I'll try first.
In the last government there was a bill that was introduced as part of the budget, which was sort of a strange process--to deal with a definition in CEPA as part of the budget bill. But that almost solved the problem. The proposal was to not call them anything. There was a lot of debate about what they should be called, and the best way to get around that was just to refer to them as substances on schedule 1.
Why I say it almost solved the problem is that there was one area where it left the definition “toxic” unchanged. The word “toxic” was left in the section dealing with virtual elimination.
The way it was done, the term “toxic” for virtual elimination would no longer have been tied to section 64, which is the risk base of the statute, and “virtual elimination” could then have been interpreted as changing from a risk-based approach to a hazard-based approach, which our association strongly objected to. So we, and I think others also, opposed this change.
I don't know why the government didn't want to make that additional change and also change it in section 65 at the time. If the committee wanted to look at that solution, I think it almost made it. It would just have required referring to substances on schedule 1 in section 65 as it did in about a hundred other sections in the change.
There's also an associated issue of some references to “toxic” in the preamble. And if “toxic” isn't in the rest of the bill, then what would the preamble refer to? I think that could be solved by, again, the preamble referring to substances on schedule 1. Environment Canada lawyers, when we discussed this with them previously, thought that was inelegant. I'm not sure if it's elegant or inelegant, but it would certainly have been clear.
So I think there's a fairly straightforward solution that was almost arrived at before, and that solution would be worth looking at again, but avoiding the errors that I've just described.