Thank you. It's good to see you again, Mr. Chair.
Thank you all for inviting me and having me around to discuss Bill C-326. As you've just heard, I'm a Professor in the Faculties of Law and Medicine at the University of Ottawa. I'm a biologist by background, educated abroad at Berkeley, Caltech, and Oxford, and then I said “enough of that”, and I became a lawyer and got my law degree at UBC.
My work at the University of Ottawa—and before that in other faculty positions I held at Yale and Harvard—has to do with law, public health, and human or environmental security. That is the focus of my research and my litigation. It is also a set of goals shared by Ecojustice, which is a really quite remarkable environmental law organization. It's a charity, the largest of its kind in Canada and one that is partnered with our law school at the University of Ottawa.
In Canada, a simple glass of water, like the one before me now, should be safe to drink anywhere in the country. If Canada were a perfect country, it would be safe to drink this anywhere, but we're not perfect. Our country is definitely not perfect on water. Most Canadian cities have relatively sophisticated water treatment facilities. Many rural parts of the country or first nations communities do not, and they rely on untreated or minimally treated water. That said, here in the national capital region, just a few days ago there was a boil water advisory up in the Pontiac, so it presses in on our cities as well.
For Canada 150 last year, a time of celebration for most of us, there were also over 150 first nations communities with boil water advisories, which is a disappointing fact. The longest of those boil water advisories had been going on for over 8,000 days—over 20 years. I can honestly say from my research that there really is no other developed country as lagging and as backwards as Canada is on drinking water, and that's a tragedy.
Ecojustice, the charity, has a long-standing interest in this area through representing groups in litigation or regulatory proceedings, but also in research, and particularly in publishing a series of reports call “Waterproof”. I'm going to take you through the highlights of the 2014 report.
In that report, Ecojustice looked at the Canadian guidelines for drinking water quality, which are basically the maximum levels of chemical, radiological, or microbiological contamination that are tolerable in drinking water in Canada. Ecojustice compared those Canadian safety levels to the standards in the United States, the European Union, and Australia, and also to the global standards from the World Health Organization.
They found that the Canadian standards quite frequently lag behind. While Canada has reached first place or tied in first place in 24 instances, more often than not we're in last place for 27 different substances compared to the U.S., the EU, Australian, or WHO standards. In fully 105 cases of substances that those others regulate, Canada does not have a water safety standard at all—nothing. There are well over 100 cases where Australia, the EU, and the U.S. have standards and we simply don't, of any kind or of any level.
An example is a herbicide called 2,4-D, which is very widely used. In those countries I mentioned, the safety threshold is up to three times more stringent than it is in Canada. In Ontario and Quebec, for example, there's a ban on using 2,4-D as a cosmetic herbicide, for instance to make golf courses pretty. It's prohibited. However, there's no standard for it in our drinking water at all.
Let's take styrene, the key ingredient in polystyrene, which I'm sure you've heard of. We have no safety standard for styrene in drinking water. The World Health Organization classifies styrene as possibly carcinogenic in humans. A derivative of it, Styrene-7, 8-oxide, is classed by the World Health Organization as probably carcinogenic in humans. Those are found in drinking water at unregulated levels because we have no standard.
Along with poor safety standards—and I've just given you two examples—Canada also has no requirement to treat surface water, or groundwater that is mixed with surface water. Other countries directly or indirectly legislate to require such treatment. We do not. No wonder we are up to our eyeballs in drinking water advisories and boil water advisories. It's as simple as that.
With regard to what to do, the “Waterproof” report has a number of recommendations. It's good reading, if you'd like to see it.
However, for today's purposes, the most important thing to discuss is the special review policy in Bill C-326. What that bill calls on the minister to do is conduct a special review any time that an OECD country passes up Canada with a newer or tougher safety standard in drinking water. The basic idea there is that the minister has to watch the OECD. We would tend not to fall into last place if we were watching what the rest of the OECD is doing. You get in first place in a race by watching the guys a little behind you and trying to run a bit faster. That's the philosophy behind the special review requirement in the bill. If the minister thinks it's in Canadians' best interest to adopt a tougher OECD-inspired standard, she has the option of doing so. She has the option of adopting that, and making a recommendation in an annual report that she gives to Parliament.
Now, as for my thoughts on this, the idea of comparing us to the OECD is very good. Parliament has done this before. We have used the OECD as a comparator for pesticides and toxins in the Pest Control Products Act and in the Canadian Environmental Protection Act. However, here's the difference. Those laws make it mandatory for the minister to take action on a special review when Canada is behind its OECD peers; Bill C-326 makes it optional. This is obviously an area of potential improvement. The ministerial action could be mandatory instead of optional.
That said, do I urge the committee to recommend the passage of the bill? Of course I do, but with amendments, if you'd like to, including the amendment I just discussed. That's an option, as well. That's what you do here.
I'll leave it there. Thank you for making time, and I look forward to your questions.