Thank you.
Thank you very much to the Standing Committee on Finance for inviting me to appear today as a witness.
My name is Dr. Leah Temper. I'm the health and economic policy program director at the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment. I also hold a Ph.D. in ecological economics, an interdisciplinary field that considers the economic system as a subsystem of the earth's ecosystem.
Today, I'm going to be speaking about greenwashing and clause 236 of Bill C-59. My colleague from the Quebec Environmental Law Center addressed you on Tuesday and outlined four recommendations from a brief we jointly submitted. These include expanding the amendment to include all business interests and entities as well as products; broadening the scope to all environmental claims; and requiring disclosure of the evidence behind any green claims to consumers, as well as disclosure of negative environmental impacts related to products and industries to address cherry-picking.
Julien did a great job, so I would therefore like to take my time today to highlight the urgency and benefits of taking bold and effective action on greenwashing through Bill C-59.
We know that greenwashing is bad for business, that it cheats consumers and that it hinders green innovation, but I'd like to stress how it's bad for all of our health and our shared environment. One example of this is the well-known case of the Volkswagen emissions scandal, which led to the largest environmental fine in Canadian competition history, when it came to public attention that the company was marketing clean diesels that emitted over 40 times more pollution than it claimed.
The company eventually paid out about $40 billion in damages globally, but there's a study in Europe that estimated the excess air pollution emitted as a result of this deception shortened 1,200 lives in Europe by 10 to 20 years each, leading to about 13,000 years of life lost. Customers in Canada were paid out, but the public who was exposed to the toxic diesel fumes and the children who suffered increased respiratory health issues were of course never compensated.
Today, we know that the vast bulk of greenwashing revolves around claims of net zero and carbon neutrality, and these empty words are undermining and derailing the necessary transition to phasing down fossil fuel use. The IPCC clearly said that disinformation from vested interests in highly polluting sectors in Canada is undermining public support for climate change and is obstructing action.
Greenwashing about false solutions to climate change runs the risk of locking us into these false solutions that are neither environmentally clean nor economically viable without ongoing government subsidies. We should learn from a recent report that highlighted how petrochemical companies marketed plastic as recyclable for decades, in order to boost “disposability profits”, when industry insiders knew from the beginning that plastics recycling was uneconomical and was not a viable way to address the plastic waste crisis.
Similarly, oil marketed as net zero is not clean. It of course still emits tailpipe emissions and should never be marketed as environmentally friendly. We know that transport air pollution in Canada remains a major contributor to the over 850,000 children under the age of 14 in Canada who suffer from asthma.
Green claims are also different. They suffer from information asymmetry in a more significant way than other product claims because consumers do not have the tools to verify their truthfulness the same way they can verify the durability or the effectiveness of a product. This highlights the importance of the disclosure requirement we have asked for.
Of even greater concern is what Wren Montgomery, a professor at the Ivey Business School, terms “futurewashing”, which are large, unsubstantiated commitments for the future. Of course, such claims cannot be verified, and they should be considered misleading in almost all circumstances.
She and her colleagues also highlight other features of what they term “greenwashing 3.0”, including how green claims are being used by polluting industries as political strategies for maintaining corporate reputation and social licence and how such messages are being targeted at stakeholders beyond consumers and used to dispute the feasibility of stricter environmental regulations. Greenwashing 3.0 points to the urgency of broadening the testing requirements of section 236 to include all business interests and not only products, and for the need for complementary regulations to those that our trading partners have already put in place.
I will close by saying that CAPE has filed several complaints with the Competition Bureau against fossil fuel interests for deceptive advertising in the last years. However, the process in Canada is exceedingly slow, with an estimated two to three years for a complaint to be resolved. In the meantime, the deceptive ads continue to inundate our airwaves, radios, buses and computer screens. This is, of course, of concern, because the decisions we take today will define our energy systems for decades to come, and because consumer skepticism is setting in whereby soon, any green claim, no matter how genuine, will no longer be believed, seriously undermining consumer confidence. This is why I ask you to strengthen—