Thank you.
To start with, I won't go over who we are. It is included in our written brief, and you can read that later. I'll discuss just the key points.
First, CEPA does affect our industry. It affects every aspect of our industry. That starts with the source material that we ship, that we buy, the kinds of reagents we use, the operations themselves, and the downstream products, the market itself. We've observed that the effect of CEPA has grown over the last decade. Based on its current structure and developments, we expect that growth to accelerate in terms of impact.
The scope of CEPA is very broad. Most people focus on the management of substances part, but there are many other parts, including fuels and engines, transboundary movement, pollution, and federal lands. Our industry is impacted directly by parts 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, and 9, so several parts of CEPA.
One thing is very easily overlooked. When most people think of substances, they think very narrowly in terms of chemicals, that it is, for instance, a brown liquid in a flask, whereas the definition of a substance in CEPA applies to materials as well--the things you sit on, write with, are surrounded by. All that is considered a substance under CEPA, as are releases from a specified type of source. So it's a very broad definition, and therefore the substance management part has a very broad application.
In terms of our experience, one thing we note is that there does not seem to be a shared view among everyone about what is the role of CEPA. Some perceive it as a safety net. That expression has been used quite a lot. Others see it as a foundation that supports other legislation across jurisdictions, or as an overarching national legislation. In your review, as you're considering what, if any, changes are required in how it's functioning, you need to be clear on which role you wish CEPA to play.
There's also a lack of clarity and a lot of tangling in terms of how CEPA interacts with other federal legislation--for example, the Environmental Assessment Act, the Fisheries Act, the Hazardous Products Act. As well, how does CEPA relate to provincial legislation? Provincial environmental legislation tends to work in a different way, through things like operating permits, and therefore it is sometimes very difficult to see how they fit. They address sometimes the same issue or the same facility but from a different angle. Understanding that would be very helpful.
In practice, what we see is that at this time very few people understand CEPA and know it, and know all the parts. There are some who are experts in a particular section, but very few actually have an understanding of how the whole act is intended to work.
The act is not fully implemented. There are sections or areas that are yet to be interpreted. Even those that have been interpreted and applied haven't been tested. There may be one or two examples, or the outcomes are still not clear. So it's very difficult to say what is working well, what isn't working well, and whether any shortcomings flow out of the legislative structure or flow out of the implementation.
What concerns us is that we're observing a trend beyond CEPA. I had the great privilege of attending many of this committee's hearings during the review of CEAA. I was extremely overwhelmed by what a wonderful job you did. That came into force in October 2003, and we're waiting for the implementation. Hopefully it will happen before the next review. There was a similar experience with SARA.
We're hesitant here in terms of rushing to make recommendations about how to improve CEPA. Will it be a further setback to implementation as people go back and try to interpret? We're really torn, in approaching this review, on what to recommend to you.
We have a wish list of areas that we think you need to think about and that we would like to see. Obviously for us, clarity, predictability, and consistency are extremely important for as broad and as important an act as CEPA.
Clarifying the role of CEPA in the overall system, federal and provincial, of environmental legislation and health protection law is very important. We would like to see an act that not only permits but encourages complementarity or mutual support among the various pieces of legislation and between the two jurisdictions as well as minimization of conflict and inconsistencies, which are not helpful to the environment and not helpful to industry.
On a more specific note, it would be very good for us to have clarification of the relationship between the use of the word “toxic", the definition in section 64, and the role of schedule 1. A lot of people hear the word “toxic” and think of schedule 1 or substances so labelled as particularly damaging mega-uglies. Yet when you look at the definition or the criteria set out in section 64, they're a floor on which any substance that could potentially be damaging in some way to either the environment or health could be captured. So there's an inconsistency there, which makes discussion of how it should be used very difficult.
Another point we would make is we would like to see a refocusing of emphasis on real outcomes, as opposed to process. We have seen a tendency to focus too much on process: on having an instrument, on a discussion of what type of instrument, and not sufficient emphasis on the actual outcome in the environment, in human health protection that we wish to accomplish. Part of that has been a real reduction in monitoring and reporting on the state of the environment. We have not seen a state of the environment report in many years. Some of the information is available, but it appears to us that in assigning limited resources to discharge mandatory process obligations, the government has chosen to cut back on monitoring and reporting. Yet how can we make decisions, and how can we judge whether the act is working and what more we need if we don't have any information or good enough information for us and the public on whether the state of the environment is improving, where it is not improving, what needs to be done?
In that context, we need to keep clear the role of industry versus the role of government in generating information. Industry can provide and does provide information on releases from our facilities. We monitor impacts on the environment around our facilities, but we cannot provide baseline data on the overall Canadian environment. We're not going to take blood samples from Canadians. Those sorts of things have to be done by government, and the interpretation and analysis and trend-watching has to be done by government. It cannot be done by us.
The final thing from our industry perspective: We would ask you to keep in mind this broad range of substances that needs to be addressed and is addressed by CEPA. Our industry deals with inorganics, as opposed to organics, and many people think of dioxins and furans as chemicals that need to be addressed. The kinds of substances we deal with are very large in volume, but very small in number. Not many elements have been invented and put into use for thousands of years, and they're applied in a very wide range of applications. A lot is known about them, and a lot of field data is available.
The kinds of exposures in the environment to environmental organisms or to humans have many different pathways and sources, some of it natural, a lot man-made; it's very difficult to study just one thing. For example, the hazard criteria used to identify organics at the highest concern, like persistence and bioaccumulation, are not very good criteria when applied to our types of substances, because they don't differentiate between high hazard and low hazard.
I'll stop here.