Good afternoon, and thank you.
I'm Cassie Barker with Environmental Defence.
Thank you for including PFAS in your study. As mentioned, this class of chemicals poses a significant danger to freshwater ecosystems, source waters and human and environmental health. This committee has heard from municipal leaders who have not had the resources to upgrade their water treatment facilities to filter out PFAS and who are also unable to address the causes of source-water contamination in their own communities.
The government states that 98.5% of Canadians have PFAS in their blood. Drinking water and freshwater consumption as well as product-based exposures are significant sources of ongoing PFAS exposure.
These forever chemicals don't break down. They make us sick, and other jurisdictions have already taken action. Scientists, firefighters, northern indigenous health experts, environmental health organizations and some of the world's leading product brands are pushing for class-based PFAS phase-outs.
Recent polling from Abacus found that four out of five Canadians want to see federal government action on PFAS. We ask the committee to protect fresh water and ensure all PFAS are included in the government's class-based listing under CEPA and that regulations align with the EU and U.S. states to move quickly and impose a product-based phase-out.
These chemicals persist because PFAS have a strong fluorine-carbon bond, the strongest bond in organic chemistry. Because of this, once PFAS are formed they don't break down. Instead, they persist forever and accumulate in the environment and in our bodies. For years, stain-proof and waterproof “forever chemicals” have been used in industry, pulp and paper production, fracking fluid, plastics, electronics manufacturing and in hundreds of product types, as mentioned earlier. There are now thousands of PFAS on the market in over 200 product categories. Scientists with expertise in PFAS state that all well-studied PFAS show human health harms and that the health and environmental risks of PFAS, coupled with their extreme environmental persistence, require a class-based approach.
The OECD definition of PFAS used in the government's own risk assessment further reinforces regulating PFAS as a class. Cancers, kidney disease and reproductive harms are just a few of the many ways that PFAS can impact our health at relatively low levels of exposure as they mimic fatty acids in our bodies, disrupt hormones and suppress our immune systems.
Northern indigenous people are particularly impacted by PFAS contamination, and leaders have been calling for the urgent need to act. Firefighters are also highly exposed through firefighting gear and foams. Firefighters now die more from exposure-related cancers than they do from fighting fires.
PFAS cleanup costs, as mentioned, are in the range of billions of dollars, and this should not be borne by municipalities attempting to depollute their source water. It is the chemical companies that have known about and concealed the toxicity of PFAS for decades that must be held liable for this cleanup. In fact, as mentioned, we're seeing municipalities in the U.S. sue chemical companies over the costs to depollute their source water and drinking water, and these settlements have just begun.
Other jurisdictions are protecting their fresh water by regulating and prohibiting PFAS. Canada needs to do the same. The U.S. is in the midst of implementing its three-year PFAS strategy, and they have established a binding drinking water standard for some PFAS. Many U.S. states, including California, Washington, New York and Maine, are bringing in drinking water standards and product-based phase-outs in cosmetics, textiles and food packaging.
The EU has a road map for phasing out PFAS in products, starting quickly with the product types with existing safer substitutions. Denmark has also started taking action to get this class of chemicals out of their paper products.
Urgent action is needed to address this growing PFAS threat in Canada. The Canadian government must support municipalities that need federal leadership to prohibit the sources of PFAS. The federal government recently proposed a municipal drinking water objective, but until it prohibits PFAS contamination of our waters from products and industrial releases, this objective will do little to reduce PFAS contamination in our drinking water.
This government can and must do more to advance PFAS regulatory action and set strong rules to drive reformulation of products away from PFAS to switch to existing safer alternatives and push industry to invest in innovation.
Thank you.