Thanks again for the opportunity to present at committee.
Hugh Benevides couldn't make it, unfortunately, so I'll be presenting. Aaron, who is now the policy director at Environmental Defence, will be here for questions as well.
You should have with you three unstapled handouts in French and English of PollutionWatch slides. It's a complicated topic, trying to get through all the timelines, but we can't go too fast for the translators.
PollutionWatch has presented before and we've spoken before about timelines and about how there are stages of the assessment and management process that have no timelines at all. We feel that's a problem. There are stages of the assessment and management process where there are timelines, but often they are too lax. The categorization of the domestic substances list has shown us clearly that deadlines are an effective way of ensuring that substances are dealt with in a timely way. The deadline has allowed us to make the assessment of substances a priority and to make sure that we give them adequate attention and resources. We feel those kinds of timelines are important for the rest of the process as it moves forward.
Perhaps I can get you to turn to page 1. The first slide is our attempt at showing how the process works now, as written in the act. If you look in the first box, there are a lot of section numbers. Section 70 is industry's mandatory reporting of any data they find about a substance they're using or manufacturing that says it's toxic. Section 74 is the screening assessments of the domestic substance list. Section 75 is the review of any decision in another jurisdiction where a substance is deemed to be toxic and needs to be restricted. Subsection 76.(3) is where an individual citizen can nominate a substance to be assessed or put on the priority substances list.
You can see, for the first two stages, in general, there aren't any timelines. The caveat to that is if a substance, through one of these channels, is put on the priority substances list for full risk assessment. There is actually a timeline of five years, though that's extendable for another two years, so it's a very loose timeline of up to seven years.
Going through it, basically, there's no timeline to the first step, which is the publication of a proposed decision based on the assessment. There's no timeline, then, to the publication of the final decision. From that point, there are timelines. There is a period of two years before the publication in subsection 91.(1) of a proposed instrument or regulation, and then eighteen months to finalize that proposed regulation or instrument and publish it.
From that point, there are no legislative timelines in terms of implementation of the act. We talked, as well, in the past about cabinet involvement, and from subsection 77.(6) is the point where there is a recommendation to cabinet for an order in council to put it on schedule 1, and there is a further cabinet trip later on in order to approve the regulation.
I'm going to skip over the domestic substance list and talk about the non-domestic substances first, just because we feel that substances that have been categorized through this categorization screening process are a bit of a special case because there are a whole lot of substances all at once that need to be dealt with.
Perhaps I could get you to turn to page 2, which is our proposal for timelines for substances in general, for good timelines for the assessment and management of substances, leaving aside this chunk of substances that we need to deal with in terms of the domestic substances list. That would be section 70, section 75, subsection 76.(3), anything that's put on the priority substances list for those reasons.
What we've proposed is that the government have six months to do the screen risk assessment and come up with a proposed decision as to whether that substance is toxic and whether we need to move ahead in terms of regulating it, and that there be six months from that point to finalize that decision. That being said, there are all those times when we need more data and there needs to be a bit of an extension, so putting the substance on the priority substances list would allow a two-year extension to the process. What we're proposing is a two-year extension, as opposed to the five years, plus two years that it is now, and the possibility that it could take seven more years before a substance has a decision based on the assessment.
From that point, we feel the timelines that exist right now are too long. The first publication of a proposed instrument or regulation, as opposed to being two years, should be six months, and then another six months to finalize that instrument or regulation after the common period. Then we feel there needs to be a legislative timeline for ensuring that once a regulation or an instrument has been decided upon, it is implemented.
We've suggested eighteen months would be a reasonable time limit, a good maximum for us, acknowledging that different instruments in regulations will have different needs in terms of their timelines.
Finally, I'd like to turn to slide three. We've categorized the domestic substance list, and it's left us with approximately 4,000 substances to assess and potentially manage. Some of these, though, as Mr. Soule spoke about, will not be considered in use. They will automatically be set aside and not need to be assessed. There's also another category of substances we've left out that we don't think apply to this flow chart. Those are the substances that are persistent and bio-accumulative and inherently toxic--the PBITs, as we call them, which we think have the highest potential to cause problems, if not now then surely in the future. Our position is that those substances should be immediately scheduled as toxic and virtually eliminated, because the act says that anything that is a PBIT, that is CEPA-toxic, needs to be virtually eliminated.
Slide three: instead of the three-and-a-half-year total timeframe for regular substances, we feel there should be a little bit of slack given in terms of both the assessment and the development of a regulation and instrument. We recognize there are a lot of substances to deal with, and we'll need resources to deal with all these substances. The other thing in terms of this slide, in terms of this five-year timeline, the two-year assessment and five years in total, is we're really thinking of this in terms of the highest priority of substances out of the DSL. Out of that 4,000 we would say this would be a good timeline for about 600. Health Canada has already said they have about 100 they think are the highest-priority health substances. We would expect Environment Canada would be able to deal with 500 of their persistent or bio-accumulative substances within this timeframe.
The process is the same as I went over before for the non-domestic substance list except that instead of a six-month timeline for the screening assessments, we think, given the resources, the government should be able to deal with the first batch of these substances in eighteen months, and then take six months to finalize the publication of the decision. Again, for those rare cases where they feel the need to get data--and remember there's been seven years to collect data already--they can use the PSL, the priority substance list, as an extension. Likewise in terms of proposing a regulation or instrument, we feel having a year's extension for the domestic substance list would make sense.
That's the first 600. We expect there would be another batch or two of 600 besides the substances that are put aside. We expect and hope the government will be able to assess the first 600 in two years and then assess another 600 in two years and another 600 in two years, until we finish.
That's it. We hope this presentation was helpful. I know the timeline is complicated and there are two different streams--the domestic substance list and the non-domestic substance list.
We're happy to answer questions. Thanks.