I'll provide a little bit of background. Health Canada was formed before the Great War. Environment Canada was formed in 1971. Until 1988, Environment Canada operated on the basis of using various statutes that pre-existed the department. In 1988, Parliament consolidated a number of statutes and parts of statutes into what then became known as the Canadian Environmental Protection Act. That act had a primary focus on pollution, but significantly on pollution from both an environmental perspective and a human health perspective. That, of course, remains the primary focus of CEPA today.
During the 1990s, CEPA 88 underwent a very extensive review by your committee's predecessor, chaired by Charles Caccia. The review resulted in a very comprehensive set of recommendations to enhance the act and strengthen it in numerous ways. The government provided a detailed response, and then effectively tabled a new bill, which in turn went through an extensive clause-by-clause review and resulted in CEPA 99. Since then, CEPA 99 has undergone a handful of minor modifications, a review by a House committee, and a parallel review by a Senate committee in 2006 and 2007. However, no subsequent Parliamentary reviews and no comprehensive set of reforms have been made to the act since it was introduced in 1999.
Environment and Climate Change Canada has two primary pollution statutes. One is the Fisheries Act, which contains a prohibition on depositing deleterious substances in the water. That's the primary statutory authority for addressing water pollution. However, for all other pollution, CEPA is our main statute. Of course, many other departments have other statutes that address environment and health risks. Most of those statutes are product focused. For example, Agriculture Canada and CFIA have a number of statutes that focus on seeds, feeds, etc. Our colleagues at Health Canada have the Food and Drugs Act and the Canada Consumer Product Safety Act, a lot of product-focused acts.
The way CEPA generally works is that if another act provides for equivalent environmental and health protection, CEPA stands down and the other act operates, which makes sense because that act has been designed specifically for that set of products. However, CEPA sets some basic requirements and allows the government to intervene in a wide range of areas.
We tend to think of CEPA as providing a tool box, a broad set of authorities to address a wide range of issues using a wide range of tools. In some cases, however, the act is a little more prescriptive and that's generally the case where Parliament has decided to use the act to bring into Canadian law a commitment that we've made internationally. I'll get to a couple of examples later in my presentation.
Now, for those of you who have attempted to wade through CEPA, or have even been deterred by the bulk of it, you'll know that it's an extensive act and it's a complicated statute. One way to understand it is simply by looking at the structure to determine which chapter addresses what issue. Another way to think about it is what broad sets of authorities it contains, what tools it enables the government to use. A third way to understand it is as to what subjects or issues the government has used CEPA to address.
I am going to take you through all three, and I hope that will give you a good basis for understanding the statute.
Slide 5 gives you a summary of the main structure of the act. The actual table of contents is reproduced in annex B on slide 20. The front end of the statute gives some crosscutting authorities and some obligations related to requirements for transparency and public participation, some authorities for gathering information to determine what kinds of issues to address, and authorities for some of the tools that we use, objectives, guidelines, and codes of practice.
My colleague John Cooper has described the work the government does to address chemicals under the chemicals management plan. The legal framework for that work is primarily found in parts 4, 5, and 6 of CEPA, which are premised on this test of whether a substance is toxic. That is a term that is carefully defined in the act and is a much broader term than the meaning of “toxic” in normal parlance. It essentially means harmful to health, harmful to the environment, or harmful to the environment on which human life depends. It's a very broad definition of risk. The act separates what one might think of as chemicals or inanimate products, and animate products or toxic substances in living organisms, but basically the same regime applies to both.
Part 7 focuses on various specific sources of pollution. You can trace the history of some of those provisions back to pre-CEPA 1988. Nutrients provisions were in another statute and brought into CEPA at that time. Some of the air pollution provisions for vehicles, fuels, and engines were in other statutes and brought into CEPA. Other provisions in this part, as I mentioned earlier, are designed to address international agreements. There is a set of provisions about ocean disposal, which basically replicate the London protocol under the London convention. Another set of provisions addresses transboundary movement of hazardous waste and hazardous recyclable materials. Those are basically designed to enable Canada to comply with its obligations both under a bilateral Canada-U.S. agreement and under an international agreement known as the Basel convention.
We have fairly extensive authorities to address environmental emergencies, both to require planning and to take action. Part 9 allows us to address pollution from government operations, federal undertakings, and activities that occur on federal lands. Collectively, this is known as the federal house. It is important to have these authorities because although the jurisprudence is a little fuzzy, in general, one can say that many provincial environmental laws do not apply to the federal house. Whereas on most land in Canada an activity would be subject to a combination of federal and provincial laws, or federal and territorial laws, within the federal house, whether it's a federal activity or an activity on federal land, including aboriginal land, in general, most of those provincial environmental laws do not apply, so there is a gap that needs to be filled.
Then we have a very extensive enforcement regime.
All told, it's an extensive act and a powerful act. One of our previous ministers actually did wade through the entire act and commented after reading it that CEPA is a Ferrari. I'm not sure I'd go that far. I guess he was one of those rare politicians who are prone to hyperbole.