Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman, and thank you, members of the committee, for offering the opportunity to the Industry Coordinating Group for CEPA to present some further ideas around possibilities under CEPA.
As I mentioned before, the Industry Coordinating Group for CEPA is a network of about 24 associations involved in fairly detailed discussions with Environment Canada and Health Canada on matters concerning new and existing substances. We don't cover the full gamut of industry, but we have a pretty significant cross-section of membership.
The CEPA ICG has also been participating in international discussions with Environment Canada and Health Canada that have been going on for a number of years. This has resulted in both formal and informal arrangements for the sharing of assessment data among regulators to streamline the process for the notification and assessment of new substances.
There have been some fairly significant movements in this area. Bilateral arrangements have been established with both the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Australian authority, NICNAS. We started off with an arrangement, called the Four Corners Agreement, that allowed for the extensive sharing of data between Environment Canada, Health Canada, and the U.S. EPA. It worked reasonably well, except that, as we mentioned on Tuesday, there have been confidentiality problems for the U.S. EPA sharing it with Canada.
There's been a fairly active program with the Australian authority; we've shared assessments. When Canada does an assessment, a company that wants to introduce the same substance into Australia can send the Australian authority the dossier that Environment Canada has worked up. They get quite a quick movement through the Australian scheme when that happens, and a lower fee for the notification process as well. So there's a fairly significant value in this process.
We've learned a lot from the OECD new chemicals task force. Data sharing between these government authorities has resulted in each authority learning more about each other's system, and the way they assess. It's advanced the area of assessment quite substantially.
There is a shortcoming, though, in the current CEPA, which Gordon alluded to, that is preventing Canada from optimizing the benefits from these relationships. As I'll explain, we should learn from what Australia has done and modernize CEPA to allow recognition of foreign assessments. Whenever a new chemical is introduced for commercialization globally, there's a succession of similar but not identical notifications that occur in the various countries where the developer of that substance wishes to commercialize it.
Each country has its own somewhat unique set of notification requirements intended to determine if this new substance will be safe for its intended uses. Gordon mentioned there's a fair similarity, because a lot of countries under the OECD umbrella have notification schemes and they've tended to get fairly close together on the requirements for submitting a new substance notification. But the U.S. is quite different, and there are other differences.
Although a detailed comparison of assessments has been conducted on the same substances, a review of assessments was done by a number of OECD countries to learn how far apart they might be on the judgments they would have taken unilaterally on the same substances under different circumstances.They concluded that even though they might start with slightly different dossiers and have slightly different approaches, the results are usually quite comparable.
A fair degree of confidence was developed in this process, that even though they're looking at substances a little differently, the results are very similar. So the concept of looking at substances and the judgment being relatively equivalent seems to be fairly good.
This work is continuing under the OECD new chemicals task force and has moved on to a work-sharing pilot for prospective substances, new substances that are just entering the market. It's called the parallel process. It's evaluating live notifications to determine the potential to expedite conclusions that can be accepted by multiple countries. The objective of these exercises is a mutual acceptance of notifications, a step toward mutual recognition arrangements.
During the multi-stakeholder consultations on the new substances notification regulations held from 1999 to 2000, there was general support among the multi-stakeholders for the continuation of the active role that Environment Canada and Health Canada have been playing internationally, particularly in the OECD program.
One of the recommendations of that consultation was that the two departments should formalize their strategy for their future international role, to ensure that there will be continuing support. The result was the publishing of a document, Finding Common Ground, that was published by Environment Canada. It's also on their website, and there is an excerpt from it that I've included in the appendix. It's a very ambitious but very hopeful document that I think certainly has a good degree of value. Canada has been seen as leading in this area in the OECD, as a representative for sharing data and moving forward efficiencies in this notification process.
Another aspect of this international activity has been the establishment of formal bilateral arrangements that I've mentioned for sharing data related to the assessment of new substances, in a way that preserves confidentiality claims.
The two arrangements that are the most notable are with the EPA and with NICNAS in Australia. Through the dialogue with the Australian authority, we became aware that they had anticipated the value of being able to recognize another country's assessment program as having credibility equivalent to their own program. This came out of the data-sharing back and forth. They realized this was a workable process and they wanted to capitalize on it. NICNAS refers to these as approved foreign schemes. They have included sections in their legislation that define their ability to obtain maximum value from the assessment work of another country, without compromising their sovereignty. The government still has the ability to decide whether or not to accept it, but if they want to accept it, then it allows for expediting this judgment. One of the key sections I've included in appendix 2.
So the recommendations of the industry coordinating group for CEPA are that the opportunity of the current CEPA review should be utilized to add wording to the next revision that would allow Environment Canada and Health Canada to benefit from those assessments conducted by other countries, to the degree that the departments believe appropriate, up to and including full acceptance. The recognition of the credibility or equivalence of another government's assessment capabilities will be extremely helpful in improving efficiency of the notification of new substances, without diminishing Canada's sovereignty under this process.
That's what the CEPA ICG would promote. The idea is that it would be completely in the government's hands as to whether they wanted to recognize a country as such. It would be based on experience of reviewing their assessments and really coming to the conclusion that another country's judgment is relatively equivalent to what we have done here in Canada.
Thank you very much for your attention.