizations across the country.
It's a very rare opportunity for a community-based activist to have this chance to present our comments on how we see the workings of government's structure for the control of toxics and to tell you how we ENGOs have to deal with it. We're not offering a legal viewpoint; we're offering a layperson's understanding of toxicology, bureaucracy, and the technology of pulp and paper production.
The system is not broken, but the hands on the levers need to do more than a little heavy lifting. Considerable taxpayer money, and even more volunteer time, is being wasted in these consultations that do not remain focused and do not deliver the pollution prevention Canadians expect. These processes serve to confuse the lines of accountability. In British Columbia, we call this “talk and log”, where we sit and negotiate and the trees are falling outside the window while we talk. That's exactly what's going on with toxics policy in this country.
This is not mandated by CEPA 1999; it's the way it's been interpreted by the governments.
Let me tell you a little bit about myself, then you'll sort of see why I'm coming to these conclusions. My home is on a small island off the coast of British Columbia. I moved there in 1987 to live a quiet rural life. My partner and I were growing our own food and were working as clam diggers to earn a little extra money. Our island, having finished logging its old growth forest, was and is heavily concentrated on family operations growing oysters for the export market, but in about 1989, trouble started in paradise.
At that time, fisheries closures were beginning to spread along the coast of British Columbia because of dioxin contamination of the shellfish from chlorine bleaching pulp mills. Eventually about 120,000 hectares of foreshore were closed to crab and shellfish harvesting, of which more than half remains closed to this day.
On our island we were threatened with economic disaster, so we were looking for a solution. That's why the name of my organization is Reach for Unbleached, because if the pulp mills weren't using chlorine to bleach their product, if they were using unbleached or, alternatively, making bleached paper, there wouldn't be any dioxin and then our oyster fishery would be okay. So that's where we came from.
I don't have time to take you through the whole process of multi-stakeholder meetings, scientific twists and turns, market scares, job blackmail, the harmonization agreement with the Province of B.C.--which wasn't very harmonious, and the federal and provincial governments never renewed it--and then lots of B.C. elections, although the B.C. elections tend to be a lot more fun than the rest of it.
In summary, the federal government declared dioxin CEPA-toxic and subject to virtual elimination. It then acted to stop the outpouring of dioxin by using a regulation under the Fisheries Act that prohibited the mills from putting dioxin out in their effluent. It was a strict command and control regulation, and it worked. Dioxin levels in effluent plummeted.
In my paper, there's a description of dioxin's health impacts, the fact that it's slated for international ban under the POPs treaty, etc., but I'm going to skip that in the interest of time.
However, given all of those things, including the EPA's science reassessment of dioxin's health impacts at very, very low levels, it's not too surprising that Canada continued with its dioxin elimination program by developing Canada-wide standards. What is surprising, given the elimination mantra under which the CWS was justified, is that the process focused only on airborne emissions of dioxin, not on the creation of dioxin. This is a directive of the national advisory committee that seemed absolutely impossible to change when we got down to discussing the nuts and bolts of dioxin production.
British Columbia was given the lead as champion of the dioxin Canada-wide standard, and our organization and numerous others from coastal communities followed through on the process. Pulp mills were burning chips from wood that had been towed in the ocean. By being in the ocean, the wood soaked up salt, then when they burned those chips they made dioxin. That's the nub of the problem, but the really important part is that the Canada-wide standard was only looking at the airborne emissions instead of at the creation of dioxin. Most of that dioxin actually goes into landfill, rather than up the stack and out into the air.
However, we did manage to get pollution prevention written into the Canada-wide standard after about two years of committee infighting. Unfortunately, the pollution prevention turned into a bit of a bad joke. Many expensive and time-consuming meetings later, to which we coastal environmentalists donated our time, consultants' reports proved to almost everyone's satisfaction that it was far too expensive to consider taking the logs out of the salt water, that the salt could not be washed out of the wood chips, and that it was okay, because the dioxin was sealed away forever in the pulp mills' landfills.
Many of these landfills have no liners. In cases where there have been tests, dioxin frequently shows up in the leachate and in the groundwater around the landfills. In any event, the best of these landfills is only built for a hundred-year weather event, and I think we're looking at a little more than that these days.
:
I want to thank you, Mr. Chairman and Mr. Clerk, for inviting me here this afternoon. My name is Dr. Gregory Heming, and I come from a small town, Haines Junction, in the Yukon.
By way of introduction, I would like to say that by profession I am a human ecologist. I study the way humans interact with systems natural, environmental, political, economic, social, and cultural. By vocation I am a communitarian, and by that I mean I am one who believes in the value and livability of small rural communities, particularly the one I'm a member of.
Both my interests have convinced me that former Secretary of State (Rural Development) Andy Mitchell was correct when he asserted that rural communities are the future of Canada.
As you know from preliminary correspondence, my remarks to you this afternoon are centred on two core problems, neither of which is written directly into the Canadian Environmental Protection Act. However, I submit to you today that both of these core problems are equally important to the eventual success CEPA may realize in preventing pollution, protecting the environment, protecting human health, and contributing to sustainable development.
Canada's small rural communities are being adversely impacted from the inside by what I call internal disaffection and from the outside by external exploitation. Both disaffection from inside and exploitation from outside begin to occur when communities are unable to supply local needs from local sources.
It is my contention that communities, provinces, territories, and first nations, as they become increasingly dependent on outside sources, centralized governments, and larger and larger corporations for their basic needs, become correspondingly disaffected from our local businesses and our local governments, and most troubling to me, with our own neighbours' civic demeanour.
The Canadian Environmental Protection Act can, if it reconciles many of the criticisms and suggestions that this committee has heard over time, do much to protect us from the negative by-products of a large-scale economy. But even with wholesale refinements and adaptations in how CEPA chooses to regulate and enforce environmental law and corporate responsibility, it will do little to promote an interdependent series of small-scale economies, which would include the likes of family farming, community markets, innovative and productive cottage industries, and community alternate energy capabilities.
Therefore, while CEPA may help us identify and regulate the symptoms of a toxic economy, which does in fact include thousands of bioaccumulative and inherently toxic substances, we cannot expect CEPA to help us treat the root cause of pollution, which is our own inability to distinguish our basic needs from our unnecessary wants. Nor can we expect CEPA to help us redesign our economy so that it may become less exploitive, more authentic, and more local, healthy, and sustainable.
Our present economic model, which demands unlimited economic growth through unlimited consumption, and which we hope to temper with the likes of CEPA, is prejudiced against the small. It has an inherent industrial prejudice against anything rural. It works against family business, competitive business, and small-scale innovation. In fact, it may even be fair to say at the end of the day that it just may be prejudiced against the delicate balance inherent in our natural world.
Because rural folks live in very close proximity to our natural landscape, we understand in ways that others do not that our lives and livelihoods are always a mixture of what is natural and what is fabricated and altered. In short, we understand in rural communities, as few do, that culture can only happen by consuming nature.
As our current economic system continues to pump resources out of the periphery into the centre, from the countryside into the city, from the poor to the rich, as the economy heats up, as it must do in the system that we have, it has become increasingly acceptable to ruin one place for the sake of another.
The key question for community folks and country folks, and ultimately for this committee, is what mixture of nature and culture is acceptable? What mixture of pristine wilderness, resource extraction, automobile pollution, toxic substances, displaced wildlife is acceptable before rural living becomes too much like urban living?
While this committee will likely hear much about a priority substance list, screening level, risk assessments, toxic substance, management policies, and administrative and equivalency agreements—and make no mistake, these are absolutely invaluable to make CEPA effective—we must not allow the particular and overly precise language of experts, of scientists, of lawyers, of lawmakers, to cloud over and obscure the common sense language in which we express many of the common sense Canadian values.
In an attempt to serve this more ordinary approach to pollution protection and environmental protection, in an attempt to prevent small communities from falling in on themselves or from being overridden by external forces that they are incapable of fending off, I would like to put before this committee four notions that just might serve you well when the regulatory and administrative waters of CEPA get choppy. If nothing else, strict adherence to these four notions will give you the philosophical framework, the economic foundation, and the political rationale to think about CEPA in ways that will ensure that our rural communities are indeed the future of Canada.
Number one, Trappist monk Thomas Merton once remarked that, having lost our ability to see life as a whole, to evaluate conduct as a whole, we no longer have any relevant context into which our actions are to be fitted, and therefore, all our actions become erratic, arbitrary, and insignificant. For me, I believe Merton was suggesting that community was the relevant context in which we can somehow begin to see our lives as being less erratic, more sensible, and infinitely more significant.
If CEPA does not tie directly and pragmatically into community life and into rural life, it is not likely to gain the support of the people and therefore will always be seen as one more management regime filtering down and put upon lesser levels of government. CEPA must always ask and always seek to answer one question: what will any proposed regulatory change or innovation do to a particular community? How, we must ask ourselves, will CEPA affect our common unity?
Number two, Daniel Kemmis, the former mayor of Missoula, Montana, in response to his constituents about the heavy hand of federal government, said something that's always impressed me. He said:
It would be an insult to these people to assume that they are incapable of reaching some accommodation among themselves about how to inhabit their own place.
This simple rule of local government can guide this committee as it searches for ways to mould seamless cooperation with provinces, territories, aboriginal people, and ordinary citizens when it comes to implementing CEPA.
Number three, university professor in law Professor Charles Wilkinson once outlined what he called an ethic of place:
An ethic of place respects equally the people of a region and the land, animals, vegetation, water and air. It recognizes that westerners revere their physical surroundings and that they need and deserve a stable, productive economy that is accessible to those with modest incomes. An ethic of place ought to be a shared community value and ought to manifest itself in a dogged determination to treat the environment and its people as equals, to recognize both as sacred, and to insure that all members of the community not just search for but insist upon solutions that fulfill the ethic.
This committee should never forget that pollution prevention, environmental protection, and sustainable development are all tied together--end of story.
Even more specifically and of greater significance is the fact that we must never forget that air, land, water, vegetation, animals, and human civilization are all on an equal footing. The cultural and economic systems that emerge from these natural systems must be accessible to those with a modest income. This, in fact, may be the premier Canadian value from which everything flows.
Number four, Erica Jong, with clear brevity of thought, gave me great pause once more. Take your life in your own hands, she said, and what happens? A terrible thing: no one to blame.
This committee and all of us in this room can no longer afford to shuffle the entire blame for contaminated water, for smog, climate change, and toxic chemicals solely to either industry or to government. As citizens and consumers, we are ultimately responsible for making healthy choices about our own lives and our own livelihoods.
This committee would be ill-advised to alter or amend CEPA in any way if such alteration or amendment took individual consumers off the hook for their own failings, no matter how innocent. In 1853, just six years prior to when construction began on this original Parliament Building, British poet laureate William Wordsworth penned the following poem:
The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
...
For this, for everything we are out of tune;
....
If I can impact upon this committee one single message that must come through clearly in this mandatory five-year review of the Canadian Environmental Protection Act, it is this. We cannot continue with our infinite consumption of our finite resources, for if we do, we will most certainly give our hearts away; for if we do, we lay waste our powers and we never get to the bottom of things.
Thank you.
:
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Let me begin by expressing our industry's appreciation to be addressing the committee on this important and timely examination you're undertaking with respect to the Canadian Environmental Protection Act.
By way of introduction, FPAC is the voice of the Canadian wood, pulp, and paper producers, nationally and internationally, in the areas of government, trade, and environment. Canada's forest industry represents 3% of Canada's GDP and exports over $40 billion of wood, pulp, and paper annually. We're also one of Canada's largest employers, operating in hundreds of communities—mostly rural—and providing nearly 900,000 direct or indirect jobs across the country.
The forest sector has established itself as a leader on environmental issues. The operations have spent over $8 billion on reducing air and water discharges. Our most recent data show that the sector has reduced greenhouse gas emissions by 30% since 1990; at the same time, we have reduced particulate matter by over 60%. We have an equally impressive track record on water, which I won't get into, as time does not permit.
We are very proud of our environmental track record. However, we recognize that the status quo is not good enough. We must do more to continually improve our environmental performance; and to do more, we need creative approaches built upon collaboration and cooperation with stakeholders, as well as federally and provincially. Through mechanisms like our Pulp and Paper Air Quality Forum, we have proven our capacity to work with a broad range of stakeholders in thinking creatively about solutions to very complex and difficult issues in a time of economic crisis for the sector. Indeed, the remarks I'll be making today draw very heavily from the work of that forum, and I look forward to sharing those.
We are a highly regulated sector in many jurisdictions across the country, and consequently we have a significant level of experience with respect to environmental legislation, both federally and provincially. CEPA has a significant impact on our members, particularly now that the Clean Air Act amendments have been included within CEPA.
FPAC would like to focus our comments today on one issue that is of overriding importance to our members, the equivalency provisions within CEPA. As a highly regulated sector, we are particularly sensitive to the increasing regulatory morass and complexity we're facing within Canada's landscape. To be very clear, FPAC does not challenge the federal government's authority to regulate environmental issues, nor do we advocate harmonization with provincial standards. We recognize that the federal government may wish to do more in certain provincial jurisdictions, and we also recognize that the provincial governments do share some of the burden of reaching and eliminating the complex environmental challenges we face.
However, we do advocate very strongly for efficient approaches that eliminate federal and provincial duplication. We firmly believe it is critical that federal and provincial governments work together towards that goal. We suggest that understanding the strengths and weaknesses of the existing provincial regimes is a key step in pursuing federal action. This understanding is certainly a necessary building block for ensuring regulatory gaps are addressed and that duplication is avoided.
CEPA 1999 does provide provisions to allow federal and provincial governments to sign equivalency agreements between them. We fundamentally believe that the original intent of these provisions aimed at simplifying the environmental landscape without weakening environmental performance. However, our experience to date has shown that the provisions, along with their interpretation, are significant barriers to achieving this important goal. I'm sure you're aware that only one province, the Province of Alberta, actually has an agreement in place with the federal government.
In the interest of the committee's time, I do not intend to review all of the legal intricacies of CEPA. I'm sure you're more than intimately familiar with them. I would also like to set aside for just a moment.
So just in the context of the existing CEPA as it stands, there are two provisions for equivalency, which I think are important to highlight here. One, the provincial regulatory provisions can be deemed equivalent to regulations of the federal government and therefore could be eligible for exemption. Two, these provisions must allow for investigation of alleged offences or what we call the citizens' right to investigate. You need both of these criteria to be in place to get an equivalency agreement.
proposes amendments to CEPA 1999 in this area, and I implore the committee to take a very close look at those provisions as you undertake your CEPA review.
The proposed Clean Air Act amendments shift away from a very strict regulatory-to-regulatory interpretation or focus toward the more outcomes-based approach, i.e., provisions, the effects of which are equivalent. FPAC strongly believes this is a clear and important step in the right direction, as it adds flexibility to the requirements and should not compromise the quality of the environment. , however, does not modify the “citizens' right to investigate” provisions.
I would like to lead you through a very short example around air quality that highlights the challenges and implications of CEPA 1999 and then also the proposed amendments for .
Based on comprehensive legal analysis, we have several stand-alone legal opinions, as well as consultations with the federal Department of Justice, Environment Canada, and five provincial governments—B.C., Alberta, Ontario, Quebec, and Newfoundland and Labrador. On the potential for an equivalency agreement with provinces for our sector, we have found that only Alberta and Newfoundland and Labrador would be in a position to sign equivalency agreements under CEPA 1999 without tremendous and significant modifications to their existing regulatory regimes. If you add amendments to this equation, what you get is Alberta, Ontario, Newfoundland and Labrador, and Nova Scotia able to sign equivalency agreements, due to the shift toward the outcomes-based approach that I mentioned earlier.
I would like to note that Quebec, with its very comprehensive regulatory regime—it has a tremendous regulatory regime in place—would still not be able to sign an equivalency agreement. That's given as a result of the lack of “citizens' right to investigate” provisions. Quite frankly, this concerns us greatly.
The following are our recommendations for your consideration. We urge you to remain committed to simplifying the environmental regulatory requirements in Canada by addressing the legislative constraints that prevent the establishment of equivalency agreements. Furthermore, we urge the committee to support the proposed amendments, as they relate to equivalency, that were introduced in . While they do not go far enough, in our opinion, they do move us in the right direction.
As a supplementary to this, we do not know how the committee intends to deal with this, but we believe there would be some inherent value in the committee's coordinating its CEPA review activities and its activities. I'm sure you have all sorts of thoughts on that, but this is an area that highlights, I think, the value of undertaking that.
We apologize in advance for not having any specific recommendations here, but we would like to ask the committee to undertake a study or further examination of what options may exist to support the citizens' right to investigate in concept. We really believe it's an important concept, but there must be a way to do this while providing flexibility for provincial jurisdictions in terms of this requirement. We haven't yet undertaken our resources to figure that one out. We intend to, and we would like to be able to present the results of that to committee, but we also suggest that you may have some study work or interest to study that particular opportunity.
We request that the committee recommend to the government that it draw on the experience of sectors that have already developed cooperative federal and provincial mechanisms. For example, I did mention the Pulp and Paper Air Quality Forum. For the last two years, we've been rolling up our sleeves with environmental organizations, aboriginals, five provinces, and the federal government, to figure out a path forward on air and climate change that makes sense for all concerned. We really hope those initiatives are not pushed aside with respect to a new approach to air.
Mr. Chairman, this concludes my formal remarks. I'd be happy to take any questions that the committee members may have. Thank you.