I can respond.
I repeat what I think I said in an earlier meeting: to date the departments have not added to the virtual elimination list all substances that they have prohibited.
In 1998, after the departments developed the toxic substances management policy, the departments identified 12 substances for virtual elimination. Eight of those were pesticides, and there were four other substances. All eight of the pesticides are not registered with the Pest Control Products Act; in other words, they cannot be used as pesticides. Adding them to the virtual elimination list doesn't do anything over and above the step that's been taken by the pesticide management folks, so it would be additional government effort for no value added in terms of risk management.
The other substances have been subjected to the prohibition regulations, so again their use is prohibited in Canada. Again the conclusion was that going through the administrative steps to add those substances to the virtual elimination list would not add any benefit to the risk management of those substances, because what needed to be done had already been done.
You also asked about whether there are administrative problems with virtual elimination requirements in CEPA. I think it's fair to say the answer is yes, there are.
The virtual elimination provisions are complicated and hard to follow, but essentially what they say is that if a substance meets the criteria in the regulations to be considered persistent or bioaccumulative, and inherently toxic, the minister shall implement virtual elimination as it's defined the act. That means the minister must add the substance to the virtual elimination list, identify a level of quantification, and then develop a release limit regulation.
What we found is that many of the substances on the horizon that we anticipate may be subject to these requirements are contaminants in products; they're not being released through industrial emissions. We've learned that it's extremely hard, technically, to develop a level of quantification for a contaminant in a product that is inadvertently released, and that indeed the better approach for addressing these substances, in many cases, is simply to prohibit their use. Going the VE route--virtual elimination--would then just add some burdens that are hard to comply with and again won't add a lot of environmental or health benefit.
The additional requirement of having a release limit regulation is again something that in many cases has turned out to be unnecessary. If you ban the substance, there's not much point in developing another regulation that prescribes a release limit for it, because in theory you shouldn't be using the substance--so, yes, when we've tried to implement these provisions, we have encountered some administrative challenges.