Thank you.
The virtual agreement makes its appearance in the 1978 agreement. It starts off right at the very beginning, at article II, which lays out the purposes of the agreement. As Derek pointed out, the two federal governments declare that it's their policy to prohibit the discharge of toxic substances in toxic amounts and to virtually eliminate the discharge of any or all persistent toxic substances.
The concept is referred to as well in article VI. There's a special annex in the agreement that deals with persistent toxic substances and also sets out the principles by which governments are to establish programs to deal with persistent toxic substances.
The very first principle I'm going to quote is: “The intent of programs specified in this Annex is to virtually eliminate the input of persistent toxic substances in order to protect human health and to ensure the continued health and productivity of living aquatic resources and human use thereof”.
Once virtual elimination came into effect, we looked at it a number of times over the years, and--just basically to cut to the chase--we struck a task force, a task force that spent two years looking at how you could effectively implement the concept of virtual elimination. We produced a report in two volumes, called A Strategy for Virtual Elimination of Persistent Toxic Substances. Once again, it's my pleasure to table before the committee copies of this report in both English and French.
Other witnesses have talked about the economic instruments that could be used to encourage the utilization of the virtual elimination concept. We produced a report on how in fact you could use economic instruments. We produced a report on how bio-indicators could be used to measure the success for virtually eliminating persistent toxic substances. We've had a whole string of reports. We, or at least previous commissions, have been commenting on this.
It is from that perspective that the commission expressed some degree of satisfaction when it saw two developments that basically emanated from all this work. One was the establishment in the late 1990s of the binational toxic strategy, where the two governments basically established programs to aggressively deal with persistent toxic substances. The other one was the manifestation earlier, in CEPA, of the concept of virtual elimination.
Hopefully that overview gives you some appreciation for the historical development of the concept and the role that earlier commissions played in it.
Thank you.