That's right.
In my introductory remarks I tried to establish the proposition that precaution is not an option, as it's an emerging principle of international law, and that the particular articulation of the principle in the act is one that is contested, and not the only one, by any means. Mr. Stoffman gave another one. I have a couple more here that I could offer to the committee. So whether it's written in and how many times it is written in is really not the issue.
If I could go back to the remarks about REACH, Mr. Warawa, of course you're right. REACH at the moment is hypothetical, in the sense that we don't know exactly what form it will take when it is finalized, and due to the same kinds of pressures that affect the quality of our laws in Canada, its initial form has been diluted in Europe.
I would have thought that we'd not be talking here about waiting for REACH and seeing how strong or weak it will be, but to actually compete, as it were, to see if we can have the strongest or most precautionary law in terms of earlier action; more information provided by proponents; greater onus on proponents to provide that information; more information provided to the public; and greater resources, for example, to do the kinds of things like Polluted Children, Toxic Nation: A Report on Pollution in Canadian Families, which Environmental Defence has done, but to do that with some fulsome data, as is done in the United States and Germany and elsewhere.
So on those kinds of questions, I would think our preoccupation would be how can we actually compete with legislation like REACH, regardless of what its final form will be when it arrives.