Thank you. That has us very concerned as well. We learned quite late. We were not consulted as stakeholders. The environmental groups in Canada were also not consulted.
This bilateral pact that was enjoined between the U.S and Canada basically allows Canada to ignore its Basel obligations. These new plastic amendments, which are meant to control the mixed and dirty and difficult-to-recycle plastics and to provide transparency and monitoring and controls over them, were just ignored. They said, “We are going to sign this agreement, and by doing that we will maintain the status quo of opaque, untransparent, uncontrolled trade.” This has us very worried, because the U.S. is a major exporter of all kinds of problematic waste to developing countries, and it's very easy for a Canadian actor now to just send things through the U.S. and avoid the obligations of the Basel Convention.
The agreement itself was highly criticized, because although countries are allowed to have separate bilateral agreements under the Basel Convention, they have to have the same controls and environmental rigour as the convention itself. Saying you're not going to do anything with these new definitions certainly does not represent the same level of control as accepting these new controls.
It's illegal on the face of it, in our view, but it's also very problematic in terms of what it's going to do with respect to North America contributing to the contamination of the developing world.