Thank you, Madam Chair, for the opportunity to appear today to discuss the consumer product safety-related aspects of the Public Health Agency's “Child and Youth Injury in Review, 2009 Edition”.
As you said, my name is Athana Mentzelopoulos. I'm director general of the Consumer Product Safety Directorate at Health Canada, and I'm accompanied today by Denis Roy. He is a mechanical engineer who works in the mechanical and electrical hazards division of my directorate.
The “Child and Youth Injury in Review” is an important publication for those who work in product safety. It helps to increase the public's awareness of the dangers that consumer products can pose, and it has helped us in our ongoing efforts to make products, and particularly children's products, safe.
Any product can pose a risk if it is used inappropriately. No doubt you have heard this truism in a variety of forms. Water, for example, is essential for life, but drinking a profound volume of water can be fatal. Equally so, no product can substitute for a parent or a caregiver.
In my area of work, one of our ongoing priorities is to inform consumers about the appropriate use of products. It is essential to follow manufacturers' instructions for use, for example. We also routinely issue reminders about safe use of and practices related to consumer products, and we frequently advise consumers about risks posed by consumer products, either as a result of their normal use or because of unseen or unintentional hazards.
Some recent examples of our work have been the series of warnings we have issued about the presence of lead and more recently of cadmium in children's jewellery. We have also continued to remind Canadians about safe sleep practices for infants, including the need to ensure that infants sleep in a crib that has been properly assembled and is free of bumper pads, pillows, and other decorations.
In the Consumer Product Safety Directorate, we regulate certain products and classes of products, and wherever we cannot sufficiently address and mitigate a risk through regulations, we have prohibitions. This is the case for, among other things, toys.
In Canada, safety requirements for toys are currently specified in the Hazardous Products Act and its associated regulations. Under this act, certain toys are prohibited, while others are restricted. There are requirements concerning the size of component parts of toys, allowable stuffing materials, and limits on the presence of lead and toxic substances, among other requirements.
It is the responsibility of manufacturers, importers, distributors, and retailers to ensure that they are complying with the Hazardous Products Act and the regulations. Product safety officers routinely monitor the marketplace and take appropriate enforcement action on toys and other products that contravene the legislation. We also have a laboratory, the product safety laboratory, that examines potentially hazardous products in order to assess the nature and degree of any hazards.
In our work on product safety we are attentive to the normal and foreseeable use of products. We consider dangers posed by consumer products to be those unreasonable hazards that are posed by a product during or as a result of its normal or foreseeable use and that might cause injury or death. There is a reasonableness standard that must be adhered to and that guides our work.
As many members here today know, Health Canada is currently proposing to change the legislative framework for consumer product safety. That legislation is now before a Senate committee.
As I mentioned, we currently work in the context of the Hazardous Products Act. That legislation is 40 years old and is a framework that only permits us to react to risks and hazards as they emerge through the preparation of regulations and prohibitions.
On the basis of this legislation, we have developed specific and very prescriptive regulations for toys, a prohibition on baby walkers, regulations for cribs and cradles, limits on the use of lead in children's products, requirements for teethers and rattles, and a prohibition on yo-yo balls, among many other things. All of these regulations and prohibitions will be transferred to the Canada Consumer Product Safety Act, should it pass, and the level of protection they afford will be maintained.
The proposed Canada Consumer Product Safety Act—the CCPSA—will fundamentally change and improve the way we approach product safety in Canada. Bill C-36, the CCPSA, includes a number of elements that will help us to further strengthen consumer safety. It has a general prohibition against consumer products that are a danger to human health or safety. It would also require industry to report product-related incidents and would give the government the authority for mandatory recalls. That's something I know members here are very familiar with.
These authorities all support a three-pillar approach to product safety: active prevention, targeted oversight, and rapid response. These are essential pillars to our program, because we have a post-market regulatory regime for consumer products in Canada. That means there is no requirement for certification or for approvals by government for industry before they introduce new products to the market.
We need the tools in the CCPSA so that we can generate product-related intelligence that will be the basis of an early warning system when problems with the product emerge. In the future, should the CCPSA pass, we will be able to act quickly and proactively at the first signs of emerging product-related problems. Rather than necessarily going through the process of developing regulations to deal with product-specific hazards, we will be able to use the general prohibition as part of our step-wise enforcement to act quickly when we have determined that a danger to human health or safety exists.
Given the post-market nature of the consumer product market, the rapid innovation in consumer products, and the insatiable desire for new products and new design, work in product safety is never done. The CCPSA is one element of the government's food and consumer safety action plan. Through that plan, we have also been resourced for more inspectors, more outreach work to consumers and industry, and more work in the area of standards development. Through its elements, the food and consumer safety action plan is building a consumer product partnership in which industry is more aware of its obligations for safe products, consumers have more information about the products they are purchasing, and government has more flexible and modern powers to help ensure safety.
The Hazardous Products Act has served us well over recent decades of work. We have a significant body of regulations and prohibitions, and we also have an aggressive work agenda for modernizing some of those regulations and for developing new ones.
Just yesterday, our minister announced new changes to regulations under the act that will restrict the amount of lead in a variety of consumer products, including children's toys. We are also currently involved in a project with the United States and the EU, and more recently Australia has joined, to improve safety standards for corded window coverings. Our requirements in Canada for these products are already among the strictest in the world, but we are working with our international partners to address certain hazards posed by Roman shades and by roll-up blinds.
We also have ongoing initiatives to improve our toy regulations, including dangers posed by small, powerful magnets; to address infant bath seats, potentially to regulate them; to improve our already world-leading regulations for cribs, cradles, and bassinets; and to review potential standards for ski helmets. Most of all, we are looking forward to the passage of the Canada Consumer Product Safety Act and to the changes the legislation will bring to product safety in Canada. We are hopeful that our focus will soon turn to implementation of that legislation.
Thank you, Madam Chair.