Thank you very much.
Thank you for the invitation to be here, Monsieur le président.
As Dr. Khatter just mentioned, we released a report last week, and I hope you have a copy in front of you, called Polluted Children, Toxic Nation. In a nutshell, we tested five Canadian families from right across the country--families from downtowns, families from rural areas, families from different walks of life, families of different ethnicities. Within those families, we tested seven kids and six adults. We tested for 68 toxic pollutants, and we deliberately chose a range of pollutants--some pollutants that our bodies primarily absorb through breathing air pollution and some pollutants that we pick up from products in our homes and offices.
What we found is that in the folks we tested, 46 of the 68 toxic pollutants were present; and probably most shockingly, in many cases, virtually every family of chemicals we tested for was present. There were some kids who had higher levels of these contaminants than their parents.
Surely this is precisely the kind of measure of success, or frankly, measure of failure, that this committee should be looking at when it comes to the performance of the Canadian Environmental Protection Act.
I think it's noteworthy that among volunteers from the city of Sarnia, Ontario, including volunteers from our first nations community within the boundaries of the city of Sarnia, which you might have seen profiled on The National a couple of months back, the pollution is so bad that the sex ratio of babies born in this community is now two to one, girls to boys. The pollution has actually changed the sex ratio of children being born in this community.
I was joking with somebody before this presentation that my presentation on measures of success for CEPA would be very brief, because frankly, I don't think that CEPA can be said to have been terribly successful. The act has not met its goals. It has not been effective in preventing pollution or in reducing toxic exposure. But we believe that there are ways to make CEPA better.
I want to outline very quickly just four areas that we hope this committee takes a look at in terms of improving CEPA: timelines, consumer products, burden of proof, and the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence ecosystem.
As my colleague underlined, CEPA sets out a duty to expeditiously and diligently assess and manage substances, yet it lacks timelines at important stages in this process, and this allows chemicals to remain on the market with unfinished assessments and inadequate data. All we have to do is look at Canada's performance with respect to other industrialized countries. For example, the chemical PFOS was mostly banned in the United States in 2000, but in Canada, it took until October 2004 to post an assessment, and that assessment still has not been finalized.
CEPA's preamble recognizes the need to virtually eliminate persistent and bioaccumulative toxic substances, but the mechanism in the act really does not allow this to occur. There are administrative barriers that prevent this, one example being the requirement to measure the smallest measurable level. This is the kind of administrative change that we think can be made to the act to make a big difference.
According to its administrative duties, CEPA sets out to create consistent standards, yet frankly, there are different standards when it comes to consumer products. As Mr. Glover pointed out, new substances introduced to the market have to meet one test; 23,000 substances that have essentially been grandfathered are held to a lesser test. Many of these substances are known carcinogens, known neurotoxins, and known hormone disruptors. They are still on the market. We have them in the bodies of Canadian adults and children. And the pace of change when it comes to regulating these substances is glacial, to say the least.
The burden of proof of safety is not consistent, either. Frankly, we have a major concern that when September of this year rolls around and Environment Canada finishes its categorization of these 23,000 substances, that the Government of Canada simply will not have the resources, as things are currently structured, to plow through the regulation of these substances. We think it's fair, as other industrialized countries do, to ask industry to prove that these things are safe before their continued use in the market is allowed.
Finally, let's take a look at pollution hot spots. The Great Lakes and St. Lawrence basin is home to over one-third of Canadians. It's also the source of about 45% of all air pollution emissions in the country, so we have in the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence basin a congruence between a large percentage of the Canadian population and a very large amount of pollution. We think that in terms of bang for the buck, different requirements and different provisions for pollution hot spots like this one make a lot of sense.
Let me just conclude by saying that I want to thank the committee very much for the care and the diligence you bring to this review. The Canadian Environmental Protection Act is a complicated and arcane piece of legislation. At the end of the day, this review is about getting this act right, getting our federal framework right to protect the health of Canadian children, to reduce the number of smog days in our cities, and to make sure that Canada starts measuring up to standards that already exist in the United States and in Europe. These are the kinds of measurable results that we're hoping to see out of this review, and I want to thank you very much for undertaking it.