Thank you, Mr. Chair.
My name is Mark Winfield. I'm a professor of environmental and urban change at York University. I also run the joint program on environmental studies and law that we offer in conjunction with Osgoode Hall Law School.
I want to thank the members for the opportunity to speak to the committee today about these important issues related to the administration and enforcement of CEPA. I have a long history of engagement with the act. I was very involved with the original CEPA review back in 1995, when the late Honourable Mr. Caccia was in the chair. The committee led the review that led to essentially the current version of the act. I have continued to follow this over the years, particularly with respect to the federal-provincial dimensions. Most recently, I was an adviser to the commissioner of the environment and sustainable development on their most recent audit of the act.
I will focus on the wider issues around the enforcement of CEPA and not so much on the specifics of the Volkswagen case. Others have spoken to that. I think we need to think of the Volkswagen case as a bit of an outlier in terms of the overall enforcement story around CEPA. I really want to focus on that narrative. This is a complicated story, and that reflects the scope of the act.
In approaching this, I had a look back at the report that was done through the commissioner's office and the annual reports under CEPA. A number of things come out very strongly in this. One is that there's really a number of regulations under CEPA, but the enforcement activities on the part of the department seem to be relatively focused on a fairly short list of those regulations: PCBs; the import and export of hazardous waste; and in 2017-18 a lot on the environmental emergencies and also on petroleum storage tank regulations that apply on only federal lands and federal jurisdiction.
The implication of this that is you have a wide range of regulations. Some are very significant from an environment and health perspective, around which there seems to be very little enforcement activity in terms of inspections and warnings. We have already heard about the relative rarity of actual prosecutions. Thinking about pulp and paper regulations, new substances regulations, rules around the national pollutant release inventory, and ocean disposal, an area where the federal government is the primary regulator, we're seeing relatively little activity.
The other area I want to highlight to the committee members is a perpetual one: The enforcement of certain regulations falls under administrative or equivalency agreements with some provinces, and from an information perspective, that situation is fairly opaque. We get very little meaningful information about what's happening under those agreements at the provincial level. I also note that we do have a new wave of these agreements emerging, particularly around climate change measures related to coal-fired electricity and methane.
Thank you.