Thank you.
Let me start by saying that the members of the Canadian Chemical Producers' Association produce and market a wide variety of chemicals.
I'd like to restrict my comments to the chemical precursors, in particular the multi-use aspects of a number of the chemical precursors. I'll also restrict my comments to industrial chemicals, not the pharmaceutical active ingredients, which are outside of our membership's purview.
For the most part, our members produce and market to other companies, who in turn produce the products for public consumption. Very little of our production goes directly to the public.
The global trade in chemicals is second only to motor vehicles. Canadian exports to the United States are over 80%. Roughly 80% of our total production in this country is exported. There are estimated to be somewhere between 80,000 and 100,000 chemicals of commerce worldwide. In Canada, there are over 20,000 chemicals that are marketed commercially, and many times that are available in lab quantities.
While we produce only a small number of different industrial chemicals within our membership, the Canadian economy uses as diverse a range of chemicals as in any other developed country. I think the chemical sector needs to present to this group that many of the chemicals we produce are inherently hazardous. All of them deserve respect, in both production and handling. Many chemicals have multiple uses, and many chemicals are precursors for the production of other chemicals. I want to come back to that with a couple of examples.
Our members are working within an advisory working group on precursor control regulations. We have been working with Health Canada on how to put necessary controls in place that would allow normal business practice to proceed and yet give the regulators and law enforcement adequate tools to manage the illicit handling of our products.
I'd like to briefly mention a couple of things for the record--and I apologize if I'm speaking to the converted--on the class A and class B precursors.
For class A, at this point you have to be licensed as a manufacturer or shipper. You can only sell to licensed purchasers. You must keep records of what is produced, and those records must be available to enforcement officials.
For class B chemicals, you must be registered, maintain business records, and be audited. As a condition of membership in our association, our members are required to deal only with reputable buyers. They're committed to refusing any suspicious sales where the purchaser does not have a line of business that directly requires the chemicals being purchased.
I want to mention a few specific examples. There is an increasing diversity of chemical imports, with enormous growth in container shipment traffic, particularly through the west coast. Carriers into remote areas of this country might need to come under increasing scrutiny. A number of key carriers, including railways, and a number of trucking companies are associate members of our association, and we spend a lot of time working with them on recognizing when products might be diverted.
Our association also works with Foreign Affairs and International Trade in the chemical weapons area. We work with Natural Resources Canada on explosives precursors, and, as I mentioned, we're part of this group with Health Canada.
There are many areas where chemicals can be diverted for illicit use. Let me give you a couple of examples of class A and class B multiple uses.
Acetic anhydride, which is one of the class A listed chemicals, is also used in water treatment and water purification and air purification as a disinfectant. In the class B area, first of all, all of the chemicals there are multiple use, but let me pick up on acetone, whether it's being used as nail polish remover or being used in the manufacture of paints or varnishes. There's a whole series of applications.
But there are a couple others I'd like to mention specifically. One is sulphuric acid. It's by far the most widely used industrial chemical worldwide. In the United States alone, over 40 million tonnes a year are shipped around the country and outside of the country. Canada is somewhere in the neighbourhood of 10 million to 15 million tonnes a year. In the case of hydrochloric acid, about five million tonnes a year are shipped. These products have multiple uses. They are used in fertilizer production. They have a wide variety of uses.
Our message is that many of the class A and all of the class B precursor chemicals are multiple-use in commerce. Doing something further or eliminating these products would have a considerable impact on the Canadian economy, restricting the ability to produce a wide variety of important and required goods of commerce. For the most part, banning the use or restricting the use further of these dual-use chemicals would only result in using alternate chemicals to make the same product. Chemistry can find a way.
We don't think that product deselection is going to solve the problem. We do think there needs to be effective monitoring of the products that we produce and where they go, and we believe we're doing that. We're also working very closely with the Health Canada officials on the list and keeping it up to date. We believe your existing legislation has provisions for adding to and subtracting from that list as the technologies evolve.
I'll stop there and offer to take questions.
Thank you.