I want to address the suggestion that there's something vague or overly broad about the term “toxic”, something that wasn't even argued in the Hydro-Quebec case, certainly not successfully. I'd actually like to refer to comments about CEPA that a colleague of mine has made, Amir Attaran, who's the Canada research chair in law, population health, and global development policy at the University of Ottawa. He says:
The scientific definition of toxicity focuses simply on the substance's ability to cause mortality or morbidity on any species at any concentration, quite apart from its ability to do so in the course of ordinary or foreseeable exposure.
He goes on to say that CEPA's definition of toxic is actually narrowed from this definition by the likelihood that the substance will enter the environment, and it's further narrowed by the likelihood that the substance will then cause harmful effects.
So I think we actually have a very specific definition that is actually quite appropriate for the application of CEPA. I don't think this is a word that is broad or vague in terms of how it's applied in CEPA. It's true, as Mr. Lloyd said earlier, that the definition is not exactly the same as other definitions of toxic in international regimes. I'd be happy to provide the committee with a list of some of those regimes, some of which I mentioned in my remarks.