Environment Committee on June 16th, 2016

[William Amos, Liberal, Pontiac, QC]

I want to go back to Ms. Diamond. My learned colleague, Mr. Fast, was raising the spectre of Big Brother, this sort of Orwellian governmental oversight situation, in relation to the discussion of what chemicals are necessary. I think this is a really important point that I would love to hear a bit more about from you.

My editorial on it would be that the government does have a duty to regulate. I think this is clear from the statute as it exists already. We can't assume that there is going to be some invisible hand of the private marketplace that is going to achieve the protection of society, let alone of society's most vulnerable. We have to ensure that our legislation is keeping up with modern times and we are assessing how effective it is on the ground.

What do you think could be reformed in CEPA, in terms of legislation or regulations, in the context of this issue of choosing what chemicals are necessary? I do appreciate that there is an argument out there that the private sector needs to be able to evaluate what is necessary. Is there a public role? What is it? How does that look?

[Prof. Miriam Diamond]

The public role is to advance consideration of the chemical mixtures that we all experience, and that the environment experiences. CEPA takes the chemical-by-chemical approach to adjudicate according to set criteria. What CEPA isn't able to do and doesn't get a handle on is the totality, what is out there in total in the Canadian environment.

There is a mismatch here. You go, “You know what? We have done a great job on a chemical-by-chemical basis. We don't have hazard quotients above one on a chemical-by-chemical basis.” However, there is evidence out there to suggest that the totality of exposures could be causing adverse effects. These two pieces of information don't match.

What are we going to do? We have to have better consideration, then, of the totality of chemicals. Some would say cumulative risk assessment. I agree with my colleague, Mr. Khosla, who said that phthalates have now been bundled together to do a cumulative risk assessment for phthalates. That is a great first step. What it still doesn't get to is the totality of chemicals to which we are all exposed. Science is really struggling on this. We can get people to the moon, but this is really difficult.

What we can say is that, by putting provisions into CEPA to examine the totality of chemical emissions and effects, we demand that science move forward on this. When we put that into CEPA, we provide an impetus to work toward getting methods and answers.

[William Amos, Liberal, Pontiac, QC]

Is this why alternatives assessment is so important—because, through the regulatory mechanisms and the implementation of the statute, it is very hard to get at how all these chemicals, in their various mixes at various stages of life, impact us? Is it for that reason that we need the alternatives assessment approach?

Secondarily, what lessons have we learned from the U.S. National Academy of Sciences report that you mentioned in relation to alternatives assessment?

[Prof. Miriam Diamond]

I think what we have learned is that we definitely need alternatives assessment, because we can't have regrettable substitution. “Regrettable substitution” is kind of the name of the game with respect to taking out bisphenol A and replacing it with what we think is more toxic, bisphenol S and some of the other bisphenols. We definitely need alternatives assessment.

As I said earlier, we have to frame alternatives assessment broadly, to look at not just the drop-in replacement chemical, but whether we can actually change functionality. Can we change the nature of the product?

This is a paradigm shift from the chemical-by-chemical approach toward saying that we have some real issues going on here with sustainability and that we need to be asking questions in a bigger sense. We are not cutting it with the chemical-by-chemical approach, so can we move the conversation?

We can't do it all in today's hearing, but what we can do is open up the conversation to change the paradigm. We are living in a 1980s paradigm of chemical by chemical.

[William Amos, Liberal, Pontiac, QC]

I appreciate those comments, and I agree that we can't achieve it in today's conversation. However, we will, as a committee, be considering recommendations, and I think this is the locus for that conversation. If you or any other colleagues who are experts in this area have suggestions as to how we get there, this would be the time and place to make those submissions.

I do want to go quickly to Mr. Khosla on the issue—

[The Chair, Liberal, Deb Schulte]

You have 30 seconds.

[William Amos, Liberal, Pontiac, QC]

On the NPRI, suggestions have been made that it be expanded so that it gets down to a postal code level, as is done with the toxic release inventory in the U.S. We don't have that in Canada. Canadians aren't aware, in their backyards, of what they're being exposed to and by whom. Would you agree that this is a useful expansion of the NPRI?

[Amardeep Khosla]

I'm afraid we don't really deal with the NPRI in my group, so I can't answer that question.

[William Amos, Liberal, Pontiac, QC]

I'd ask for just a yes or no, then, from Ms. Diamond.

[Prof. Miriam Diamond]

Is the question whether we should have postal code level NPRI releases?

[William Amos, Liberal, Pontiac, QC]

Yes. Should the public have access to that?

[Prof. Miriam Diamond]

Yes.

[William Amos, Liberal, Pontiac, QC]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Deb Schulte]

I'm sorry, but you're over six minutes.

Mr. Cullen.

[Nathan Cullen, NDP, Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC]

Professor Diamond, what type of national strategy does Canada have to deal with mercury? Or do we have one?

[Prof. Miriam Diamond]

Oh, that's a really interesting question, because Canada is a signatory to the Minamata Convention, as you know, which is tasked with controlling releases of mercury. It's very timely that you mention this. Canada has been involved in reducing mercury emissions through the International Joint Commission, for example, the binational task force that operated some 10 years ago but actually hasn't been doing much since then.

That's been directed toward point-source releases, but the reason that I'm glad you asked that question is that right now there's a very visible discussion about what's happening at Grassy Narrows First Nation, where they have been subject to elevated mercury exposure due to past releases, and it does not seem to have been adequately addressed. We're addressing mercury and releases in a very big-picture way, but here we have a case that we're not acting on, a very immediate and very egregious case in which people are experiencing mercury poisoning.

[Nathan Cullen, NDP, Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC]

Mr. Lickers, there's a whole field of study about environmental racism, in which the environmental standards that get applied to different groups are of a different level. There is Grassy Narrows and there are some other examples—Akwesasne might be one—where we see these outcomes and these exposures downriver from certain pollutants. Cancer rates are high. There are all sorts of strange and particular illnesses, we know that, within some of the communities around the oil sands.

We've seen these elevated risk levels, yet there doesn't seem to be the same hue and cry that there would be if those same risk levels were suddenly showing up in downtown Montreal, Toronto, or Vancouver. Is this something that CEPA needs to address?

[Dr. Henry Lickers]

I think it does. Maybe the reason they're not showing up in Montreal or these bigger cities is that the people there have more money.

[Nathan Cullen, NDP, Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC]

What do you mean by that?

[Dr. Henry Lickers]

You have a thing called “healthy worker syndrome”. If you have a good job and a good life, you could be exposed to these compounds and you may not show anything. However, if you don't have a good life and your society is stressed already, then you start to see these strange problems and these strange clusters of things that occur. That's what I would call them. At Akwesasne, we've been looking at that for a long period of time.

[Nathan Cullen, NDP, Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC]

Mr. Khosla, there was an exchange about this notion of cumulative risk.

I dealt with phalates in a bill that I moved through Parliament earlier. We really struggled with some industry reps who were raising alarm bells about any replacements. In terms of this notion of totality of risk exposure, at the end of the day that's what CEPA is meant to do: to protect people so they don't get sick from being exposed to the normal passage of life, to eating food and being around products.

Is that something the industry group would be advocating for as well? Or does that go too far beyond what you're willing to commit to?

[Amardeep Khosla]

Madam Chair, I agree with Professor Diamond that we're at a paradigm shift—I think she used those words—and I would call it an inflection point in terms of—

[Nathan Cullen, NDP, Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC]

Inflection...?

[Amardeep Khosla]

We're at an inflection point in terms of our ability to use new approaches that are enabled by high throughput screening, by computational toxicology, and by a better understanding of mode of action and how chemicals can trigger the same sequence of events within a body to result in a particular toxic effect. All of that is the subject right now, I think, of several billion dollars worth of work in the U.S. It is moving very fast. I think it is something that the Canadian government has been watching quite closely. It is engaged both bilaterally on it and through the OECD and can monitor that work and understand how it might be applied in a regulatory context.

The science has to be ready for it to be applied in a regulatory context. You have to have the confidence in the new approaches, that they can replicate at least what the old approaches did, and then go beyond those. I think all of that is happening. So the question for us, I think, is how to be part of that and to make sure that we can pick up the best developments as they happen. The OECD is probably an excellent place to do that, but possibly there's some bilateral work that could be done as well.

[The Chair, Liberal, Deb Schulte]

I have to cut it off at that point. It has been excellent testimony from everyone, and there's never enough time for this type of discussion. It's a very important discussion and, obviously, there are widely varying views on how we might tackle this.

As we've always said to our other witnesses, if there is something further that you want to share with us that we didn't get a chance to get to in the session today, please feel free to send us that information or those recommendations. We are receiving recommendations and suggestions for how to move forward, so we would very much appreciate that.

I want to thank you, Mr. Lickers for returning, because I know you got halfway here and were stopped at the border last week. We appreciate very much your persistence in coming back here.

We're now going to do some committee business, so we have to ask you to clear the room. But again, thanks to everyone for a great session.

[Proceedings continue in camera]