Evidence of meeting #37 for Environment and Sustainable Development in the 42nd Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was cepa.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Professor, Schulich School of Law, Dalhousie University, As an Individual
I'll take the first stab at this.
I think the answer to it is a combination of what is safe globally. You can have a debate about whether that's 2° or 1.5°, perhaps—
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Deb Schulte
I wasn't thinking about the global warming effects. I realize that. I'm thinking about the actual chemical, the air quality, CO2 as a toxic substance.
Professor, Schulich School of Law, Dalhousie University, As an Individual
In fairness, I think CO2 was declared toxic under CEPA because of its greenhouse gas emissions effect, not because of—
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Deb Schulte
I understand that, but it was just occurring to me that we're focused on the greenhouse gas aspect of CO2's climbing in the atmosphere, but what about the toxicity of CO2? Do we know at what level it starts to affect human functioning?
Professor, Schulich School of Law, Dalhousie University, As an Individual
I'll defer to others on that.
Prof. Daniel Krewski
I don't have the test results of the LD50 for CO2, but I think we're a long way from toxicity of CO2 at ambient concentrations. If it were hydrogen sulfide, that would be another story: if you go from 1 ppm to 5 ppm, you've gone from safe to dead in a short space of time.
Professor, Faculty of Environmental Studies, York University, As an Individual
Keep in mind that one of the dimensions is, of course, that the definition of toxicity in the existing act is quite broad and was actually drafted for the specific purpose of being able to capture something that doesn't have a direct toxic effect at the level of individuals or people, but at a systemic environmental level. That's the basis on which it was declared toxic.
Indeed, when that definition was originally drafted, they weren't thinking about CO2. They were actually thinking about CFCs and ozone-depleting substances. They wanted to be sure that the definition was broad enough to capture those sorts of global threats. I think the classification of the Kyoto six substances under CEPA demonstrates that there is breadth and flexibility within that definition to capture these very serious threats.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Deb Schulte
I was just really thinking, we know when it's toxic, when you're expiring, but are there effects that we know of with different individuals who may be more susceptible? We know with other chemicals and other compounds that some people are affected by certain chemicals and they don't affect other people.
Do we know the gradient, or are we way off the scale?
Prof. Daniel Krewski
If you drop one oxygen from that molecule and make it carbon monoxide, we have epidemiologic data that show that with ambient concentrations there are some demonstrable adverse health effects in the general population.
Prof. Daniel Krewski
I'm not concerned about the toxicity of carbon dioxide, at this point, in ambient concentrations.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Deb Schulte
Super.
I know there's lots of.... Yes, I know, but it's the concentrations, right?
How far did we get? We're all done.
We have an opportunity here for Mr. Gerretsen to ask the last couple of questions.
Liberal
Mark Gerretsen Liberal Kingston and the Islands, ON
Thank you, Madam Chair.
I just want to follow up on a comment that Ms. Collins made about 20 minutes ago. It was with respect to preventive measures and having an economic argument for doing things preventively, as opposed to in a reactionary manner, in particular as it relates to health. Regrettably, I think quite often politics is driven by emotion, which is quite often reactionary.
However, to that end, specifically how do you think CEPA can be reformed to encourage that type of behaviour?
Prof. Lynda Collins
I think that is encompassed in all the recommendations that have been presented to you by Dr. Scott, Dr. Boyd, Ecojustice, CELA—
Prof. Lynda Collins
They absolutely do. That's the point of these.
I would just add, emotion can also be on your side. On this question about harmony between the provinces, selling it to the provinces, to the electorate, there's a little bit of public education that needs to happen within government and outside.
Actually, there's no one in this room who hasn't lost somebody to cancer. There's no one who doesn't know a family with a child with asthma. Some of those losses could have been prevented. In fact, I think you can use people's very natural human emotions that are appropriate emotions to achieve some buy-in.
Liberal
Mike Bossio Liberal Hastings—Lennox and Addington, ON
Dr. Krewski, earlier with Mr. Fast asking questions about the risk-based approach, you seemed to indicate that you felt that with technology, the risk assessment could be done without a hazard-based approach. I'd like to clarify, because you talked during your presentation about risk and hazard. I would think with these technologies, the effectiveness of them and the cost reduction in using them would actually, if anything, make a risk and hazard based approach both equitable in that you weren't necessarily excluding the hazard-based approach in your testimony.
Prof. Daniel Krewski
I think both approaches have applications in the right context. A lot of the decision criteria that I would point to will depend on the risk context. Are we talking about an environmental contaminant? Are we talking about a life-saving drug? Are we talking about an emerging pathogen? Those are different decision contexts.
However, in terms of environmental issues, I think precaution and risk based both have a place. The more data we have, the more risk based we can be.
Liberal
Mike Bossio Liberal Hastings—Lennox and Addington, ON
That's what I was saying. From a vulnerable population standpoint, given these technologies, it actually gives us the ability to formulate a lot more of that data, bring about that much more data to support that side of it.
Prof. Daniel Krewski
Yes. We can test many more different contexts with the new technologies and get more information on different population subgroups.
Liberal
Liberal
William Amos Liberal Pontiac, QC
Dr. Winfield, what are some of the changes that were not made in 1999 that you really think were missed opportunities?