I won't speak to the resources question, other than to state the obvious: one can always do more with more resources. Whether there are adequate resources is a question for parliamentarians to determine.
I would like to speak to the issue of the mandatory versus the enabling nature of the statute and to the nature of the results that have been achieved to date. Regarding the results, I think you need to look at where we are under CEPA. First, you also need to think back to slide five. CEPA is not the only statute that addresses VOC emissions in Canada. Most importantly, they're addressed by provincial regulations at the moment. So it's difficult to disaggregate the precise impact of one statute on environmental conditions in a country.
Second, if you look specifically at what's been achieved, you're taking a snapshot in time. One of the issues we would like to be able to come back and speak to the committee about is the mandatory area of the act in part five, where the Government of Canada is required to categorize every substance on the domestic substances list. The list was established in 1988 by CEPA as a way of defining what a new substance is. A new substance is everything that's not on the domestic substances list. The list includes every substance that was used over a certain threshold in commercial activities in the 1980s, and we've essentially assessed everything since then under the new substances regime.
Now, every country in the world is wrestling with the issue of how to address this legacy of substances that we didn't assess before the new substances regime was put in place. We are the only country in the world with a law that requires us to categorize every single one of those substances, and we will have done so by this fall.
The question then is what should we do with that information? We will have met the mandate. The important question I suggest this committee may want to think about is what is the significance of having that baseline of information this fall that no other country in the world will have? The law required us to collect that information and now enables us to do something with it. What we do with it and what strategies we develop to use that information to help us leapfrog from where we are now to where we may want to go, I think, is an important consideration for the committee.
That's why I'm saying that if you take a snapshot now, you may not look at the whole context of the information that is about to come and at what we might be able to do with that information.