Evidence of meeting #3 for Environment and Sustainable Development in the 39th Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was review.

On the agenda

MPs speaking

Also speaking

Clerk of the Committee  Mr. Eugene Morawski
Kapil Khatter  Director, Health and Environment, Pollution Watch
Derek Stack  Executive Director, Member of CEN, ENGO Delegate, Great Lakes United
Tim Williams  Committee Researcher

3:35 p.m.

Conservative

The Chair Conservative Bob Mills

I call the meeting to order.

I would like to let you know that this coming Monday the department will be reporting on CPA, as we requested. Next Wednesday the industry will be reporting, and that will be the chemical producers and possibly the Chamber of Commerce--the industry group, anyway, will be reporting.

I suggest that on the Monday after the break we look at the approach--how we're going to use it. I think that was the indication from the last meeting. The following Monday after the break we would look at where we're going to go from there. Our time stays the same right until June--3:30 until 5:30.

Mr. Bigras.

3:35 p.m.

Bloc

Bernard Bigras Bloc Rosemont—La Petite-Patrie, QC

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

I would like to know if steps have been taken for us to meet with representatives of Treasury Board as well as offficials of Natural Resources and Environment Canada. If so, has a calendar been established ?

3:35 p.m.

Conservative

The Chair Conservative Bob Mills

Eugene, what other witnesses will we be hearing?

3:35 p.m.

The Clerk of the Committee Mr. Eugene Morawski

I've contacted....

Are you talking about budget cuts?

3:35 p.m.

Bloc

Bernard Bigras Bloc Rosemont—La Petite-Patrie, QC

Yes.

3:35 p.m.

The Clerk

I got in touch with them and they will appear during the week following Victoria Day. They have told me that it would be better for us to have the two ministers to answer questions of a political nature. Bureaucrats cannot answer questions of a political nature. People from Treasury Board were ready to appear on Monday but we had already invited representatives of the department to talk about the Canadian Environmental Protection Act. They are all ready to appear.

If you only want to meet with the department officials to talk about program cuts, they are quite willing to come and testify but they think it would be better for you to hear the ministers.

3:35 p.m.

Bloc

Bernard Bigras Bloc Rosemont—La Petite-Patrie, QC

I know but I would be quite satisfied to hear the department officials since they have produced a report on the programs. It is that report that we want to review. It has been ready since the Fall and it would have been submitted to Cabinet. We would like them to appear to talk about that report. We do not intend to ask highly political questions but rather questions relating to programs. Which programs have survived ? Which have been cancelled ?

3:35 p.m.

The Clerk

Natural Resources Canada is going to send us a list of of those programs that have been canceled or that have had budget cuts and you will be able to question them about that when they appear.

Should I tell them that you would be satisfied to hear the officials?

3:35 p.m.

Bloc

Bernard Bigras Bloc Rosemont—La Petite-Patrie, QC

Yes, for the time being.

3:35 p.m.

Conservative

The Chair Conservative Bob Mills

Mr. Warawa.

3:35 p.m.

Conservative

Mark Warawa Conservative Langley, BC

I have talked to Minister Ambrose and she is hoping to come in June, approximately a month from now.

3:35 p.m.

Conservative

The Chair Conservative Bob Mills

Does that schedule meet with everybody's approval? We'll just carry on. That gives us our next three meetings. We'll probably know by then when the others will be coming. Mr. Bigras will have more information on exactly when we'll have the senior civil servants.

I'd like to mention before we get started that tomorrow the natural resources committee will be having a visit from Azure Dynamics and their hybrid electric shuttle bus. They're going to be departing from the West Block main entrance at 12:45 tomorrow. They're going to have a 10- or 15-minute ride around. If anybody is interested in joining the natural resources committee at that time to ride on the bus, they will explain how the process works, and so on. That's in conjunction with their convention on renewable energy, which is going on here this week.

So if anybody is interested, the chair of the natural resources committee has extended an invitation to anybody from the environment committee. We can send a note around to everybody to remind them, but that's an invitation we've had extended to us. If you want to go it's there; if you don't want to go, that's fine as well.

I would like to welcome our two guests today. We're going to have their views on CPA and the kinds of areas they'd like us to look at. I think we'll start with Pollution Watch.

Mr. Khatter, please begin.

3:35 p.m.

Dr. Kapil Khatter Director, Health and Environment, Pollution Watch

Thank you, Chair, committee members. Thanks for having me present first at the CEPA review; I take that as a compliment.

My name is Kapil Khatter. I'm a family physician and I'm working with Pollution Watch, which is a joint project of Environmental Defence and the Canadian Environmental Law Association.

CEPA is the backbone of Canadian environmental legislation. The act brings to one place the powers that deal with most of Canada's significant environmental problems: air pollution that causes respiratory illnesses; persistent organic pollutants that are building up in our bodies; greenhouse gases that can lead to climate change; metals like mercury that are contaminating our fish, our wildlife, and ourselves. CEPA gives the federal government the powers to regulate any chemical, air pollutant, or greenhouse gas deemed to be endangering our health or the health of our environment. It offers the government a range of tools to reduce pollution and prevent harm.

I think the main questions before us today are how broken is CEPA and how much work will it take to repair? We would argue that CEPA is broken and in fact that it was never really built to work well. It was a good attempt and it doesn't need to be shelved, but there are some significant changes that need to be made if CEPA is to be protective of our environment and of our health.

For that reason, we believe the committee needs to undertake a comprehensive review, hearing from a diversity of sectors and traveling where needed. The committee should see this review as an inquiry into the state of pollution in Canada, into the state of our health, and an investigation of whether CEPA has done its job promoting clean air, clean water, and clean food.

There is ample evidence to suggest that Canada is failing to meet its environmental challenges, and falling behind internationally. According to a recent study of OECD data, Canada ranked 28th out of 29 OECD countries in emissions, 29th out of 29 in volatile organic compounds, 27th out of 28 in sulphur oxides, 26th out of 28 in nitrogen oxides, etc. According to the Ontario Medical Association, air pollution in Ontario now causes 1,900 premature deaths, 9,800 hospital admissions, and 13,000 emergency room visits, costing that province alone more than $1 billion per year in hospital admissions and worker absenteeism. More than 4 billion kilograms of air pollutant releases were reported by Canadian industrial facilities in 2003, a number that has been on the rise lately. Canada's aggregate greenhouse gas emissions have increased more than any other G-8 country in the past decade, up 19% since 1990, until 2001. A recent comparison of Canadian and U.S. industrial sites in the Great Lakes found that per facility we emit 93% more potentially cancer-causing air pollutants and almost four times the pollutants that can cause reproductive or developmental harm.

The United States has legally enforceable national ambient air quality standards and water quality criteria that are enforceable, whereas Canada does not. They have strong regulations and agreements with companies to phase out some of the most persistent and toxic chemicals, the most problematic chemicals right now, like PFOS flame retardants and stain repellents, while we are still trying to finalize our assessments. The United States has a comprehensive program to test for body chemical levels. We don't even know how much lead our children are being exposed to right now.

We have done a good job under CEPA of some things, of screening the substances in use in Canada to determine which are most persistent and bioaccumulative, in the hopes of doing something about them. But while we've been assessing chemicals, the Europeans have created REACH--the registration, evaluation, and authorization of chemicals--a program that will keep problem chemicals off the market by ensuring that everything in use has adequate safety data. Our present CEPA doesn't even dream of doing that. Since Europe is the largest chemicals market in the world, it is worth asking Canadian companies who are meeting the standard for the European market why they couldn't meet the standard here at home.

CEPA fails to require that problems get fixed once we find them. It lacks mandatory timelines to get the job done, with the result that even once we know that a chemical is a serious risk to the environment or to human health, government processes to regulate the chemical can be slow and ineffective. CEPA doesn't directly apply to the significant number of chemicals in consumer products. Many products, we are now learning, contain unacceptably high levels of toxins, and CEPA puts the burden on the government's shoulders to show that chemicals or products are harmful, rather than on manufacturers to assure us that what they are selling won't harm us.

The act allows us to virtually eliminate the worst actors, to do away with the toxic and persistent chemicals. But virtual elimination as written in the act doesn't work and the process needs to be streamlined. Only one substance has made it onto the virtual elimination list over the life of the act.

We need a CEPA that will eliminate the persistent organic pollutants that are accumulating in our breast milk, a CEPA that will stop air pollution from causing asthma attacks, a CEPA that will prevent metals like mercury from contaminating people and wildlife, and a CEPA that will rescue the Great Lakes and help to rebuild the ecosystems there.

To be fair, what we know about pollution has changed a lot since 1999. We know better now that children are more vulnerable, and have found that lower doses of chemicals are more dangerous than we thought. We know that the economic loss and health care costs due to air pollution are well above the costs of regulating air pollution through CEPA. We know that mercury and persistent chemicals are transporting to the north, contaminating country food and the bodies of our first nations.

It is now time to look at CEPA through these new eyes and to modernize it to meet these challenges. The question is not whether the processes started under CEPA 1999 have been going well, or whether we've done the categorization and assessments we intended to do. The question is has CEPA been successful in keeping us from polluting our country with persistent chemicals, toxic metals, and air particulates? Has CEPA protected large population areas, like the Great Lakes basin, from the risks from environmental contamination? For us, and for our asthmatics, our learning disabled, our cancer victims, the answer is no.

The act can be complex, as the problems are complicated, and we understand you will have many questions. There are many experts out there to help answer these questions—health organizations, industry associations, scientists, first nations groups, medical officers of health, children's advocates, and international experts knowledgeable about other jurisdictions. To do a comprehensive review, as both the legislation and the recent throne speech promises, you will need to hear from these sectors. It is the only way you can learn well what the problems are and what kinds of solutions are needed.

Thank you very much.

3:45 p.m.

Conservative

The Chair Conservative Bob Mills

Thank you very much.

Mr. Silva.

May 10th, 2006 / 3:45 p.m.

Liberal

Mario Silva Liberal Davenport, ON

Thank you very much, and thank you for coming before—

3:45 p.m.

Conservative

The Chair Conservative Bob Mills

I'm sorry. Let's hear from the other witness, and then we will go to questions.

Just to remind everyone, what was agreed on last time was that the first round would be ten minutes to each of the opposition parties, then the government party, and then we go through five minutes. Then we alternate back and forth.

Sorry, Mr. Stack; I just about forgot you. Welcome.

3:45 p.m.

Derek Stack Executive Director, Member of CEN, ENGO Delegate, Great Lakes United

Thank you. I guess I'm second-best.

3:45 p.m.

Conservative

The Chair Conservative Bob Mills

No, don't take it that way.

3:45 p.m.

Executive Director, Member of CEN, ENGO Delegate, Great Lakes United

Derek Stack

Do you prefer to go through both presentations and then have questions?

3:45 p.m.

Conservative

The Chair Conservative Bob Mills

Yes, we'll do that.

3:45 p.m.

Executive Director, Member of CEN, ENGO Delegate, Great Lakes United

Derek Stack

Very good.

I apologize, I did not have enough time to get my presentation translated.

I got the notice and invitation only yesterday. So I have provided it in English.

French-speaking MPs can ask their questions in French but I will answer in English.

Time today, unfortunately, is not sufficient for me to provide a detailed analysis of CEPA's strengths and weaknesses, but I hope a cursory review of some of the long-standing issues that the environmental community has had with the act will provide context to committee members who might otherwise be discouraged from undertaking a comprehensive and substantive review.

It is the broadly held view of Canada's environmental community, supported by pollution data, internal assessments at Environment Canada, and our nation's abysmal environmental performance ranking among OECD members, as Kapil recently shared with you, that implementation of CEPA is failing in key areas and is in need of a substantive, comprehensive review if it's to serve its purpose to protect the environment and human health. Pollution is up almost across the board in this country.

The following five key areas suggest the committee would be ill-advised to relegate the current review to a simple bureaucratic tinkering of the act's mechanics. A more substantive review is needed.

First of all, pollution prevention is defined in the act as the “use of processes, practices, materials, products, substances or energy that avoid or minimize the creation of pollutants and waste and reduce the overall risk to the environment or human health.” Pollution prevention is legally Canada's priority approach to environmental protection.

Unfortunately, application of the act to date has done little to avoid or minimize the creation of pollutants in favour of end-of-pipe controls to capture pollutants for storage, incineration, transfer, or landfill. Although the government has requested flexible rather than prescriptive pollution prevention plans for major industries, we are aware of only five plants that have plans in place, and none that has implemented its pollution prevention plan. In the absence of honest efforts to reduce the production of toxic pollutants, air and water transfers are on the rise based on data made available through the NPRI, the National Pollutant Release Inventory.

Monitoring and enforcement direction is needed to realize effective pollution prevention plans that will foster the reduced use and production of toxic substances rather than transferring them from one medium to another. Industrial engineering resulting from the application of pollution prevention plans will enhance Canada's long-term competitiveness and productivity in the continental context.

On the issue of international agreements, I'd like to point out that CEPA has the potential to significantly reduce the use and release of toxic substances if the progressive principles in the act are implemented. As Canada moves to reassert its international presence, it is important to understand where CEPA comes from and how the act relates to the global policy framework for regulating toxic substances generally.

Important concepts such as virtual elimination and the precautionary principle that eventually found their way into CEPA's lexicon originated, in the continental context, in large part in the Canada-U.S. Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement as part of a cooperative binational effort to protect the world's largest freshwater ecosystem. Despite having roots in the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement, CEPA has failed to protect the Great Lakes from toxic emissions of all sorts across the Great Lakes basin.

Beyond the North American context, Canada has ratified important global agreements such as the Basel Convention on the Control of Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes and Their Disposal, the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants, and the Rotterdam Convention on Prior Informed Consent Procedure for Certain Hazardous Chemicals and Pesticides in International Trade.

CEPA should include provisions for meeting international commitments for protecting the Great Lakes--i.e., the shared stewardship of more than 20% of the globe's accessible surface water--and other international agreements intended to regulate the trade and movement of hazardous substances. To date, it simply is not supporting those initiatives.

On the issue of toxics management, current management approaches for toxic substances have proven time-consuming and ineffective, and the act's focus on toxic substance use, manufacture, and release means the toxic substances contained in consumer products are ignored. Landfilling of light switches containing mercury, for example, would not be addressed. Other jurisdictions, such as Boston, have successfully implemented simplified approaches that are more comprehensive in reducing toxic emissions.

While CEPA prescribes timelines for categorization of substances, the act does not outline a timeframe for completion of the assessment nor what is considered adequate data to determine toxicity. Furthermore, the use of section 71, which requires data from industries, has not been fully utilized to assist the government's efforts in making a determination of toxicity. The government's voluntary approach to data collection and industries' confidentiality concerns have handicapped the government's ability to effectively determine toxicity.

This ambiguity critically undermines the development of management tools for toxic substances. We are unaware of any plan of action developed by Environment Canada and Health Canada to screen level risk assessments on substances found to meet criteria for categorization.

CEPA should capture consumer products and be amended to enhance the burden of proof on industry to demonstrate that commercial products are safe for use and disposal. It would seem that, as it stands, the bureaucracy is not equipped or is ill-equipped to do the full categorization on its own.

On the issue of the precautionary principle, once a substance has been declared toxic, it usually takes another three years to have a risk management strategy instrument in place. Further, waiver and time extensions may be granted. Timelines for development of management strategies are far too long to support a precautionary and preventative approach to environmental stewardship within CEPA.

Enforcement of the act has been its biggest failure. For years the Office of Pollution Prevention relied on voluntary programs to foster action, with the explicit commitment to use the act's regulatory backstop as needed. Despite the broad and accepted failure of those voluntary programs.... I'm thinking here of such programs as the accelerated reduction and elimination of toxics, known as ARET, some years ago; bilateral environmental performance agreements with industry; and the past environmental leaders program. Those programs have all failed and yet no appetite exists for regulation. CEPA implementation must include regulatory intervention where voluntary initiatives are known to have failed.

We understand that Environment Canada's current capacity to oversee a review is compromised by recent structural changes. However, a relatively small redirection of resources would allow the department to draw on its existing expertise to realize the review necessary to protect human health and the environment.

Members of CEN Toxics Caucus have been tracking this file and have been formally consulting with decision-makers over several years in the evolution of the domestic substances list, the priority substances list, the NPRI, and on several key delegations to international treaties, such as the POPs Treaty, the Basel Convention, and the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement. I encourage the committee to use the CEN in its pursuit of expert testimony of a more substantive nature.

And I invite your questions.

3:50 p.m.

Conservative

The Chair Conservative Bob Mills

Thank you very much, gentlemen.

Mr. Silva.

3:50 p.m.

Liberal

Mario Silva Liberal Davenport, ON

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I'll try to be brief so that I can split my time with my other colleagues.

First of all, I want to thank you for coming here on such very short notice.

Part of what we want to do with the exercise today is try to assess the timeframe for us as well in terms of looking at this very important and critical piece of legislation. CEPA really is the overarching environmental legislation we have for this country. We had some very brief discussion last time that maybe we could get this done in about two, three months. Given its regulatory nature and given what we want to do in terms of timetables and the effectiveness of the legislation, and given the fact that it is so comprehensive and deals with so many different issues, is it really realistic to have this thing done in basically two or three months? And is it really not doing justice to this particular piece of legislation? That's a question for both of you.

To Dr. Khatter, you mentioned the fact that it has been a failure. Which section do you believe has been a failure? Are we going to review every single piece of the legislation, or is there a specific section or two that you think we should be focusing on as a committee?

3:50 p.m.

Director, Health and Environment, Pollution Watch

Dr. Kapil Khatter

To answer your first question, it's hard for us to imagine that you're going to be able to get through this very quickly, in the next month or two, although I don't have that much experience with how fast and efficient a committee can be.

The other part of it for us is that CEPA is really a backbone legislation, a piece that works in itself. There is a specific toxic substances section, part 5, but the other parts of CEPA are built onto that section. I think it would be difficult to find a way to divide CEPA up into, for instance, two parts and be able to deal with them separately.

My sense of it--and I'm a family physician rather than a legal expert--is that it's one piece of legislation that kind of needs to be dealt with in terms of the assessment and the management of substances.

3:55 p.m.

Executive Director, Member of CEN, ENGO Delegate, Great Lakes United

Derek Stack

Do you want me to take that on?