Just as a small correction, I'm now a professor at McMaster University. I've just moved away from the IJC. But I can talk to you about the IJC and the list of chemicals.
The Boundary Waters Treaty of 1909 stated that no activity on one side of the border will cause injury to health or property on the other side of the border. It set the stage for the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement, which the IJC recommended happen and which the two governments, of Canada and of the United States, through the Department of Foreign Affairs and the Department of State, agreed to.
There is an annex, called Annex 1, that has all of the specific chemical objectives for organics, persistent toxic substances, nutrients, microbiology radiation, and so on. That list was first compiled with advice from the Science Advisory Board, which is a binational board that reports to the IJC, composed of scientists from academia, industry, and to some extent government on both sides of the border, equally populated by Canadians and Americans. Their recommendations went up to the IJC, and the IJC recommended to governments that they implement this list.
The list is now, in some cases, 34 years out of date. A lot of the discussion in development of those lists was based on the inputs of EPA and Environment Canada scientists.
The Canada-Ontario Agreement adopted the top 12 substances the IJC identified as the “dirty dozen”, the ones for virtual elimination. They included those substances in the Canada-Ontario Agreement to work towards their elimination in the environment.
That agreement was in 2002. It's also related to the commitments Canada has made with the United States on something called the Great Lakes Binational Toxics Strategy, which is also a strategy to use voluntary practices to move towards the elimination of those same 12 substances.
So it's a very popular 12-substance list. It doesn't include many of the compounds Dr. Schwarcz was just talking about and we've been talking about; those weren't known at the time. There are many substances that are on the DSL list right now that don't appear on any of these lists.