Thank you very much for the opportunity to appear before your committee. I'm very excited about this.
As you said, Chair Schulte, I'm a professor at the University of Toronto. For the past 30 years my research has involved toxic chemicals. I try to figure out their identity. I look at where they're coming from and where they go, and where they end up and how we're exposed.
In 2008 I was privileged to be the co-chair of Ontario Toxics Reduction Scientific Expert Panel that had a word in bringing in the Toxics Reduction Act in Ontario. Since 2013 I've been a member of the Chemicals Management Plan Science Committee. I've also acted as a peer reviewer for several assessments conducted under CEPA, part 5.
My second point is that I would really like to commend the scientists and staff at Environment and Climate Change Canada and Health Canada for working hard and diligently and using the best science to bring forward sound judgments for protecting Canada's environment.
Next, I'd like to raise four points that reiterate or emphasize those raised by my colleagues, Professor Dayna Scott from York University, and Joe Castrilli and Fe de Leon from the Canadian Environmental Law Association.
I'll just briefly go over those four points. First, I recommend adopting a more precautionary approach into CEPA as a guidepost, using the European legislation, REACH, as a model. Why? It's because science is limited. We have known uncertainties and we have information that we do not know. The scientific evidence is constantly changing, and methods are constantly changing. Adopting a more precautionary approach recognizes the scientific uncertainty, together with changes in the Canadian environment.
Second, as was well articulated by Dayna Scott, we should incorporate principles of environmental justice into CEPA, specifically the protection of vulnerable populations, both in the ecosystem and human populations.
Third, we should increase the onus on industry to provide data for our chemical assessments. This would improve the work flow and the ability of chemical assessors to adjudicate their work. Again, Professor Scott articulated this well.
I would like to make a further point, and that's with regard to the provisions for confidential business information. I do recognize the importance of the provisions for CBI in part 2 of CEPA, but I also believe that a better balance between CBI and the right to know needs to be considered. CBI protects the confidentiality of business interests, the importance of which I recognize, but potentially, it does so at risk to the Canadian public. As seen in the most recent Auditor General's report, CBI and the lack of transparency in product labelling allows products and materials containing CEPA-toxic chemicals to enter the Canadian market.
Fourth, the national pollutant release inventory badly needs to be updated in terms of substances and reporting thresholds.
The next four points I will make have not necessarily been raised by others, but are new points of mine. First, I strongly support the principle of using the best available science in CEPA, but I recommend adopting this as a principle rather than being overly prescriptive in the legislation. I recommend being cautious about overly prescribing methods within CEPA, because it ties legislative compliance provisions now believed to be the best science. In other words, the science that would be prescribed becomes frozen in time and becomes a new anachronism.
The next point is more complicated to describe, so I'm going to take just a few more minutes.
I submit that we need to consider chemicals over the life cycle of the chemical that's used in a product. When CEPA was first envisaged, it was thought that if we stopped production we were taking care of things. Indeed, if you stop production levels decrease, but we do need to take a broader perspective.
I'm going to use one case study, that of the flame retardants penta- and octa-brominated diphenyl ethers, or PBDEs. They were added to schedule I in 2008. PBDEs are used in a whole bunch of stuff. For example, I wouldn't be surprised if the the chair I'm sitting on and the ones you are sitting on contain one of those formulations to retard the flammability. Furthermore, the casings and components of all the electronics in the room you and I are in may very well contain PBDEs that are listed on schedule I.
Many of those products move to the end of life. They go into the waste stream. They're not designated as a hazardous chemical. I totally get that. But they do enter the waste stream, and according to the waste hierarchy, we do not want to dump those but reuse them. So we dismantle our electronics, take the plastic, say, from the casing of your computer and turn it into something new. Okay, that something new. Can you see my kitchen spoon? This is my black plastic kitchen spoon, and I know that many of you probably have a kitchen spoon like this one, and it contains 66 parts per million PBDEs. Now, kitchen spoons are not known to have flammability standards, but, rather, this kitchen spoon probably had an earlier life as a computer or a TV casing. That's why we need to consider a life-cycle approach.
My next point is that I'm always puzzled about the different viewpoints of stakeholders. For example, my colleagues in industry often talk about the need to use sound science and evidence-based decision making, but I've never seen unsound science or decisions made under CEPA that are not evidence-based. I actually think this conversation about sound science and evidence-based decision making is really about the value judgments made on the interpretation of the science. You get the scientific data and then you absolutely need to make a value judgment. Those judgments are normative. But those value judgments need to be taken in the context of the principles of CEPA, and that's why I sort of circle back to my earlier point about better articulating the precautionary principle and environmental justice under CEPA. Those act as guide points through which the data are interpreted and the normative judgments are made.
The final point I'd like to make before wrapping up is about taking a long view of CEPA. I know you do this every five years and this is now the big opportunity, not only to fix the details but also to take the long view. I'm so heartened that your committee looks at the environment and sustainable development. I submit that what we need to do is to more tightly couple environmental protection through the control of toxic releases, through the provisions of CEPA, with sustainable development.
The chemical pollution can be viewed as an outcome of inefficient resource use along the life cycle of that chemical. Chemical releases during manufacturing, for example, represent an economic loss to the manufacturer and a cost to society. Some colleagues say that we should do alternatives assessment so we get the bad actors out. But the problem with alternatives assessment is that we can do a drop-in replacement and we replace one bad actor with another chemical that we have yet to figure out is a bad actor.