Environment Committee on June 21st, 2006

[Dr. Joe Schwarcz]

Thank you.

Let me just address the first comment you made because of an interesting statement the interpreter made. You asked...when looking at my biography and the things that I do, because I give a lecture on the chemistry of love, and the interpreter said, “I thought I heard 'love', but it couldn't be that.” Well, it could, because I do do that.

The idea is that the world, of course, functions on chemicals, both natural and synthetic, and I try to emphasize that and explain it, including the fact that there are certain substances that are responsible for our falling in love. One that has been looked at is a chemical called phenylethylamine, which has been found in chocolates.

The press has made a big deal about that--chocolates being the classic gift of lovers on Valentine's Day--because you're saying, here, have some phenylethylamine and fall in love, hopefully, with the donor. It's a charming story but it's really chemical nonsense, because the phenylethylamine never goes through the blood-brain barrier, never goes to the brain. As we know, chocolates go directly to the hips without getting into the brain.

Those kinds of chemical subtleties are important, which addresses your next question about the mixture of chemicals. I don't have any answer to that and I don't think anyone has any answer to that because it's such an unbelievably complex mixture.

We can't possibly measure all the interactions. There certainly are some interactions that we know. We know, for example, that if you have iron and vitamin C together in your diet, the vitamin C enhances the absorption of iron. I mean, these kinds of things have been done. We know, for example, that if you take certain medications, you can't take them with grapefruit juice because it changes the blood chemistry, changes the level.

But these are unique interactions that have been measured. It just isn't possible to globally measure every possible interaction. What we do is we take a look at total exposure, doses, and the underlying chemistry, and based upon the knowledge that we have accumulated, we try to come to some sort of decision. It cannot be certain.

You also asked the question about the ozone layer. Just to give you a little bit of a history to that, the reason that the chlorofluorocarbons were introduced in the 1930s was because in those days refrigeration systems worked on ammonia or hydrogen sulphide. These are terribly toxic substances--terribly. There were all kinds of ammonia leaks. You may remember just a couple of years ago there was still some old ammonia system used in a hockey rink somewhere in Alberta and the ammonia leaked out and a number of people were very severely hurt.

There was a need to find a new chemical to replace the ammonia. The chlorofluorocarbons were great because they were chemically very unreactive. You could put them into a refrigerator and compress them, and when they expanded, they sucked the heat out of the fridge. Everyone thought that this was great.

Nobody at that time could ever have imagined that these chemicals could eventually have an impact on the ozone layer in the stratosphere. And how could they? Why would anyone have ever thought of that? There wasn't any knowledge about ozone destruction. It just wouldn't have come up. You had a problem that you wanted to solve, which was the problem of refrigeration. It was a tremendous breakthrough. It saved thousands of lives by introducing the freons instead of ammonia.

Then eventually we found that there was a problem with the ozone layer. Now we address that problem because we find that not all freons fall into the same category. It depends on exactly how many chlorines, how many fluorines we have in the molecule, and exactly how they are arranged.

Well, now we have freons that don't have an impact on the ozone layer. Will they have an impact on something else that we find out 30 years from now? Nobody really knows, but we have a pretty good base on which to make judgments, because since the 1930s we've accumulated a lot of toxicological information and I would say that the chance is that the freons we're introducing now have a minimal chance of having any type of untoward effect. But it always comes down to making the decision.

I'm not a proponent for industry. I don't care if industry does well or not. I'm an academic--all I'm interested in is the scientific method and good science--but I don't think that industry is bent on unleashing dangerous substances into the environment, because in the end it doesn't do them good either. What does them good is producing good products that the public will appreciate and benefit from with minimal hazard. But you can't always predict that a hazard will be minimal.

It comes down to making decisions, but the decisions should be made by people who have expertise in chemistry, toxicology, and physiology.

[The Chair, Conservative, Bob Mills]

Okay.

Mr. Warawa, go ahead, please.

[Mark Warawa, Conservative, Langley, BC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I found this very interesting.

I am going to be keeping my comments short to give opportunity for further dialogue between the witnesses.

The focus of today's dialogue is measuring success. At the beginning we put together a number of ideas, the topics that we'd like, and a list of witnesses to speak with. Today's measuring of success dealt with three specific issues: the goals of CEPA and how they can be measured, how Canadians can be best informed about the state of the environment, and how monitoring of exposure to toxic substances can be improved.

I do have a question. As you're making your presentation, if you could be dealing with it, I'd find it quite helpful.

There were two issues, private members' bills that were dealing with phthallates and PFOS. I think it was you, Mr. Schwarcz, who made a comment about phthalates.

Is CEPA working? This is the review. We want to make sure that we have an effective environmental act that works. We've heard from other witnesses of frustration regarding the length of time it takes to deal with substances and assess them.

We also heard in the House recently that assessments that were done, for example, on phthalates were completed in 2000 and are therefore six years out of date. Are assessments made in 2000 still relevant, or do they need to be redone?

Doctor, you commented on that. As science progresses, do we need to redo some of these assessments? There are concerns about the PFOS and phthalates. Could you comment on that, where we go, and how we make CEPA effective, better? I'd appreciate hearing from each of you.

[Dr. Joe Schwarcz]

I'm not an expert on CEPA or the speed at which Parliament moves, although I gather it moves pretty slowly, whether it's on a CEPA issue or something else. From what I've read about CEPA, I think it is working as well as any such thing can work.

Yes, science progresses and things get out of date; what may be true today may not be true tomorrow. I encounter this regularly because I do a lot of public talks and I teach a lot of courses; the issue of today, yesterday, and tomorrow comes up all the time. I'll give you one example.

I had a former student at one of my public lectures ask me a question. I was talking about antioxidants and dietary supplements. She said, “You know, I remember having you as a prof at McGill 25 years ago”, which already is a bit unnerving. She said to me, “You know, at that time you were saying that there's really no need to take any kind of vitamin pill, but now you're suggesting that maybe a one-a-day vitamin is good. You see, you scientists--one day you say this, and the next day you say that. How can we trust you?”

Well, I would suggest that 25 years is not exactly one day this, next day that, and if I were saying the same thing today that I said 25 years ago, then I'd be really worried, because it would mean science hasn't progressed.

Certainly the story on phthalates has progressed dramatically. The original phthalate problem came up with something called diethylhexyl phthalate. That turned out to have environmental estrogenic consequences and various toxicity issues. Then they started to look at different molecules, because these phthalates were found in baby toys; that was a real concern because babies put their toys into their mouths.

It then turned out that when you rearranged the molecules somewhat so that you got something we call diisononyl phthalate, this doesn't have the estrogenic effects the same way.

Diisononyl phthalate was not used commonly until three or four years ago, so when you're talking about 2000, that probably was not part of the equation. Yes, I think the regulations tend to have a lag time there, but I don't know if there's any answer to that, because science keeps progressing. Maybe tomorrow we'll find another phthalate that is better, or maybe we'll find there's some problem with the diisononyl phthalate.

I think, especially as far as the public is concerned, it's very tough to get these issues across. I had a lady who called me up; she was really worried about her shower curtain. Why? It was because she had read the label on it, and the label said PVC, polyvinyl chloride. She had read somewhere that polyvinyl chloride is plasticized with phthalates, which is true; this is what makes it soft and pliable.

We used to have records--remember records? We used to put them on this machine; it turned around, and then you put an arm on it and music would play. Anyway, those black things were made of PVC, but they were very hard. The shower curtain is very soft because we add a plasticizer to it.

She was worried because she had heard about plasticizers and the phthalates. I don't know if she thought these were going to jump out of the shower curtain and attack, but she had toxicity concerns. I tried to explain to her that this was not a big issue, but she was going to change to a nylon shower curtain, not recognizing that there's an environmental concern there as well, because nylon production actually releases nitrous oxide into the environment, and nitrous oxide is a pretty potent greenhouse gas.

It's tough to get this kind of information across, but it is always evolving. In the case of nylon, there are new green chemical processes being implemented now that will not release nitrous oxide into the environment, so if I were asked this question in six months, I might have an answer different from the one I'm giving you now. Science is an evolving discipline.

[Mark Warawa, Conservative, Langley, BC]

Mr. Glover, I can tell you really want to say something.

[Paul Glover]

Yes, thank you.

Notwithstanding, I'd like to respond very briefly to some of the other things that we've heard today in a CEPA context with respect to the member's question.

With CEPA today, independent of the time, it is important to understand that CEPA does allow for a process to publish an assessment, receive comments from the public and industry, and then respond back. Again, not defending times one way or the other and the length of time it takes, there are two important points to note. As you're hearing today from the debate--and this is what makes our job so simple--we see this every day. It would not be uncommon for somebody unhappy with an assessment we would do, on either side of the fence, to say, well, here, consider this--here's new evidence, here's a new formulation. There are a lot of times when people are not happy with our decisions, an indication that we should go back and do it again.

Quite frankly, we don't. We take a weight-of-evidence approach. We take a look at the new evidence that's brought forward and we don't redo it. We ask: does this in a material way change the conclusions? That's the method we use. We've heard that with the speakers today. That QSAR, that weight of evidence, published data, that's what we take a look at. We're constantly being bombarded with new information--please consider this, please consider that, reassess. We take a look at that, but we don't always reassess. We consider that from a weight-of-evidence approach and then make a decision about whether it's important to revisit a decision.

The other thing to note is that CEPA, through the existing substances, does allow us, as the science changes, as it evolves, to revisit any substance we've assessed, if we feel scientific information has changed or exposure or uses might have changed that would lead us to come to a different conclusion. We can choose to reassess and we are constantly presented with new information and consider a weight-of-evidence approach.

[The Chair, Conservative, Bob Mills]

Thank you.

Mr. Weinberg.

[Jack Weinberg]

Thank you.

Let me say something briefly about PFOS and phthalates and then draw a more general conclusion from it.

I think the important thing to watch on PFOS and PFOA, and this is certainly now being discussed in the Stockholm Convention, a group that is looking at new chemicals, is the science of what else breaks down to those. There's quite a belief in some evidence that virtually all the perfluorinated compounds will transform in the environment to PFOS and PFOA, but there's a lot of scrambling now to make that connection. The question in the Stockholm Convention is whether just to list PFOS or whether to list the other substances that break down to PFOS in the environment.

With regard to phthalates, this I think is more illustrative of one of the problems that I didn't mention that are important for your consideration in CEPA. The IJC in the early 1990s talked about sunsetting chemicals. This raises what's sometimes called the “sunrise issue”. If you're sunsetting chemicals, then what are you bringing in as alternatives? There are two ways, I believe, of looking at the sunrise issue.

With phthalates, initially there was absolute denial there was any problem with any phthalate, ever, and it took an enormous amount of activity by scientists and public interest against an extremely powerful lobby to demonstrate particularly the neonatal effects and other serious effects. Eventually, certain phthalates were banned for children's toys and other such uses. Although phthalates are not persistent, they are so widely used that people and the environment have large burdens of these, not because they persist, but because they're re-exposed so frequently. You have the same body burdens that you would have with something that's persistent.

The way it works with this and other chemicals is a lot of times many very similar chemicals can achieve the same function. You defend one as long as you can defend it and then you bring out a new one and then it will take 15 years to build a case on that one. On the one hand, the sunrise problem is a difficulty in the way new chemicals are often promoted. You take one that's structurally and chemically very similar to the one you're phasing out and you put it in because you know you've got 15 to 20 years before the case on that one can be made.

Generally, and I think this is something reflected in CEPA and that should be changed, the sunrise problem comes up in a different way, and in a way that's often misused. We heard about dry cleaning--and it's not trichlorethelene, it's perchloroethylene, the four carbon--

[Dr. Joe Schwarcz]

No, it's trichlorethelene. The tetrachloro can be used as well, but perchloroethylene is cheaper.

[Jack Weinberg]

Well, anyway, we can debate. I believe in Canada most dry cleaning is perchloroethylene. It's actually an issue I once worked on quite extensively. I know that in just the last two weeks California came up with a phase-out of perchloroethylene in dry cleaning. There are a number of alternatives. The most interesting are various water-based systems, but the example that was given here was carbon dioxide, which maybe is too expensive for certain uses.

The important thing about carbon dioxide is that in fact Coca-Cola would be very surprised to find out that the manufacture of carbon dioxide is a very dangerous method. A lot of the carbon dioxide that's used commercially is captured as carbon dioxide by-product in distillation and so forth, which delays its release to the environment. It's not actually new manufacture.

In general, there are often burdens placed in the sunrise. That is part of the difficulty in coming up with alternatives. It is often the case that if it's not just like the one that caused the problem--which the industry then likes--and it's a really different solution, then the sunrise problem is raised, with all kinds of reasons suggesting you don't know enough about that one to follow it.

That's reflected in CEPA. Any chemical introduced after 1986, as CEPA now stands, requires a very rigorous process to be approved; for any chemical grandfathered in before 1986, you don't even need any information on it; you can delay it. The effect of that is to inhibit innovation. There is a trend toward green chemistry, but the current situation is that the burden of coming up with a substantially new alternative approach is subject to enormous regulatory hurdles for the purpose of buying more time for what exists.

One correction I would strongly urge is that you put old chemicals and new chemicals on a par. New chemicals should not be given a higher hurdle than old chemicals; in that way, we can encourage green chemistry. We can encourage the development of alternatives that are safer and less hazardous without its becoming something that is unintentionally discouraged.

It would mean you'd need to have good data on all of them. I don't want to lower the burden on the new chemicals, but unless you bring the same burden up for all chemicals, you are discouraging innovation.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Bob Mills]

I would remind members and our guests that we're now going to the second round. We have five minutes for the second round, so I would again ask you to keep it as brief as possible. We still have a number of questioners ahead of us.

Mr. Rodriguez is next.

[Pablo Rodriguez, Liberal, Honoré-Mercier, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

All this is extremely interesting, but sometimes a bit difficult to follow for someone without a background in science or who only joined this committee a short time ago.

I want to come back more specifically to the Canadian Environmental Protection Act. In your opinion what should be the two or three main recommendations that result from this review process?

[Dr. Gail Krantzberg]

Mr. Chairman, I do have five minutes and then unfortunately I have a flight.

The CEPA process is very good in principle. I think the fundamental guts of the documents, in my opinion, are sound. The problem comes with its implementation. It's heavily based on risk assessment and risk communication, risk management, not on risk reduction, and very little evidence of the application of the precautionary principle, on which it's based. So there's a lot of risk communication, and a previous member asked again whether the public is adequately informed.

It's very frustrating to speak to some of the individuals associated with trying to implement actions under CEPA when one hears that a predominant strategy for risk reduction is risk communication. It's not actually reducing exposure. It's not actually implementing a precaution. It's just communicating to people that there are dangers associated with exposure to certain substances.

“Relative risk” is a term that's extremely confusing. One must remember what risk is voluntary and what risk is involuntary. So when we hear about relative risk, we hear, well, what's the risk of exposure to this substance in a product compared to the risk of flying or crossing the street, which are voluntary actions.

The risk of exposure to a chemical in a product is a problematic area for CEPA. Some of the substances we've been talking about today are in products. Mercury is in thermometers. Mercury is highly neuro-toxic. But under CEPA, you can't regulate the mercury in thermometers because it's a product.

Synthetic musks that are in all the stuff that you used today when you got up and took your shower, such as the soaps that have no purpose except cosmetic--some of which are endocrine disrupters, and others may be carcinogens--have no function. Yet we can't regulate them under CEPA because it's in products. So regulation of chemicals in products is something CEPA needs to grapple with.

And there are actual pollution prevention actions and initiatives that demonstrate adherence to the precautionary principle.

Those would be three major areas.

Finally, on the monitoring piece, which the previous member had asked about, monitoring does need to be improved. I know that the health ministry would probably welcome the appropriate level of investment in monitoring and toxicological studies to understand what the threats to human health are and what the trends in body burns are over time.

[The Chair, Conservative, Bob Mills]

Thank you very much. We understand that you do have to leave to catch a flight.

I know, Mr. Glover, you'll be wanting to respond. I saw you nodding there.

Are there other members?

Yes, Mr. Weinberg.

[Jack Weinberg]

I'll be very quick.

One is timelines. The characterization process worked because there were mandatory timelines and resources. These processes go on forever unless there are clear timelines.

The second is building on the precautionary approach--what I think you've been calling “reverse onus”--but I think what's important is that for chemicals that are on the market you need data, and there must be a requirement that the data are provided.

A third is that you need to balance so that new chemicals and old chemicals have the same regulatory burden. It's good to require data for new chemicals, but if you're not also requiring data for old chemicals, that creates a barrier.

Fourth, the failure of CEPA to include chemicals in products has been a severe limitation. There are a lot of examples I could go into if we want to go into discussion, but much of the chemical exposure--certainly in health exposure but also environmental exposure--stems from chemicals in products, and CEPA has very weak powers with regard to chemicals in products.

Finally, on the special recognition of vulnerable populations and vulnerable ecosystems, and with regard to those, the two that should be singled out for special mention are the Great Lakes ecosystem and the far north. Again, on the reasoning for that, I can go into more detail. In the far north, people are being highly exposed to chemicals they get no benefit from whatsoever, just by long-range transport, and the same process is going on in the Great Lakes. Those are having, in both regions, profound health effects.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Bob Mills]

Thank you.

We could go to Mr. Harvey.

Mr. Schwarcz, if you could get your answer in possibly on Mr. Harvey's question, please do.

[Luc Harvey, Conservative, Louis-Hébert, QC]

Mr. Schwarcz, I would like first to talk about the study on dioxine emissions in Italy. I have four children, all girls. Should I be concerned?

[Dr. Joe Schwarcz]

Actually, the Seveso experiment--or the accident that turns out to be an experiment--is interesting in the sense that there was a very large single exposure. It was not a continuous exposure. There's a big difference between chronic toxicity and acute toxicity.

We really didn't see very much acute toxicity in Seveso. There were animals that died. People suffered chloracne; this is the basic symptom of acute dioxin toxicity.

The ongoing study has monitored the health status of these people, and there is certainly no obvious increase of any kind of cancer. We would have seen that. There are debates back and forth about whether or not there's a subtle increase, but there certainly was no major increase.

Again, that was a single exposure. What we worry about is exposure over a long time to small amounts. If you were living near Seveso at that time, the chances are that there are no consequences.

[Luc Harvey, Conservative, Louis-Hébert, QC]

It was not really a question.

There is one thing I would like to know. You have to be able to make a real assessment. When you spoke earlier, you sounded like politicians, because both viewpoints were valid. Some might feel that it is based on a belief rather than on reality. You said more than once that this was a possibility.

Is it possible to undertake DNA or human cell studies with the use of a simulator, particularly to determine the reaction to various chemicals? You spoke about a test to see if moose could fly. I suppose you could drop them from the top of the Peace Tower, but that is probably not the best way to go.

Will simulators be soon developed to determine the effects on the human body? At the moment, speculation is really only hit or miss.

[Dr. Joe Schwarcz]

Today there are numerous in vitro tests, as they're called--laboratory studies quite aside from animal studies based on cell cultures. A lot of the time carcinogens and of course drugs used against cancer are tested on cell lines in the petri dish or on cells implanted into animals.

Our techniques here are really quite sophisticated, but there are also numerous examples showing that when a substance you found to be cytotoxic and showing some form of danger in cell culture has been tested on an animal, it just hasn't done anything--or it does something worse than you found. The animal is far more complex that just single cells.

To answer your question, there are certainly tests available today that are being implemented; many decisions are based upon that. Whether to go ahead with researching a new drug, for example, will depend on what you find initially in cell culture; based on that, you may decide to go ahead or not go ahead, but it's still not 100% indicative of what can happen in a living system.

[Luc Harvey, Conservative, Louis-Hébert, QC]

That is not what I was asking. In medical research, it often takes up to 10 years to observe the side effects of a drug or to see if the medication is truly effective.

What I have in mind is a device similar to the computer-generated models that can be used to determine the resistance of construction materials, for example. Are there any electronic or computer-based simulators that could reproduce cell behaviour, etc.?

[Dr. Joe Schwarcz]

Yes. In fact, this is happening. In chemical research today we very often use a technique known as molecular modeling. You use a computer program. You introduce into it the structure of a molecule and the structure of so-called receptors on cells. These are protein molecules into which chemicals fit in a way that is essentially very much like a key fitting into a lock: it turns the device on or off.

You can manipulate a molecule on the computer screen to see how it would fit into a receptor. You can change the structure of it and analyze how it fits and then do the study on an animal, and you will find that it works.

You are absolutely right; there are molecular modeling techniques today that are going to be used. The cosmetics industry, obviously, is very interested in this because---

[Luc Harvey, Conservative, Louis-Hébert, QC]

How reliable are they?

[Dr. Joe Schwarcz]

I would say that right now these kinds of models are not as good as testing it in a life system, but it's coming. I would suspect that in the next decade we're going to find computer simulations that are going to give a very good analysis of the potential of a specific chemical to do harm or not, especially in the area of environmental hormone connections.

I can't predict the future. I know that it sounds to you like one side says this and one side says that, but that is unfortunately how it is in this business. There's the old story where an arbitrator was listening to two people discuss things, and he listens to one side and he listens to the other side. A third person asks how they can both be right. The answer to that is, “You know what? You're right too.”

That's the way it works. Science rarely gives absolutely conclusive answers. But I think we're going in the right direction, and based on the science available to us today, we're going to be able to make better predictions on what substances to worry about and what ones to worry less about.

I know that you'd like a more concrete answer. Unfortunately, I don't think that a more concrete answer is possible at this point.

The chemical complexity of life is so immense that to try to model it in the laboratory or on a computer is a tremendous challenge. The human body is the most complex machine that exists on the face of the earth. It is far more complicated than any computer, and we're not going to be able to model it on a one-to-one predictive basis.

[The Chair, Conservative, Bob Mills]

Mr. Harvey, we have to move on. Thank you.

I can't resist. I thought Mr. Rodriguez would be wearing his soccer jersey. I saw it, but he failed to wear it..

But Mr. D'Amours and love, I mean, this has got to fit.

Mr. D'Amours.