Environment committee  Well, it's come down. PFOS has become dramatically reduced since then, but it was the company that produced it that willingly took it off the market.

Environment committee  Right. I don't currently know the situation for TFA.

Environment committee  If I'm recalling it correctly, I think TFA is trifluoroacetate. When, under the Montreal protocol, we eliminated the CFCs and replaced them with HCFCs, trifluoroacetate started becoming detectable in rain because of what we replaced the CFCs with in refrigerants. So I believe it

Environment committee  In my understanding. That is my recollection, but I would want to confirm that.

Environment committee  The persistent organic pollutants are the ones that are toxic bioaccumulative and persistent. Some substances are not very persistent; they don't stick around for very long. Others are much more persistent and bioaccumulative, so we tend to give them more attention.

Environment committee  Yes, I am.

Environment committee  Yes. PFOS was the major ingredient in Scotchgard prior to 2001. It was thought to be well contained. It was thought to be not something that would be subject to long-range transport. Then there were studies done that showed very high levels of PFOS in polar bears. In 2001, 3M t

Environment committee  The Detroit River.

Environment committee  No, a lot of these emerging issues are like flame retardants and these perfluorinated carboxylic acids, and that sort of thing. They tend to be found around urban centres. They're products that we use. The brominated flame retardants are used in computers. They're used in house

Environment committee  Yes, certainly. I think that—

Environment committee  The contaminants that have declined are mostly the chlorinated chemicals that are now regulated under the Stockholm Convention. There's an international treaty now to get rid of things like PCBs and what they used to call the dirty dozen, mostly chlorinated chemicals that had bee

Environment committee  My name is Jules Blais. I'm a professor of environmental toxicology at the University of Ottawa. I took a little bit of a different approach from my colleagues. I put together a slide presentation that is really just intended to inform on the sorts of issues that we've been see

Environment committee  I have here a series of slides that review some of the issues we've been seeing since the 1970s. It all really started on Scotch Bonnet Island on Lake Ontario. That is where we really started to see the effects of environmental pollutants in the Great Lakes. This was work done b