Perhaps I can start.
The government did adopt a concept of virtual elimination, both in the toxic substances management policy and in the statute when it was amended in 1999. Since then, however, the virtual elimination regime in the act has proven to be unworkable and has had almost no impact on decision-making in the federal government or on actual prevention of risks.
In Bill S-5, the government is proposing to replace that regime for two reasons. The first, as I said, is that it has proven to be not workable for a variety of reasons. Second, the government also intends to expand the underlying obligation. The underlying obligation for virtual elimination is to essentially say that there are a number of substances that are problematic. Those are toxic substances. Some are particularly of concern and need to have particularly stringent risk management actions taken to achieve virtual elimination. At the time the virtual elimination concept was developed, that subset was confined to substances that are persistent, that last a long time and that bioaccumulate in living organisms.
In the last 20 to 30 years, we've identified a number of other sets of substances that are equally of concern. We've already discussed in this committee the concept of mutagenicity, carcinogenicity and so on. Bill S-5 proposes to replace this narrow concept of virtual elimination of persistent bioaccumulative substances with a much broader authority to identify substances of highest concern to give some guidance in the statute and then require the ministers to develop, by means of regulation, the broad criteria to determine the substances that will be on that list and that therefore require more stringent risk management than other toxic substances.
The goal is actually not to weaken but instead to broaden this category and also to avoid some of the unintended challenges that arose with respect to the implementation of the original virtual elimination regime and to give the government broad authority to bring in very stringent protection on that broad subset of substances.