Thank you.
I'm Andrea Peart. I'm with the Canadian Labour Congress, and we represent 3.3 million workers in Canada in nearly every industry and sector.
Overall, the purpose of the Canadian Environmental Protection Act is to ensure pollution prevention. While other federal laws apply to the human health risk of toxic substances and consumer products, CEPA is in fact the only federal law that explicitly requires consideration of broader environmental risks in addition to human health.
For Canadian workers, CEPA 1999 is a crucially important and terribly underutilized tool for addressing a broad range of risks posed to Canadian workers by toxic substances, including asbestos.
I really want to thank you for the ability to comment and present today. We want to focus on four very specific areas of improvement that we see as needed.
The first is strengthening NPRI reporting, primarily to protect Canadians from asbestos. Strengthening asbestos reporting under the National Pollutant Release Inventory would yield data on the presence of asbestos. Strengthened NPRI reporting is particularly important for disposal and waste industries, a suspected high-risk source of Canadian asbestos exposures in neighbouring communities.
Strengthening NPRI would also ensure that companies that fail to report, do not report on time, or knowingly submit false or misleading information would face penalties listed under sections 272 and 273 of CEPA.
These are all things that don't exist at this time. As a Canadian Centre for Occupational Health and Safety governor, I think there's often a gap between data collection on occupational and environmental that leaves Canadian workers unaware of the substances from which they're supposed to protect themselves. All of the best laws in the world, particularly on internal responsibility systems in workplaces, are unable to function at their desired level when they simply don't have information as to where asbestos is hiding.
We'd like to improve substitutions and chemical regulation by establishing an alternatives assessment. The chemicals management plan, which was established in 2006, addresses a wide range and manages the risk of the 23,000 chemicals that had never been assessed. I'm exceedingly pleased that we now have an announcement that the final third of the chemicals management plan will move forward. I know it's been a long haul, but even the fact that the final third will be complete in the near future will be a tremendous development.
Unfortunately, despite these chemical assessments, assessment hasn't translated into meaningful protections for Canadian workers. If I can give one very specific example, bisphenol A was assessed as toxic under CEPA. It was banned in plastic baby bottles, but there was absolutely no further regulatory response to other products that contained bisphenol A or to the workers exposed.
Workers' children exposed in the womb, which is the single highest point of vulnerability for bisphenol A, didn't benefit from any real regulatory response, despite the chemical being designated CEPA-toxic. We have people in areas, particularly women working in automotive plastics, who have very high exposures to bisphenol A, a substance that is CEPA-toxic, but this has not resulted in a substitution of safer alternatives and has not resulted in risk management strategies implemented at the workplace level.
To ensure and facilitate the protection of Canadian workers, CEPA should be updated to also require an alternatives assessment that will establish a process for identifying, comparing, and selecting safer alternatives to toxic chemicals. An alternatives assessment under CEPA can support Canadian companies on the successful phase-out of toxic chemicals through the phase-in of safer substitutes that will protect the health of Canadian workers. The alternatives assessment would also prevent the replacement of one toxic chemical with another equally toxic or even more toxic chemical.
A third priority for the Canadian Labour Congress is establishing precautionary thresholds for persistence in bioaccumulation that are consistent with the U.S. and the EU. The persistence and bioaccumulation regulations under CEPA set too high of a threshold for designating a substance as bioaccumulative. Both the EU and the U.S. have lower criteria than Canada for designating a substance as bioaccumulative, and we would like to see the amendment of the persistence and bioaccumulation regulations to establish precautionary thresholds consistent with the U.S. and EU for determination of persistence and bioaccumulation.
In Canada, it's true that the bioaccumulative criteria can be used to determine if a substance can be placed on track for virtual elimination, which we see as a very positive thing. However, the current system limits protections for a number of substances falling within the gap between the Canadian threshold and that of the U.S. and the EU. The lack of a harmonized lower bioaccumulation threshold in CEPA directly limits workers' ability to use the internal responsibility system to protect their health from certain chemicals found in products like flame retardants, heavy metals, and pesticide residues.
Finally, we'd like to see the modernization of triggers for a CEPA assessment to be in line with our trading partners. CEPA doesn't provide a clear approach when it comes to updating assessments to take into account new scientific evidence or to update worker exposure estimates, even if our trading partners make major changes. As a result, a number of assessments and the corresponding risk management strategies are outdated. This has an impact on worker protection in Canada.
Under section 75, CEPA would be strengthened by requiring that a decision to prohibit or substantially restrict any substance in another jurisdiction, perhaps an OECD jurisdiction, would automatically trigger a CEPA assessment of that substance. If the substance is also included on the list of toxic substances, a review of its risk management strategy and implementation would also be required.
A parallel provision currently exists in the Pest Control Products Act, which requires that approved pesticides be re-evaluated every 15 years and mandates a special review of any ingredient banned by another OECD country. We believe that CEPA would benefit from a similar trigger for assessments.
Those are some very specific recommendations that we have moving forward, but I think they reflect an overall broader need to modernize CEPA. Canadians' exposure to toxic chemicals used to be primarily related to chemical and industrial outputs, but over 30 years, we've seen a huge change. As an example, lead exposure used to occur as a result of being a welder or of living in Hamilton and other communities where smelting occurs. Now lead exposure comes from imported costume jewellery for children. As we've seen an increase in toxic chemical exposures from imported products, in many cases consumer products, and in many cases there are obstacles coming from the definition of “consumer product” in the Consumer Product Safety Act, it is CEPA that can offer a lot of improvements for worker protection and the protection of Canadians' health.
Thank you very much.