Environment Committee on June 19th, 2006

[John Moffet]

That's a fair observation. The prohibition regulations that I was referring to generally constitute a comprehensive ban. So when I said that we've looked at substances and determined whether to add them to the virtual elimination list and decided not to because they were already subject to the prohibition regulations, those prohibition regulations don't, for example, ban the presence of a substance in one type of product and not in another product. They're fairly comprehensive bans.

That's not the case, as you point out, for some substances like lead or mercury or other substances that have been discussed before the committee. I'm not at all trying to present the case that we have adequately addressed all substances that you might think should be candidates for virtual elimination or banning. Again, I think that's a policy judgment that I don't want to make. I just want to make sure the committee understands that in some cases, the government may have taken a step that does comprehensively address the presence of that substance in the environment and that following the additional steps prescribed by the act for virtual elimination would not, in our view, have had any environmental or health benefit.

[John Godfrey, Liberal, Don Valley West, ON]

Mr. Reed, I'm trying to find the narrow line between policy and effectiveness here. Is that kind of a question, which I've raised, one to which you would say, “Well, if this is a badly constructed or an incomplete piece of legislation, that's not our domain”? Or is that your domain?

[John Reed]

I'm not sure I understand the question. As a matter of policy, we would not criticize legislation. But we look at its implementation, and we would structure our work to answer the question, “Are the objectives of this legislation being realized?”

So I'm not sure if I misunderstood your question.

[John Godfrey, Liberal, Don Valley West, ON]

I guess what I'm really trying to find out is what happens when the nature of the legislation itself doesn't allow for what seem to be the purposes of the legislation, or when there are certain internal contradictions that don't allow the objectives to be met. Do you have anything to say about that?

[John Reed]

I think if we had found that, yes, I think that would not be a matter of policy to us. That would be a matter of policy implementation. If you're trying to achieve this through the act, and we do some audit work and determine that it can't be achieved for this reason or that reason, then something is wrong, and you can't achieve your own policy objectives.

In this case, we didn't find that. Plenty of other things we found.

[John Godfrey, Liberal, Don Valley West, ON]

Thank you.

[The Vice-Chair, Liberal, Mario Silva]

Thank you very much.

Mr. Cullen, go ahead, please.

[Nathan Cullen, NDP, Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC]

Thank you.

I think this is becoming a bit of a personal obsession, but I'm very curious about the testing component of this. I didn't see it in your report. Do you have any plans to look at the way chemicals are assessed? Mr. Moffet pointed out the process used and that there are protocols that are developed under OECD and other organizations. I'm trying to apply this to other industries and other things we consider potentially harmful.

I would never have considered it a good government policy to allow the tobacco firms to give us their tests on whether tobacco was safe or not because of their deeply vested interest in being able to continue to sell their product. Clearly the government doesn't want to do the same thing in the case of toxic substances. As auditors, have you done any assessment in terms of what the backstop is for a company that chooses to perform bad testing, to verify their product as fine for the marketplace?

[John Reed]

Mr. Moffet or Mr. Clarkson are probably better positioned to answer that. I can tell you something anecdotally, and it's more related to our future work plans and the scoping of this work.

Often when we scope work we do a number of interviews with stakeholders to find out what the issues are, what their concerns are. I think there was a generally held view that the new substance notification procedures under CEPA were okay. Nobody raised major problems with those provisions, and that's why we've tended to not look at them; we've tended to look where there are problems.

But inside the science and the robustness of industry-generated data...one of the departments needs to talk about that.

[The Vice-Chair, Liberal, Mario Silva]

Mr. Clarkson.

[Steve Clarkson]

I will try. I am not a risk assessor; I manage risk assessors in Health Canada. I would like to give the message that anybody I've encountered at Health Canada doing risk assessment for human health takes a very protective and conservative approach. The basic policy undertaken is that we would rather over-protect than under-protect. So our decisions are geared to try to make sure we're protecting.

There are a couple of mechanisms that might give you some assurances about testing carried out by industry. There is data that an industry laboratory may submit, but the risk assessment process in Health Canada in my area doesn't usually benefit from a practice called “good laboratory practice”, which builds on what Mr. Moffet talked about, using methodology that's been well-validated and accepted. During the carrying out of the generation of the data, there are also inspections by outside auditors to determine whether the process you're supposed to be following--the test method you're using--has been followed.

[Nathan Cullen, NDP, Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC]

What's the frequency of that external audit? This involves government officials going into the industrial labs to make sure they're doing the right thing.

[Steve Clarkson]

They're not necessarily government officials. For various parts of the good laboratory practices run in this country, it's done under the auspices of the Standards Council of Canada. In other countries they have a specific entity that carries out the good laboratory practices verification and puts on the stamp of approval--after following audits and verifying the data and the procedures--that the results are trustworthy.

Under our new substances program, I don't know how far they've implemented it, but they are working toward requiring that the data that is submitted to them for evaluation complies with good laboratory practices. In other words, the data that's submitted has to show that they have followed the practices and had the auditing I referred to.

In addition, on our existing substances side, if we had restricted ourselves to good laboratory practices data we wouldn't have reached any conclusions to speak of regarding those 69 or 71 substances that are on PSL1 and PSL2. A lot of information is generated in academia, in private labs--by industry using their private labs following GLP perhaps. But often it's just information in literature that's peer-reviewed.

In part of the risk assessment process in my department, as I understand it, the risk assessor has to evaluate the quality of the data they're looking at in the report or test. Has it been peer reviewed? Has it been reproduced elsewhere? I think you should have a fair amount of confidence that we try to ensure that the data we rely on in doing a risk assessment is credible, reliable, and contributes to our policy of being protective.

[Nathan Cullen, NDP, Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC]

Thank you.

I have two questions on resources.

[The Vice-Chair, Liberal, Mario Silva]

I just want the committee to be aware that you're already past five minutes. However, I don't have a problem with you going further because I think nobody else has any other questions. So if the committee is in agreement, we're quite willing to extend the time.

Go ahead.

[Nathan Cullen, NDP, Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC]

Those were the fastest five minutes of my life. I was so enraptured with the testimony.

I have two questions for Mr. Reed. Has there been any assessment on the capacity? We talked earlier about resources the government has, doesn't have, or allocates. Has there been any assessment, or will there be assessment? Are there sufficient resources within these two departments to do the assessment? It seems as if they're taking the lead on most of this. Are you looking at that?

[John Reed]

When we do work on the domestic substances list, which is likely in the 2008 to 2012 period, we will definitely look at capacity. We will ask the departments to identify for us the resources they think are going to be necessary to complete all of those tasks, and we will compare those against the resources available.

[Nathan Cullen, NDP, Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC]

A second question is around the timeliness of this. Through all of this we've tried to understand how long it takes, after something is determined to be toxic, until there are actually recommendations made and things are enforced. It seems to vary widely. Did you have any assessment of that in your first round, and are you considering it for your second?

[John Reed]

Absolutely. If you can just bear with me for a moment—

[Johanne Gélinas]

John looked at that. Maybe you can look at your 2002 report. I have the French version, so it's probably not the same page, but just after paragraph 1.53, we were given at the time the example of Trichloroethylene. You will see, for example, that TCE was put on the list in 1989. Then in 1993 there was

...a Priority Substance Assessment Report completed ...[that] ...declared the substance toxic under CEPA

In 1994 they started the consultation process, on which John was talking about different strategic options. In 1997 this process was finished, and then a regulation was recommended. In 2000 TCE was added to the CEPA toxic list, and in 2002, at the time we did the audit, there really was no management measure put in place at the time. That's only one example, or one substance.

[Nathan Cullen, NDP, Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC]

But as an important example, from initiation to 13 years later, going through all the proper steps.... One of the reasons for these committee meetings is to be able to turn to Canadians and say, you're okay, we've got it under control, and the government's managing and protecting your health. For a substance like this to be known, and to be known as early as 1993, as not being good for us, and then to take until 2002 and still not have things in place, that element of timeliness is out the window. We cannot turn to Canadians and tell them, your health is being protected, because the process takes so long.

[Johanne Gélinas]

We clearly stated that in this chapter, and we did the same thing with respect to the chapter on pesticides, which are just a subset of toxic substances.

[John Reed]

If I could just add quickly, in the 1999 report, TCE was not an exception. For virtually all of the PSL1 substances whose assessments began in 1989, the departments had basically gotten to the point at the time of the 1999 audit where, on the basis of industry consultations, risk management measures had been recommended to ministers and ministers had accepted them, but the measures had not yet been implemented or resourced. That was the point I was trying to make earlier, that you go through that exercise and you're still not ready for implementation.

In the 2002 piece of work, we did not have the opportunity to follow the PSL2 risk management exercise, because it hadn't really started, as they had just come to the closure of the assessment exercise. But I think there was a view at the time—and maybe Mr. Moffet or Mr. Clarkson could add to this—that the PSL2 risk management exercise would be smoother, and probably a little quicker, than the PSL1 exercise, for a lot of reasons. But—

[Nathan Cullen, NDP, Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC]

Has there ever been an assessment of—

[The Vice-Chair, Liberal, Mario Silva]

Sorry, Mr. Cullen, but you've reached the 10-minute mark and somebody else has a question.