Thank you for this opportunity to present the Mining Association of Canada's views on the Canadian Environmental Protection Act. Since you recently heard from my colleague Ben Chalmers, I will not repeat a description of who we are.
CEPA is only one of several federal acts that impact our industry, and nearly every part of CEPA affects us. Our members produce raw materials and are also end-users of chemical products, including several recycled post-consumer and post-industrial kinds of waste, such as electronic waste and spent catalysts.
Assessing and managing the potential risks of the full range of substances that are subject to CEPA is highly complex. As you know, the CEPA definition of “substance” is very broad and is not limited to individual or synthetic compounds. It does not correspond to the everyday use of the word “chemical”. The CEPA definition of “toxic” also involves a careful combination of potential hazard and exposure considerations rather than the everyday meaning of the word.
Applying CEPA to the raw materials we work with, particularly metals and non-metallic elements, has to take into consideration that these are naturally occurring constituents of the environment. They have unique ways of interacting with the natural environment and with living organisms. Their concentration in water, soil, and rocks varies depending on local geology and climate. Their ability to be absorbed by living organisms is affected by the local environment. As well, some metals are essential to the health of humans, animal, plants, and micro-organisms. These characteristics of metals and non-metallic elements mean that simpler approaches to categorizing, assessing, and managing chemicals can be unhelpful.
Assessments are also more complicated because human activity unrelated to the production or use of an element can be a significant source of releases to the environment. For example, for some essential elements, agriculture and human waste can be the dominant sources of releases. Copper, which will be assessed under the third phase of the chemicals management plan, is a good example of a substance with highly beneficial uses, yet it nevertheless can present risks.
Copper occurs naturally in the environment and is a nutrient essential to the health of humans, animals, and plants. Its superior electrical conductivity makes it a critical material for electrification and energy efficiency as the world addresses climate change.
Copper does not degrade when recycled. Copper's value provides an incentive for recycling to such an extent that in 2014, the Canadian Electricity Association described copper theft as an issue that is dangerous, expensive, and a threat to reliability.
Copper is also a good biocide. This characteristic is being harnessed to reduce the spread of infections in hospitals by using copper-alloy touch surfaces.
While copper has these many positive characteristics, it can also have negative effects on aquatic ecosystems in some circumstances. The major uses of copper result in little release to the environment. However, intensive agriculture and animal husbandry, large urban centres, and some applications result in releases of copper.
The calculated total EU-15 releases of copper were dominated by agricultural uses and traffic. The wear of automobile brake pads is estimated to account for 20% of the total European releases of copper to water. Automotive and brake manufacturers are exploring alternatives that do not compromise customer safety.
According to Canada's National Pollutant Release Inventory, which tracks only facility releases and not diffuse sources, the facilities with the highest releases of compounds into water in 2013 were municipal waste water systems.
This short overview of copper is but one example illustrating the breadth of factors that need to be taken into account in assessing and managing chemicals.
We urge you to be thoughtful in reviewing the toxins management provisions of CEPA. These provisions apply to a broad range of substances, and imposing overly simplistic approaches may have unintended negative effects.
With regard to improving transparency, subsection 54(3) of CEPA obliges the minister to offer to consult with provinces and representatives of aboriginal governments when developing objectives, guidelines, or codes of practice, while broader public consultation remains discretionary. There is a similar lack of transparency observed in access to environmental data generated by federal monitoring. In our opinion, data generated using public funding should be publicly available unless there is a compelling reason for secrecy.
Our recommendation is that subsection 54(3) and similar sections of the act should be amended to require public consultation and the publication of peer-review comments.
The government should also be encouraged to make any environmental monitoring data generated or funded by the federal government publicly available within a reasonable time.
In your review of CEPA, witnesses have mentioned examples from other jurisdictions. Our members have direct experience with Europe's REACH model, and some MAC member companies are members of REACH consortia. In these cases, arrangements have been made, or are being made, to provide Canadian officials with all the data generated.
In looking at REACH, you need to look at all relevant aspects. For example, REACH requires consortia of industry to collectively generate assessments that cover the full value chain of each substance. REACH supported this requirement with a comprehensive framework for sharing the cost of the assessment among all companies in the substance value chain. Moreover, Europe's economy is some 10 times that of Canada's and therefore has much greater capacity to absorb the high cost of REACH.
Already our sector has encountered a few instances in which suppliers of niche products used in emergency response decided that the Canadian market is too small to justify the CEPA compliance burden.
Our recommendation is that in looking at examples from other jurisdictions, you consider the entire context, including the relative market size.
Now I'll turn to the National Pollutant Release Inventory.
MAC has been involved in and supportive of the NPRI since its creation and sits on the multi-stakeholder NPRI work group. The NPRI is much more comprehensive than other inventories and requires reporting for many more types of facilities, some of which are large sources of some pollutants. For example, comparing the reporting of releases to water of copper and its compounds, nearly three-quarters of releases would be missed if the NPRI applied U.S. Toxics Release Inventory rules. The NPRI also includes criteria air contaminants and has lower reporting thresholds for more substances.
The NPRI works through a published notice based on consultation rather than legislated rules, which has enabled the program to evolve in response to experience and users' needs. The NPRI secretariat has prepared some excellent presentations that explain this evolution over time.
Some of the evidence presented to this committee appears to have overlooked the differences in the comprehensiveness of the two inventories and the impact of the NPRI evolution on trends over time. I would encourage you to seek further details from the NPRI secretariat.
While MAC would caution against restricting the NPRI's flexibility through legislation, there are improvements that we would encourage you to recommend. In particular, the NPRI would greatly benefit from increased informatics support, as would other government data management programs. Allowing civil servants access to 21st century information management and communications tools would greatly increase their effectiveness and their service to the public. Better tools could also significantly reduce the administrative burden on reporting facilities, while at the same time reducing data entry errors.
Our recommendation is that you should be cautious in making any amendments to sections 48 through 50 of CEPA, but you should encourage the government to allocate additional resources and particularly information technology support to enhance the NPRI.
On leading by example, as mentioned by one of your first witnesses, part 9 of CEPA was created to enable the filling of the regulatory gap created by the exemption of federal operations and federal land from provincial oversight. Today, 17 years later, that gap remains, and it has been exacerbated by the elimination of the requirement for environmental assessments of projects for which the federal government is the proponent. As you discuss the adequacy of provincial oversight of provincially regulated industries, I would urge you to first consider whether the federal government is demonstrating leadership in its own jurisdiction.
Thank you.