Mr. Chairman, I'd like to state that it's unfair to have to follow such an entertaining person.
Thank you, Chairman and committee members, for this opportunity to testify before you on CEPA. I'll only cover two basic topics. I want to begin my remarks with reference to risk and precaution, and then talk about the Great Lakes perspective.
Robert Constanza said:
[d]efining sustainability is actually quite easy: a sustainable system is one that survives for some specified (non infinite) time. The problem is that one knows one has a sustainable system only after the fact. Thus, what usually pass for definitions of sustainability are actually predictions of what set of conditions will actually lead to a sustainable system.
Environmental regulations purportedly are designed to ensure that a set of conditions exist to enable ecosystems to be sustainable and protective of public well-being. We use science to predict the outcome of our perturbations on biological, physical, or chemical integrity of the systems, and then regulate on that basis.
The science regarding chemical perturbations has typically been incorporated into risk assessment methodologies to predict outcomes of substances in various environmental media, particularly cancer outcomes. Risk assessment, however, is undependable in protecting living things because it asks whether the possibility of or the risk of damage to the environment and public health is sufficiently large to warrant government intervention.
Risk assessment and risk characterization ask, “How resilient is the environment? How much harm can we bear?” The question of whether harm is sufficiently large to regulate is a matter of ethics, not a matter of science, so portraying risk assessment as a scientific method is not entirely accurate.
For CEPA, the outcome of risk assessment is to manage risk, often by communicating risk rather than acting on the precautionary principle and preventing risk. Further, the inherent complexities and limitations of evaluating chemicals in isolation from one another, in addition to the scientific uncertainty of proving causal relationships between specific chemicals and corresponding health effects, results in a risk management approach that is again undependable.
I'll expand on an alternative or at least complementary approach, that being the precautionary principle as it relates to persistent toxic substances. You've heard of Dr. Schindler, whose recent letter to the Prime Minister makes the case for a precautionary approach. Further, the IJC, the International Joint Commission, in the 1990s, asserted that persistent toxic substances cannot be safely regulated. These chemicals cause disease, death, behavioural abnormalities, cancer, genetic mutations, physiological or reproductive malfunctions, and physical deformities in organisms or offspring, or they can become poisonous after concentrating in the food chain. So, members, I emphasize that cancer is not the only end point of concern, and that cancer is also an end point that takes decades to emerge and its etiology much longer to determine. What does risk assessment do about these other types of health outcomes? Not very much.
The precautionary principle, as defined by the federal government in the CEPA, is
[a]n internationally recognized principle for action that states where there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, scientific uncertainty shall not be used to postpone cost-effective measures to prevent environmental degradation.
Risk assessment is a dominant environmental decision-making tool in an industrial model of the world. The model favours global economic competitiveness. While this may very well be a defensible model, it makes it plain that risk assessment is therefore not the appropriate tool to protect ecological integrity and public health. It may be useful for predicting cancer, but it's a clumsy, blunt instrument for predicting and circumventing sub-lethal, insidious health effects, or for regulating emerging technologies and processes that also have large spatial and temporal significance.
Finally, most risk assessment and risk management methodologies consider the greater the persistence of a chemical, the greater its potential risk to environment and human health. CEPA needs to consider that some pollutants arise from substances that are in use on a continual basis, like high-production-volume chemicals such as personal care products and pharmaceuticals. These are continually reintroduced into the environment and, as a consequence, the supply continues to be replenished. Therefore, the persistence is virtual, and the notion of persistence needs to be revisited in the act.
My first recommendation to the committee, for Parliament, is for CEPA to actively apply the precautionary principle, critically address the shortcomings of risk assessment and risk management, and learn from other jurisdictions that have taken action to ban substances in the face of uncertainty. A simple example is the banning of certain polybrominated fire retardants by the EU.
Next, I raise the importance of a functional CEPA to the Canada–Ontario Agreement Respecting the Great Lakes Basin Ecosystem and the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement.
I remind the members that the Canada–Ontario agreement, or COA, is a federal–provincial agreement aimed at enhancing and protecting the Great Lakes basin ecosystem. The agreement outlines how the two governments will cooperate and coordinate efforts regarding Great Lakes basin management. COA was first signed in 1971, in anticipation of the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement, and there have been seven COAs to present.
Eight federal departments and three provincial ministries signed the most recent COA in 2002, and it expires in 2007. Canada has not signalled to Ontario its decision to extend the agreement, revise the agreement, or renegotiate the agreement. This is a tremendous cause for concern, because within COA is a “harmful pollutants” annex with the goal, stated by the governments of Canada and Ontario, to virtually eliminate harmful pollutants in the Great Lakes. This job has not been done. Chemicals and commerce still threaten the health and integrity of the Great Lakes regime.
The principles of the 2002 COA reflect contemporary agreements and research on environment protection and management that have not been overtly considered. My submission contains those principles. I just want to mention a few: pollution reduction; control at the source; the precautionary principle; prevention; to anticipate and prevent, it being much more economical and cost-effective than to remediate; and public and stakeholder participation.
Will CEPA successfully invoke these principles in light of the current reliance on risk assessment and risk communication? Will COA continue and embody and embolden CEPA? We in the Great Lakes region depend on you to help make this happen.
Also current in the Great Lakes regime is the ongoing government review of the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement. During this review, many have called out the increasing importance to examine current science, policy, and emerging concepts in ecosystem protection and the protection of human health. CEPA is highly relevant to this review, as it can set Canada's tone for mitigating chemical insults, for which the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement contains many commitments.
The Great Lakes are situated within a huge watershed and have a large surface area and retention times of years to nearly centuries. The Great Lakes are exquisitely sensitive to persistent toxic substances. I reaffirm a continuing call for special provisions in CEPA to accelerate aggressive action on chemical pollutants in the Great Lakes region, home to one-third of Canadians. The area generates two-thirds of Canada's manufacturing output, for which natural resource protection is essential.
We in the Great Lakes region ask you to urge our government to take this review seriously; to revise or rewrite the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement to invoke strong, CEPA-based Great Lakes provisions for chemical management; and to push our U.S. colleagues to step up their commitments and implement their Great Lakes regional collaboration. We ask that this be done by providing the minister with the power to designate a region as a significant area, given that the region is particularly environmentally vulnerable to the effects of toxic substances and/or that it generates a particularly large volume of toxic substances into the environment. Following the designation of the Great Lakes region as a significant area, we ask you to urge that the minister be given powers to establish monitoring and research priorities for particular substances and to identify the priorities to move toward the virtual elimination of the inputs of these priority substances.
To summarize, I recommend that the precautionary principle of CEPA not only be upheld but applied vigorously and that risk assessment be tempered by that principle; and that special provisions within CEPA are included to provide the minister power to designate the Great Lakes a significant area, with the purpose of accelerating aggressive action to curb chemical insults in the region and to negotiate stronger Great Lakes commitments with Ontario and the United States.
Thank you.