The reason for eliminating phthalate from those items back in 1998--and it was industry that stepped up and voluntarily withdrew phthalate out of teethers and soft rattles--was that it was done as a precautionary measure pending further research. That's a very important part of the statement: “pending further research”.
As Marian Stanley has outlined, further research has been done by the Consumer Product Safety Commission in the U.S. on those kinds of products and they have been deemed safe for continued use. The reason they're not back on the shelves here in Canada is Health Canada has not withdrawn the alert they issued in 1998. They have continued to take those products off the shelves and test them. And alternatives were readily available at that time, so there were products out there that consumers could use, and you know that in the marketplace products get displaced with other products. It happens in the plastics industry all the time. A better product comes along or a more economical product or a product that performs better, and that gets substituted in the marketplace. It's the way of business.