Mr. Chair, thank you.
Commissioner, thank you so much for your report. I'm glad you exist. Thank you to the departments that are here as well, and for all your presentations.
This area is very important to me, not least because I'm highly sensitive to chemicals and to toxins. I'm one of those canaries in the mine, so I feel it right away. I get skin rashes. I notice everything. Also, I'm super-concerned about the fact that we have cancer rates that are increasing exponentially each year in spite of our putting far more millions and millions of dollars into cancer research.
I'm pretty new to the committee and I'm going to ask some pretty basic questions, but this is where I am as a Canadian and as a parliamentarian right now.
For my birthday, I received a bracelet. That bracelet caused me immediately to have a migraine, a colossal migraine. I went back to the store and said there was nothing on the box but I know it's some type of lead, or I don't know if it's lead or mercury, but it's something that has led to the migraine. When I went back to the store, they couldn't tell me what the bracelet was actually made of.
As a department, what would you say is the obligation of that company to know what's actually in that product, and what's the obligation of the Canadian government to tell me that there's something there that might make me sick as it relates to toxic substances?
Do you have an answer to that?