Thank you for the opportunity to speak again.
It's a complicated bill, so I'll try to move through it quickly. The committee has already heard about the health effects of these three phthalates; they are developmental and reproductive toxins, according to the national toxicology program. We've also heard that it's important that we look at these chemicals together as a class, particularly because BBP and DBP share a breakdown product that itself is toxic. The goal we should have here is to do what we can, given the strength of the scientific evidence, to reduce exposures wherever we can.
I'll go through the bill by product class rather than by chemical class.
In terms of children's products, that aspect of the bill, all three chemicals need to be restricted. The DEHP part is a no-brainer. It's a reproductive and developmental toxin. It's been restricted in children's toys in the European Union since 1999, and now in child care articles as well, like baby-bottle nipples. More importantly, it is declared toxic to human health under the Canadian Environmental Protection Act, and has been since 1994. Canada has done nothing to reduce DEHP exposure since it was declared toxic 13 years ago. There is much less DEHP now in children's toys and products, but we need regulations to keep outlying companies from selling a teether in Canada that could harm a child.
In terms of BBP and DBP in children's products, they have also been banned in toys since 1999 in Europe, and that ban was extended in 2005. The presence of these phthalates has also been reduced in children's products since then. There is nothing that should keep us from passing that part of the bill.
The argument you'll likely hear is that BBP and DBP are not toxic under the Canadian Environmental Protection Act. There are three problems with this argument. The first is that if you look back at the risk assessments from BBP and DBP, they did not take into account exposure from children's products and exposure from household products. They didn't take into account exposure from breast milk, house dust, or cosmetics in terms of deciding whether BBP and DBP were a risk to human populations. As well, there was no combined assessment. We know that there is a shared breakdown product between the two chemicals and that both of them work in the same way--they both block testosterone. Yet there was no cumulative or combined assessment of the two to decide whether they were causing the problem.
Finally, even if you decide that you can't do this or you don't want to do this under the Canadian Environmental Protection Act, you can easily do it under the Hazardous Products Act, as it already restricts other non-CEPA-toxic substances in toys.
In terms of cosmetics, PollutionWatch supports restricting these chemicals in cosmetics using the Canadian Environmental Protection Act. There is, however, another approach, and that's to use the cosmetics hot list, which is a simple and easy way to prohibit these chemicals. DEHP and DBP, as it says in the bill, should be put on this list. They were both classified in the EU as reproductive toxins as early as 2001, and as of 2003, no reproductive toxins can be used in cosmetics. Most major companies are on their way to eliminating these chemicals, but as we've heard in earlier testimony, they are still present in cosmetics. DBP, in particular, is in nail polishes.
Just as in the argument for children's products that we can't put DBP on the children's hot list because it's not CEPA-toxic, the cosmetics hot list is full of substances that are not toxic under the Canadian Environmental Protection Act. We're talking here about chemicals that are developmental and reproductive toxins and about direct exposure through cosmetics.
Finally, in terms of medical devices, which is perhaps the most important part of the bill, the exposure of infants, children, and the rest of the population to DEHP through medical devices has the potential to be the largest. As a family physician, I am sensitive to the importance of many of these products.
As Ms. Goldman said, I was on the expert advisory group to the Medical Devices Bureau looking at DEHP and medical devices. At the time, we were quite conservative, because we had little information about the alternatives. We were handicapped in how much we could call for substitutions, because we weren't given much information about what kinds of safe alternatives were out there. Still, at the time, the report we put out said that a switch to alternatives was immediately justifiable. In recommendation 4, we urgently encouraged research into the alternatives. I'm dismayed, at this point, to see that since 2002 there has been little research into the alternatives, there's been no education of doctors and nurses in the health care community, and there have been few switches to safer alternatives.
We support this important private member's bill and the part that deals with DEHP and medical devices, with the following caveats. We think there needs to be a phase-out period of three years or so for the health care system to adjust to the removal of DEHP-containing products. We believe that over those three years there should be a safe-substitution consultation in which they work with the health care community to figure out areas in which alternatives do not yet exist on the market, or are not feasible. Finally, we think a procedure needs to be built in so that the government can give three-year exemptions if no reasonable substitutes for products exist.
With these safeguards added, taking action now on DEHP medical devices will be the most important thing this bill can do, and it is an action long overdue.
Thank you.