Evidence of meeting #6 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.
Liberal
Mike Bossio Liberal Hastings—Lennox and Addington, ON
Is it similar to the one used in the EU that's called REACH?
Director General, Legislative and Regulatory Affairs, Department of the Environment
No, the system we use is quite different from REACH.
Director General, Legislative and Regulatory Affairs, Department of the Environment
REACH is an extremely time-consuming process that requires extensive work on the part of users and producers, but that actually has achieved a lot fewer decisions than we've achieved under the chemicals management plan.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Deb Schulte
Thank you very much. We can see how fast six minutes goes.
Mr. Gerretsen.
Liberal
Mark Gerretsen Liberal Kingston and the Islands, ON
Thank you, Madam Chair.
Thank you, gentlemen, for coming here today to share this information with us and to answer our questions.
There are two things I want to pick up on that Mr. Moffet mentioned in his presentation. After all, in our review, we are looking at how changes can be made to the act to better enhance our commitment to protecting the environment.
One thing that you've mentioned twice now is the possible regulation of commercial products that produce emissions and being able to regulate them during the production of the actual device. You used wood stoves as an example. I'm really interested in that. I'm curious to know if you could expand on that and give another couple of examples of devices like that.
Also, do you foresee any potential difficulties with doing that? Is there going to be criticism? I mean, there's always going to be criticism on everything, but what might be the potential challenges to that? Just give some off the top of your head.
Director General, Legislative and Regulatory Affairs, Department of the Environment
Another couple of examples; I'm an extremely uncreative person. I'm sure we can give you more examples, but I don't have any off the top of my head. I apologize.
Director General, Legislative and Regulatory Affairs, Department of the Environment
I knew somebody would come up with one. Yes, instead of using CEPA to deal with the content of baby bottles, the presence of BPA was banned using the Canada Consumer Product Safety Act rather than CEPA.
Another example that my colleague has just given me is that of a portable fuel container. It can be a piece of plastic or a piece of metal. You can design it so that the lid seals effectively and there are no fugitive emissions, or you can have it like the ones at my cottage that don't actually seal effectively.
Because the product itself doesn't contain a toxic substance and because of the way our regulatory regime authorities are structured now, we couldn't regulate the way that jerry can seals.
Liberal
Mark Gerretsen Liberal Kingston and the Islands, ON
Do you have no oversight of that, as it stands right now?
Director General, Legislative and Regulatory Affairs, Department of the Environment
Under the toxic authorities in CEPA, we do not; under other authorities, under other statutes, perhaps. Now, under vehicles, fuels, and engines, yes, we can do that kind of thing, but for vehicles, fuels, and engines.
All I'm saying is that if there are toxic substances, including greenhouse gases, that are best regulated by looking at the way in which a product is designed rather than the way it's used, we don't have that authority now.
Liberal
Mark Gerretsen Liberal Kingston and the Islands, ON
That's very interesting. I'd love to learn more about that later on, because I think there's great possibility there.
The other thing you talked about was auctioning permits. Is this basically the same idea as putting a price on carbon, whereby the permit goes to the individual who is willing to pay the most for it?
Director General, Legislative and Regulatory Affairs, Department of the Environment
The trading systems in which auctioning is most prevalent are indeed greenhouse gas variants of cap and trade. When a government establishes a cap and trade system, you have to decide who gets permits and how to issue the permits. Do you issue them for free, sell them for a fixed price, or do you auction them?
From a pure market perspective, auctioning certainly has some advantages. I'm not suggesting that's the way a government would necessarily go, but many jurisdictions have chosen to auction at least some of the permits, because that allows the market to demonstrate the value of the permit. The person who needs it the most will pay the most.
Liberal
Mark Gerretsen Liberal Kingston and the Islands, ON
I don't want to run the risk of making a comment that the chair will rule me out of order for, but I'm also very much interested, along the same lines of questioning that Mr. Amos and Mr. Cullen had, not with respect to the political parts of the review that was done in 2006 and I guess into 2007, but with respect to what came about from it, in terms of what was actually not a directive from the minister's office but what....
In the interest of doing a review now, it would be very useful to know the challenges with the previous review, so that we could, when doing it this time, understand how we can properly make sure that we don't fall into those same problems. Getting a good understanding of where we came from and what was or wasn't accomplished would be very useful for me. I'm not asking you necessarily to provide any comment on this, because I feel as though you may already have stated your case on that.
Director General, Legislative and Regulatory Affairs, Department of the Environment
No, I think what I was trying to explain is that my colleague and I cannot tell you why a decision was made. We would be very happy to provide you with a table of all the recommendations and the way in which the government responded to those recommendations. If you see that no response was made and wonder why not, well, that's a different discussion. But I can give you the documentation so that you can see that two-thirds were implemented, and perhaps you don't want to bother pursuing those again.
Liberal
Mark Gerretsen Liberal Kingston and the Islands, ON
Perfect. I know I'm out of time but, Madam Chair, I don't know whether this is something that requires an official request from the committee or whether it's something that the officials can just provide.
Director General, Legislative and Regulatory Affairs, Department of the Environment
I'll follow up, absolutely.
Director General, Legislative and Regulatory Affairs, Department of the Environment
Yes.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Deb Schulte
I think everybody would be appreciative of that. Thank you very much.
Mr. Eglinski.
Conservative
Jim Eglinski Conservative Yellowhead, AB
Thank you, Madam Chair, and thank you, Mr. Cooper and Mr. Moffet, for coming.
Thank you for a bit of clarification, in your last question, about the 31 recommendations. I look forward to seeing those, especially those that were acted upon. There were indications here that nothing was done, and I don't quite believe that.
Anyway, you mentioned that under the aspect of enforcement of the regulations you have a very robust program. Then there were some comments made, I believe, that you only got a couple of million dollars' worth of fines. I'm not exactly sure of the full amount; I didn't listen to that.
Does your organization, in enforcement, work in a proactive rather than reactive way? I'm an enforcement type of guy, and I'd rather work with companies, organizations or people in looking at ways to remedy the situation with respect to pollutants, or something like that. Is there an active phase of your enforcement department that works in that way, rather than just going out and finding violators? Do they have a proactive way of working with them and trying to resolve a problem before enforcement is actually necessary?
Director General, Legislative and Regulatory Affairs, Department of the Environment
I'll try to respond briefly, but I might suggest that if there is interest on the part of the committee in enforcement, that you might want to invite the chief enforcement officer to come and explain.
Very briefly, however, within Environment and Climate Change Canada, we distinguish compliance promotion activities from enforcement activities. We develop compliance promotion strategies for every regulation and every instrument and then go out and talk to affected parties about what they need to do to comply. The focus is generally on smaller businesses. Suncor doesn't need our help, but dry cleaners do.
Enforcement plans are developed on an annual basis. No matter how many resources we have, they're limited. We can't cover everything. On an annual basis, the department decides what to focus on and what not to focus on, keeping a certain proportion of our enforcement resources available for reactive actions that come up. But the proactive priorities are identified on a risk basis where the enforcement officials go out and proactively inspect and investigate, if needed.
I can tell you that last year, there were almost 5,000 inspections, 3 written directives, 562 written warnings, 78 environmental protection compliance orders, 10 tickets, 60 investigations, 37 charges laid, and 15 convictions obtained. We can give you that kind of information on a per trend basis if you want.
Conservative
Jim Eglinski Conservative Yellowhead, AB
I noticed your pollution prevention plans. Have you found that industry is working well? Are they accepting your standards, or are you finding certain segments of industry in Canada rebellious, in a sense?
