Thank you.
We are on clause 38.
Like some of Mr. Cullen's comments, clauses 38 to 41 are major government amendments to take greenhouse gases and air pollutants out of CEPA. Due to the changes we've already made to clause 18 through Liberal amendment L-21.1, we think it no longer makes sense to remove GHGs and air pollutants from the schedule 1 toxics list.
We've been concerned from the beginning that clauses 38 to 40 remove criteria air pollutants and greenhouse gases from schedule 1 of CEPA--to repeat myself--and place these substances into two new categories, air pollutants and greenhouse gases. Effectively, Mr. Chair, these clauses create a parallel set of authorities, with tools that are currently in CEPA with respect to toxic substances.
We think this double listing will create some ambiguity. There has been litigation—we've just had a small discussion about Hydro-Québec, for example—to raise the profile of this ambiguity. We need to keep this quite unambiguous.
We think the government's original Bill C-30 provisions would simply have reproduced regulatory authorities that the federal government already has in relation to these substances. We've said that since the beginning of the Bill C-30 process. These have been found to meet the definition of “toxic substances” under section 64 of CEPA, and those substances are already listed on CEPA's schedule 1.
So as Mr. Jean just asked, we believe that if they had gone through, they would have raised a serious question about what the constitutional basis for the exercise of federal regulatory authority in relation to these substances actually is. For those reasons alone, and because of the fact that we believe we really need to make this whole question unambiguous, as opposed to ambiguous, we are opposed to clause 38.