Environment committee  I doubt I can answer that question in 10 seconds. The facility must be located so that there is no possibility of effluent from the facility entering public waters.

Environment committee  When we're looking at containment facilities, one of the most important things is how the effluent cleaning process is designed. We have a terrific example of a good way to do that in the Kuterra closed-containment facility built by Namgis First Nation on Vancouver Island. In that case, there is no possibility of any release to the wild because of the number of screenings that the effluent goes through, followed by settling in a pond—essentially a reverse well—so that before any liquid effluent ever reaches a natural water body, it has already been cleaned three different ways.

Environment committee  I have heard witnesses speak very profoundly about those issues, and what struck me most was how aghast they were at the thought that a fish that has not only sustained them by way of providing food directly but sustained their entire ecosystem could possibly now be owned by a corporation somewhere.

Environment committee  I think the Senate addressed a number of them. The main concern we had was, of course, the ability of citizens to participate in the process, to provide evidence, to review evidence and to know how these living organisms are being assessed. I think the Senate amendments have gone a long way toward addressing that.

Environment committee  Thank you for the question. I will take the human health issue first. The concern here is with respect to unintended consequences of gene editing and genetic engineering, which can be the production of proteins that are allergens for some people. That's not to say that every GMO product has allergens in it, but that potential is there.

Environment committee  That was the health side of things. On the genetic issue that was raised, the problem is that these fish will compete. They're quite capable of interbreeding with wild Atlantic salmon. They are also capable of competing with them for food, and given that they're engineered to grow more rapidly than normal fish, one assumes they will be very hungry and will take up a great deal of the food supply.

Environment committee  Thank you for the question. I should begin by saying that the need to demonstrate the need for the living organism isn't a departure from the risk assessment; it's in addition to the risk assessment. Let's be clear on that. We definitely do need to have risk assessments. When we think about living organisms that have wild counterparts, there are considerations that go far beyond the purview of those doing the risk assessments.

Environment committee  They do go a great distance to satisfying those concerns. I am aware that Nature Canada has filed or is about to file a brief with you in which they detail slight tweaks to the language that would make even clearer exactly what we want. I would commend those amendments to you when you receive them.

Environment committee  Thank you for the opportunity to address you on CEPA. Living Oceans Society is a non-profit dedicated to ecosystem-based management of Canada's oceans. I serve as its executive director. It's been 22 years since the act came into force, and during that time genetic engineering has developed with very little public consultation or oversight.

Fisheries committee  If I may, funding on a regular, annual basis is needed to fund all of the shoreline cleanup work that needs to be done, whether it's a result of ongoing activity on the ocean or container spills.

Fisheries committee  Thank you. What I would most like to see is the establishment of the joint spill response task force, integrating it among the federal, provincial and first nations jurisdictions involved and getting it properly resourced to be able to respond to a spill in a timely manner.

Fisheries committee  Internationally, there has been quite a bit of work done to improve the rules for carriage at sea. That work is summarized in the Rotterdam Convention—to which we are not a party—driven largely by the EU, I believe. If you want to look to a regime that provides more modern and realistic rules for this multimodal carriage that didn't exist in 1924, when the existing rules were made, that is where I would look.

Fisheries committee  Perhaps I could take a first cut at this. The first nations communities in question are quite small and remote. They do not have the capacity at the present time to participate in the kind of standing joint task force that I suggest we need to have on this coast. They must be given some assistance with developing the capacity to participate, on an ongoing basis, in training and drilling.

Fisheries committee  The fact is that the larger ships are more vulnerable to windage. They're stacking so many containers so high that these ships are quite vulnerable to losing their centre of gravity, if you will, in the wind. They're also vulnerable to high seas. A long ship in a high sea can suffer structural stress that can impair its integrity, so no, the bigger ships aren't giving rise to more safety.

Fisheries committee  I don't know, and it's rather alarming to me that I don't know, because I've been asking for information about the spill from the Coast Guard and did not get anything back. All Canadians deserve to know what the spill response regime is, and what lessons we learned from Zim Kingston, but there is simply no communication about this, even to those of us who were at least tangentially involved, and certainly, trying to be involved in the ongoing cleanup effort that is going to be required for the next decade or so to deal with this debris.