Thanks very much. That's quite a handful of questions.
In terms of Health Canada, one of the things that Health Canada has started doing in recent years is a national biomonitoring study, which is a study of which chemicals and in what concentrations are actually being found in our bodies. That's an important step forward, but there's much more that can be done.
In terms of the big picture of environmental health monitoring, what European Union countries and what the United States have done is created what they call national environmental health surveillance systems, which are comprehensive systems for monitoring the emissions and releases of toxic substances into our environment and our communities, the exposure of humans to those toxic substances, the adverse health impacts of those exposures, and finally, the policies that are in place to reduce the emissions, releases, and exposures.
Canada has pieces of that in place. In my brief, I will include a section that draws on the experiences of those other jurisdictions, as well as Quebec, which is a national leader in Canada, to create a national environmental health surveillance system. It's something that's really important, because if you don't have that information, then how do you determine what your priorities are in terms of regulation and enforcement?
I think that the issue raised about pollution hot spots is a really important one. It goes back to the issue of environmental justice, that there are marginalized and vulnerable communities and populations in Canada that are really bearing a disproportionate burden of pollution in society.
This is an area where the words “environmental justice” are not to be found in any federal law, regulation, or policy in Canada; whereas, the United States has been dealing with this for 30 to 40 years, and so have some European countries.
This is a huge opportunity that we have before us now to put environmental justice into the Canadian Environmental Protection Act in ways that really make that meaningful and that give government the tools and the mandate to protect those populations and those communities.