I'm Joel Weiner I'm the senior adviser in the Canadian section of the International Joint Commission. With me is my colleague Mr. Jim Houston, our environmental adviser. We've been asked to come and explain the connection between the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement, about which you heard a little bit from Derek, and virtual elimination.
As you have already heard from Derek, the IJC has had something to do with this. We are not involved at all in the implementation of CEPA; we're not in a position to comment on it. Frankly we're limited to making comments about what the commission has pronounced on, over the years that the water quality agreement has been in effect. The current commission has not dealt with either CEPA or virtual elimination. So we have nothing to report to you about what the current commission's views are.
What we can tell you is how the commission contributed over the years to the evolution of the concept of virtual elimination and perhaps shed some light on how it came to be included in the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement, and then how it made its appearance into the Canadian Environmental Protection Act.
If that satisfies the chair and the members of the committee, I will continue. I had planned to spend a bit of my remarks telling you a little about the IJC, which is on the verge of celebrating its centennial, since it was established by the Boundary Waters Treaty Act of 1909 between Canada and the United States. However, in the interest of time I will not do that.
Mr. Chair, I brought copies of our annual report for 2005 with me.
They are in English and in French, and I can table them before this committee, if you wish.
I think it's important to say that, in a nutshell, article IX, one of the provisions of the Boundary Waters Treaty, gives to the parties, the governments of Canada and the United States, the ability to refer to the commission any matters they choose with respect to transboundary environmental issues. Our primary mandate is to try to resolve disputes where the parties think we would be helpful--to avoid them in the first place, to do research and ongoing investigations, and to bring matters to the attention of the parties.
When the first water quality agreement was put into effect in 1972, it was largely as a result of recommendations that the commission itself had made when earlier it had received a substantial reference from the governments to look into the question of pollution in the Great Lakes. Among the things we recommended was that the parties needed to establish an agreement between themselves that focused exclusively on the question of water quality in the Great Lakes Basin.
The 1972 agreement does talk about toxic substances, but it doesn't talk in a lot of detail about persistent toxic substances. That probably reflects the state of knowledge at that time.
What's interesting to note is that between 1972 and 1978, when the new Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement took effect, the commission was publishing annual reports. The 1978 agreement mandated us to produce biennial progress reports, but up until that point we were obliged to produce annual progress reports.
When you look back at those early reports of ours, you'll find that we did have an awful lot to say about the impact of persistent toxic substances and the need to control them. Many people, and I think maybe Derek to a certain point has alluded to this, go so far as to credit the work of the IJC and its network of advisory boards for giving rise to the concept of virtual elimination. My colleague Jim and I have done a search through our records, and we actually haven't found a case where we used it in one of our documents, although we haven't had a chance to do an exhaustive search. But we are told by government officials who were behind the closed doors during the negotiations between Canada and the United States, leading up to the 1978 agreement, that the work of the commission, and particularly of its advisory boards, was very much on their minds. They were familiar with the work. In fact, many of those government members were members of our various advisory boards.
So I think the case can be made that the advice from earlier commissions between 1972 and 1978--that governments on both sides of the transboundary needed to get on with the job of addressing persistent toxic substances and their discharge into the Great Lakes Basin ecosystem--was something that was increasingly important. The commission was, I guess in those days, pleased to see that when the 1978 agreement came into effect, one of its very specific objectives was to achieve virtual elimination.
Going back to our third annual report, in 1974, we started commenting as early as then on the need for the two governments to start addressing the question of persistent toxic substances. In 1975, for example, we said that toxic substances, including heavy metals and persistent organic contaminants, may well have been the most serious and long-term problem faced by governments in ensuring the future beneficial uses of the Great Lakes.
If you will permit me, I will quote directly from that fourth report. This is what we said about toxic substances then: “They pose threats to water quality, the fishery, human health and ecology in general. Too little is known about these substances....Control and monitoring programs are imperative.” We went on to recommend that effective control laws be enacted and implemented to the fullest extent possible in both countries as quickly as possible. We returned to that theme in each of our ensuing reports.
Suffice it to say that the concept of virtual elimination appears to have taken shape, in the negotiations that led to the 1978 water quality agreement, largely, or at least in part, because of the things we had said over the years.
The 1978 agreement is still in effect today. It was amended by protocol in 1987, which basically means that new provisions were added to it. Very little, if anything, was struck from the 1978 agreement.
I might point out to members that the 1978 agreement is currently undergoing a substantial review by the parties, by the two governments. This review began in April of this year. The 1978 agreement, which as I said was amended by protocol in 1987, has not been revised at all since then. The two governments, together with the provinces and the states and an incredible number of stakeholders through the Great Lakes Basin, have embarked upon a fairly comprehensive review of the agreement.
In fact, today, later this morning, the commission will be transmitting to the two federal governments, to the Secretary of State in the United States and to the Minister of Foreign Affairs in Canada, the commission's own independent advice about what the parties, we think, should be doing about the agreement. My understanding is that members of the committee will be receiving copies of our report in the next day or so, and you'll probably be reading about it in the press tomorrow morning.
In fact, this morning, as we're meeting here, there is a large assembly in Toronto. The way the parties have organized the review was that they established a large number of working groups looking at the various annexes and articles of the current agreement, and those working groups are spending the next two days in Toronto. These are binational working groups, Americans and Canadians working side by side, government officials and many of the environmental organizations, and they are presenting in one big assembly the considered output of their work.
These are early stages of the agreement's review, but I think over the next year you'll be hearing a fair bit about that.
Sir, am I using up too much time?