I'd like to echo Will's comments that we appreciate very much the chance to have this time with you and also the fact that you are assessing and studying this bill. As someone of long standing in the environmental movement or--I don't know if I should say this--with grey hair, it's great to see this on the table and being actively discussed. So thank you for this opportunity and for your work together.
As Will has said, this bill of rights, Bill C-469, is seeking to improve access to information, public participation in decision-making, and access to justice. I think we're all going to tell you that it's very timely. I especially want to emphasize it's timely to advance the interests of all residents of Canada in undertaking their responsibilities and exercising their rights to protect the environment.
I'm emphasizing this notion of residents, because not all people living in Canada at this point who are interested in the environment are citizens yet, or perhaps won't be citizens, but I would like you to consider that we want to and seek to--in so many ways--foster shared Canadian values with all who reside in Canada. So we're suggesting you consider one of several text changes and move from using “Canadians” to “people of Canada”. We offer you a definition of resident at the end of our page; it's a bit of housekeeping to help you along in your work.
Friends of the Earth's detailed analysis of environmental rights in Canada, which we reported on in something called “Standing on Guard, Environmental Rights in Canada”, finds that there are grave inequities in the provision of environmental rights when you look across all the jurisdictions. We like to think--and we'd like to think you agree--that residents in Newfoundland or P.E.I. should have access to the same environmental rights as someone who lives in Ontario, the Yukon, or Quebec. We think they should be entitled to the same provisions when it comes to information and notice, public participation, and the requirement for government response. Those are just three of the 10 indicators we used when we looked at the provision of environmental rights in Canada.
One of the things that interests us very strongly about this bill is the opportunity to bring some coherence in bringing together what is right now a patchwork of provisions and procedural opportunities under the laws of Canada. To be clear, we're not saying that this is going to affect what happens in Newfoundland, necessarily, unless we continue to work with all of our colleagues in Newfoundland.
So we're not saying that by adopting and passing this bill we will affect the work of Newfoundland or any other jurisdiction's own work. But we can provide a bar. We can raise the bar from what Canada now has as a patchwork to something very comprehensive, with some leadership. Those of us who are in the field will continue to show that leadership to those in other jurisdictions.
Friends of the Earth will continue to work with our colleagues and supporters in the different provinces to encourage them to raise their bars. I'll refer to Newfoundland in a couple of situations, because we have a very compelling experience taking place there right now that is instructive in what you can accomplish with this bill.
The other thing I want to note is the time perspective of 40 years, because next year it will be 40 years since the Department of the Environment was established, in advance of the UN Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm in 1972. So we have 40 years of history, with all kinds of activities and important pieces of work put forward, and opportunities and rights, but as I would characterize it, it's very much a patchwork of opportunities.
Over that 40-year period, many of us have been involved in the collection of work that Canada provides leadership on. Canada is on the leading edge of so many files and is dealing with everything from stratospheric ozone protection to biodiversity, transport, management of hazardous substances, persistent organic pollutants...you name it. There's a whole litany there. I probably don't have to repeat it for you.
While this was happening globally with developed and developing countries, I want to point out this very important development of a consultative culture here in Canada. It started around the management of chemicals. It started around dealing with chemicals from cradle to grave.
As someone who was at that time spending a lot of time with colleagues in other countries, I found it interesting. Partly, it's the scale and size of the country and the number of players we have that allowed us to create this consultative culture, but it's also the goodwill to figure out how to work together. Also, as I've said, it was growing out of a cradle-to-grave management around chemicals at the time, but extending, then, into many other areas of consultation--not just about the environment. It definitely was affecting the overall federal consultation culture or policy.
So I think we'd like to convince you--and add our voice to others--that it's a really important time now to take the 40 years of experience around that and put it into something as compelling as the Environmental Bill of Rights. The consultation culture, to me, is the front end of the experiences people have in access to information, in participating in committees and providing their input in advance of conflict, and in trying to be engaged in decision-making in a way that is constructive and positive.
I wanted to mention to all of you that Friends of the Earth is not a legal organization. Having said that, we benefit from the counsel and assistance of the environmental law organizations in Canada and many wise legal practitioners who provide their support individually to us. But in the delivery of our mission, which is to work to restore communities and the earth, we use a whole set of tools. We use research, education, and advocacy, and especially we insist through our work on the enforcement of laws and regulation.
So over the 10 years that we've been able to work with Ecojustice, as one example, we've had the privilege of obtaining standing in many cases that have gone to the Supreme Court. That standing was in the interests of providing fresh insights, of providing expertise that allowed for the development of moving from principles to practise: such as the polluter pays principle and moving that into Canadian law in terms of shaping the use of environmental class actions. It's a whole range of things.
I wanted to say that for those who are concerned that this bill would open the floodgates of litigation, there is a wide body of experiences that show how you can move from the different avenues or rights available into engagement and into productive experiences. For example, they have a very interesting experience in calling for a factual record on the lack of enforcement of Canada's pulp and paper effluent regulations. This was in the early 2000s.
It was an area of great concern because, as a sector, pulp and paper was the largest single user of water, and we were very concerned about what we saw as the impact of that effluent on the reproductive capability of fish. We were successful in having that factual record performed. That was through the Commission for Environmental Cooperation. It took five years. It's always a test of stamina, but with very useful results.
What I would point to, and the point I'm trying to make here, is that through that process we then moved into a working opportunity with Canada's Forest Products Association, with leading scientists in this field, with other environmental organizations, and with Environment Canada itself, to work--for the past six years now--on various ways and means of reducing the endocrine-disrupting impact of effluent on fish. So that opportunity to use a very important environmental right, the petitioning opportunity there, opened up transparency, first of all, but it also opened up the opportunity to work constructively together.
Increasingly, we at Friends of the Earth are called on to help individuals and communities navigate their way through this patchwork, this rather complex collection of environmental rights and responsibilities. The example I wanted to share with you is that of the retired fisherman in New Harbour, Newfoundland, and it is about working with him to help him exercise his rights on an investigation--just recently delivered--and assessing that using section 17.
What he really wanted us to do was use the Fisheries Act. There was nothing available to him to use that. Instead, it was the new PCB regulation under CEPA. That's still in play, but I'd have to say that Newfoundland is a place that could add some amazing, some important, environmental rights to their portfolio of procedural rights. We're happy that there were federal rights available for this gentleman and happy to be able to help him use that.
Finally, I just wanted to say that, with the history and experience I was talking about over the last 40 years, we want to see that Canadians are able to call on Parliament for accountability. We've offered some text as well that would add a provision saying that “Every obligation imposed on the Government of Canada, a Minister, the Commissioner or a federal source in the Act is justiciable”--I can never say that word “justiciable”.
With that, I will say thank you again for your attention. In terms of drafting, I have two pages of specific suggestions for you that I'd be happy to talk about later.