Bill C-30 (39th Parliament, 1st Session) Committee on Feb. 13th, 2007

[Francis Scarpaleggia, Liberal, Lac-Saint-Louis, QC]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Laurie Hawn]

Thank you.

Monsieur Bigras.

[Bernard Bigras, Bloc, Rosemont—La Petite-Patrie, QC]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.

Welcome to the committee and kudos on your presentation. I want mostly to go over the presentation of the Canadian Lung Association, since it is the only document I have received.

On page 5 of your brief, Mr. Maybee, you indicate that Canada's air quality standards should be set as equal to, or lower than, the most health-protected standards existing internationally.

I want to know what you are referring to when you talk about the most health-protected standards existing internationally. Could you provide us with models based on high standards elsewhere?

[Dr. Barbara MacKinnon]

Yes, certainly there are good international standards that we could compare them to. I don't have the actual numbers here with me today, but I certainly could forward them to your committee. As you can imagine, there is great variance between those in the United States and those in Europe, which would be the ones I would draw examples from. They vary for particulate matter or for ground-level ozone or for other substances. Some of them are lower than ours, and some of them are actually higher than ours. So if we're talking about particulate matter and ozone, I think we're probably in the middle of the international pack at the moment. Certainly, there are some that could come down lower.

It's important to make a distinction between what we're talking about here, because our standards are for ambient air levels of air pollution. They're not for emissions that come out of stacks. There are two separate measurements. We would like to see greater regulations for the emissions that come out of stacks, as well as for ambient air levels.

I don't know if that helps you.

[Bernard Bigras, Bloc, Rosemont—La Petite-Patrie, QC]

I have another question.

Are you aware of standards adopted by various urban areas in Canada? I am thinking, among others, of the Montreal Urban Community, which has strict standards, I am told, headed by Dr. Drouin of the Institut national de santé publique du Québec.

Are you aware of these standards, and could they be used to help develop so-called national or Canadian standards?

[Dr. Barbara MacKinnon]

Certainly, we're aware of Dr. Louis Drouin's work in Montreal particularly, and in helping to get citywide standards that are actually perhaps lower than the Canada-wide standards. It's particularly important for the Montreal area, which has both traffic problems and wood stove problems that are relevant to particles in the air.

I don't see any reason you couldn't use city standards as a good example, but the main thing is that for human health reactions to things like particles, there's no safe level, so even if you have a low level of exposure, some people get sick. So every effort to bring those standards down to what is achievable is always good, whether you use a Montreal standard, or a United States standard, or a Canada-wide standard. The lower the better.

[Bernard Bigras, Bloc, Rosemont—La Petite-Patrie, QC]

In your opinion, is it true that the standards set by the Montreal Urban Community are quite stringent?

I don't want to go into detail, since this is a general discussion.

Could we consider these to be quite stringent standards, ones the federal government could use to set so-called national standards that you would like to see adopted with respect to Canada's Clean Air Act?

[Dr. Barbara MacKinnon]

It's one of the standards that could be looked at, yes. I'm not sure about the actual numbers of the standards. I think they are slightly more stringent. On the other side of the coin, too, is whether they're being achieved. That's the other thing to look at as well.

[Bernard Bigras, Bloc, Rosemont—La Petite-Patrie, QC]

In fact, the issue is whether the standards are being respected, and that is the subject of my second question.

On page 8, you talk about the quality of indoor air and you are proposing that Ottawa create a list of indoor air pollutants, including tobacco smoke. In principle, I fully agree with you.

However, I have some questions. What do you see as the federal government's role? In my opinion, it is rather removed from the quality of indoor air. I'm saying this in all honesty.

We see that it is extremely difficult to apply CEPA. How do you see this being integrated into Bill C-30?

[Dr. Barbara MacKinnon]

You make an interesting point that of course you can't regulate what goes on inside people's houses. What you regulate is the content of materials at the point of sale. So for the production of something, you regulate a lower emission level or a lower content of things that will off-gas in the house.

With respect to wood stoves, you regulate how the wood stove is made, not how people use it in their house.

[Kenneth Maybee]

If I can, I'll add a point to that. For a number of years, the Lung Association has been advocating for regulations related to indoor air quality. This is the first time a government has come forward saying that they have an interest.

I think what this committee must look at is finding a home for indoor air quality. When you find the home for indoor air quality, then you have to put the resources together so that this home, which obviously would be Health Canada, can operate and do the job of taking on the issue of indoor air quality.

Subsequent to that, I would suggest that at a provincial level there has to be the same sort of thing. There has to be a home in the province. If you go out now and ask any citizen in Canada or any part of the government who owns the responsibility for indoor air quality, you're not going to get a proper answer.

[The Chair, Conservative, Laurie Hawn]

Okay, your time is up, Monsieur Bigras.

We'll go to Mr. Bevington for seven minutes, please.

[Dennis Bevington, NDP, Western Arctic, NT]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you to all the witnesses here. I've enjoyed your discussions. Of course, indoor/outdoor air quality is extremely important in this bill, and certainly is to all Canadians. What we can do, in some cases, is clarify what we're trying to accomplish here, as well. There has been a lot of confusion in Parliament and everywhere else on the street about the difference between smog and greenhouse gas emissions.

Maybe you could comment a little bit about that, in terms of how you feel that difference is stated.

[Dr. Barbara MacKinnon]

We've just finished writing a little backgrounder to help us explain this to the public, because it can be confusing for certain people.

When you burn fossil fuels, you emit a whole bunch of pollutants--many of which we call air pollutants--like particles, volatile organic compounds, sulphur, nitrogen, and so on. Burning fossil fuels also releases CO2, which is a greenhouse gas. Now, the air pollutants, of course, affect our respiratory health. The carbon dioxide goes up into the upper atmosphere and, together with other gases, is causing the earth to warm. So air pollutants and greenhouse gases have the same cause.

They also have intertwining effects, because as we warm up the planet, some of the predictions are that we will get worse air pollution. One reason is that if you have more hot air days, people will turn their air conditioners on more and the power plants will have to burn more fossil fuels. Also, particularly in the Atlantic region, as you may know, when we get warm weather in the summer, it comes from the Ohio River and the Windsor-Quebec corridor, which are highly industrialized and which are high traffic corridors. So our warm weather always brings to us smog--air pollutants--from those sources. The more warm weather days we get, the more smog days we're going to get in those regions of the country where weather and smog combine to bring us poor air.

So not only do they have the same causes, but climate change makes air pollution worse. Interestingly, they have the same solution, of course, if you do it the right way, through measures like energy efficiency or moving away from fossil fuels. Those actions reduce both greenhouse gases and air pollutants.

So they have many connectors.

[Dennis Bevington, NDP, Western Arctic, NT]

Mr. Samis, you talked about the need to regulate fine particulate matter. Within the fossil fuel range, of course, there are differences in the fuels you use. There's been much research done on the impact of diesel fuel, with its fine particulate, as a special hazard to human health, be it to heart and lungs or be it because of carcinogens. So don't we have to be very careful when we're speaking about fossil fuels as well in order to understand their impact, in terms of their relative merits, on human health? Simply by lumping them together, we're doing a disservice to our understanding of how to deal with them.

[Stephen Samis]

I think that's true, and I think that's partly why all the witnesses here today are talking about separating these things out, drawing clear lines of cause and effect, and establishing the most appropriate measures--targets and compliance measures--for each. Although they're interconnected, they act on human health differently. You can be more or less aggressive on various elements that contribute to each. So I think that's correct.

[Dennis Bevington, NDP, Western Arctic, NT]

Yes, there were some very interesting studies on the impacts on children in school buses, because of course they're mostly run on diesel fuel. And the children were achieving these very high rates of exposure to the fine particulates.

Do you think this bill should recognize the need to protect vulnerable groups in our society too? Adults stand higher on the ground. They use less oxygen per unit of body mass. They process in a different fashion from children. So the children are really quite vulnerable on our streets right now to these types of pollutions.

I'll get you to comment on that.

[Stephen Samis]

I think the bill would be wise to recognize vulnerable populations and to identify some of those. I think it would be likely helpful in helping the federal government identify the kinds of actions and the aggressiveness of its actions with respect to the various ways in which you can reduce both greenhouse gases and air pollution.

I know that the Canadian Lung Association, in its brief, made reference to that, so I'd pass it over to them.

[Dennis Bevington, NDP, Western Arctic, NT]

There were a couple of other points I wanted to touch on. One is the measurement of ambient air condition in buildings, because of course that determines the energy efficiency of the building. To a large degree these days, it is by the amount of air that you have to bring in and bring out.

We have set standards that don't deal with the air condition, they just deal with the volume of air movement and the time of day. Would you say that we need to revisit the kinds of standards we set for indoor air movement or replacement and start to look at systems that will give us measurements of the actual condition of the air indoors before we change it?

[Kenneth Maybee]

I think you'll find that part of that is already being done through the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation. They've taken that on. They're looking at various methodologies on how they could do that. Of course, the difficulties you run into are that the federal government has only so much to do with the regulatory part, and it is a provincial responsibility. So somewhere along the way we have to have a tighter fit with the provinces on how that's going to work out.

But to get back to your first question, there is a great deal that has to be done on indoor air quality. It hasn't really had a home before. I'm looking forward to it now finding a home, and I think a great amount of work can be done there.

[The Chair, Conservative, Laurie Hawn]

Thank you very much.

Mr. Bevington, your time is up.

Mr. Warawa, for seven minutes, please.

[Mark Warawa, Conservative, Langley, BC]

Thank you, Chair.

And thank you to the witnesses for being here.

I'm one of the Canadians who have allergies and take shots for it. I'm 56, and what a disappointment it is to have to deal with allergies--and mine are minor compared to those of many Canadians. But when I was musing with my GP, he attributed it to air pollution, so I experience it first-hand.

In fact, much of a member's time on the Hill here is spent sitting and listening and thinking, and so it's a good practice to try to find time where you can actually do some cardiovascular to stay in somewhat decent health, and also keep your mental faculties somewhat alert. But the air quality is a concern when, as I've said, 90% of our time is spent indoors, so air quality indoors and outdoors in a downtown area is a concern.

I'm from the Fraser Valley, and there was a study done to find out what the ingredients were in the haze over the Fraser Valley. Aircraft would fly through it and do the sampling to try to determine what the ingredients were. It was interesting to discuss the report afterwards and to find out that the high pollution levels seem to actually travel along with the Fraser River itself, where there are the highest concentrations. People would go down there to exercise, ride their bikes along there, and that's very close to where I live too.

So I appreciate your comments. I too am excited about Bill C-30 and actually moving toward cleaning up the air, and the commitment that makes to cleaning up the air Canadians breathe both indoors and outdoors.

In my questions I want to focus on the qualities of the fuel . Before I start, Mr. Maybee, you provided an actual written brief along with the recommendations. The other two presenters, from the Asthma Society and the Heart and Stroke Foundation, did provide a good verbal brief, but do you have a written brief with recommendations that you'll be able to hand in?

[Rob Peacock]

No, we don't at this point. I think part of that really is attributable to the fact that we just haven't had the time over the last few days. We got the notice three days ago, but we would be delighted and happy to do so but with appropriate time.

[Mark Warawa, Conservative, Langley, BC]

That would be helpful.

Mr. Samis.

[Stephen Samis]

It's exactly the same situation for us. We have had about three days to prepare and we didn't have time to put this into writing and then have it translated before coming before the committee. We would be happy to do that as well.