Transport Committee on Feb. 23rd, 2017

[The Chair, Liberal, Judy Sgro]

Thank you very much.

Monsieur Aubin.

[Robert Aubin, NDP, Trois-Rivières, QC]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Mr. Bratina, thank you for being here with us this morning.

I would first say that you have not said very much to convince me of the relevance of the issue you are defending. I had the opportunity of speaking on this during the first hour of debate in the House. However, I would like you to explain why it would be relevant for the committee to undertake a more exhaustive study of this issue.

If I may I would like to compare your motion and the text of the amended motion. The first motion reads as follows:

[...] the government should address the growing concerns of lead pipes and water quality [...] to advocate and establish possible solutions to these issues [...]

That wording really gave me the impression that we would initiate some action. But for reasons that escape me, the wording was amended by the parliamentary secretary of the Government House Leader, and now reads as follows:

[...] the Standing Committee on Transport, Infrastructure and Communities should undertake a study [...] to discuss options for addressing lead drinking water service lines [...]

We are very far here from the action verbs in the first motion. There is a certain overlap in some things, such as the idea of a study on the presence of lead, and the efforts made by governments.

What I understand from the amended version, in short, is that we are now talking about doing an inventory rather than a real study to find solutions to the problems you have raised.

Do you think it is relevant to use the resources of the committee to draw up an inventory? That inventory could be done by a researcher or even by an employee of the Library of Parliament, and then the committee could examine potential solutions.

[Bob Bratina, Liberal, Hamilton East—Stoney Creek, ON]

I appreciate your comments.

I would have preferred the original, unamended motion, but this is not a matter anymore of gathering information, inventories of.... Somebody is going to have to do that, but that's not what I see as the resources of this committee in addressing this problem.

First of all, because I brought the motion forward—whether it's happenstance or serendipity—Health Canada is reviewing the maximum acceptable concentration now, looking to cut it by half.

Last night, I was sitting after a busy day of attending other conversations about this subject, and Peter Mansbridge on The National said that next week they're going to look at the Flint lead drinking water situation, a special study by the CBC. It's very topical.

I think the most power this committee will have is not expending a lot of resources over many months of testimony, but highlighting the fact that it is an issue that is affecting young, newborn children, especially poorer people, all across the country.

Not only did the CBC pick up on this, but Arizona State University's school of journalism—our student friends may be interested in this because it's called the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism—decided that the biggest story on an environmental issue that they could take for the students to dig into was drinking water, as a result of Flint.

That school extended an invitation, and other schools that will be participating are Dublin City University in Ireland, George Washington University in south California, Louisiana State, Syracuse, Alabama, Oklahoma, and the University of British Columbia Graduate School of Journalism. All these young people are going to be examining the problem of lead in municipal water supplies.

There is a very simple task, I think, that this committee has: to see whether the funding that is being made available to communities with regard to their infrastructure is being applied in a focused way to assist communities and households in solving this problem.

[Robert Aubin, NDP, Trois-Rivières, QC]

Thank you.

You have almost answered my second question, but I want to see if I understood.

Listening to you, I have the impression that the federal level is probably the level of government that lags the furthest behind in understanding this issue and that the provinces, if not the municipalities, already have the expertise.

Should we not ensure that this folds into the subsidies granted for infrastructure projects, so that these projects would be eligible for federal funding?

[Bob Bratina, Liberal, Hamilton East—Stoney Creek, ON]

It's a good point, and I think it's a conversation that the committee can have in a simple, efficient, and fast way to get at the question whether resources are adequate and whether they're properly placed provincially and municipally.

The provinces have frankly let me down, when a medical officer of health is saying, “Let's just keep an eye on the situation” and “Go see your doctor.” The evidence is so strong of the dangers to certain people.

I've had people say to me, “I grew up in a house with lead pipes and I'm fine.”

I say, “Maybe. Did your mother breastfeed you?”, because it's baby formula with leaded water that is a very high ingestive point of this neurotoxin.

On the other hand, although you may be smart, perhaps you might have been a genius. It's like people saying, “I smoke and I didn't get sick, so let's just forget about the anti-smoking stuff.” There's a real problem; it's going to affect children for their entire lives. There's so much research.

The top research on this is from Simon Fraser University, by an American who came from Cincinnati who did studies that found that incarcerated people in the Ohio state penal system had exceedances of lead in their blood and the behaviours that are caused by changes to the prefrontal lobe of the brain, where all of the humanity of a person sits. We can't just say, “They should know about it.”

I think this committee could very quickly bring the right attention and seek the funding available or that otherwise should be created to address this. I would hate to leave my opportunity as a member of Parliament without having asked my colleagues to take a look at this and see what we can do about it.

[The Chair, Liberal, Judy Sgro]

Thank you very much, Mr. Bratina.

Mr. Fraser.

[Sean Fraser, Liberal, Central Nova, NS]

Thank you very much for being here.

By way of background, you kicked off your remarks with a statement about the EPA and its knowledge of the scope of the problem in the U.S. Do we know whether the scope of the problem in Canada is similar to that in the U.S., or are we wanting information right now?

[Bob Bratina, Liberal, Hamilton East—Stoney Creek, ON]

I haven't seen the problem phrased in the way I state it, that it's the number one environmental health issue for children under the age of six. Health Canada explicitly states that there is no safe level of lead in a child's blood, and there's plenty of information on the Health Canada sites as to what people should be worried about, especially with regard to developing children. It's all out there, then, but it's being phrased in different ways. I wanted to use the very dramatic statement by the U.S. government to kick this off, and I doubt whether Health Canada would argue—and the World Health Organization, and the Centers for Disease Control. All the leading authorities are on this subject.

Is the Government of Canada? That's my question.

[Sean Fraser, Liberal, Central Nova, NS]

Do you know whether any kind of analysis has been conducted within Canada already that demonstrates the social or economic impact of this problem? You said that in B.C., I think it was, at a population level no detrimental effects have been observed, but common sense would suggest that at the individual level such effects could happen.

[Bob Bratina, Liberal, Hamilton East—Stoney Creek, ON]

What we know is that, as referred to earlier by Mr. Hardie, in the old days of leaded gasoline.... I can remember when my dad filled the car up, because I am old enough, I loved that smell. It probably affected me, so all of my shortcomings I'm blaming on leaded gasoline.

What we know, however, is that the graph of blood lead levels in North America from the 1970s to now shows them to have gone down dramatically. If you want to say, “It's gone down dramatically, so why are we here today?”, the fact is that for certain population cohorts, especially the newborn, there's a completely opposite graph developing.

What bothers one is that you can get certain sorts of diseases or you can fall and break your arm, but once the prefrontal lobe of the brain is diminished in size, it stays that way, because lead fools it into thinking it's something good. It's not, and it screws up the way the brain develops, and that's the end of it.

If you want to say, “It's only children at age one, so how many of them are there in Canada, and is this a problem we should be dealing with?”, I would say yes, it is.

[Sean Fraser, Liberal, Central Nova, NS]

I find it very curious that there wouldn't have been a population-level impact observed, if somebody ever looked at that. Do you know if there has ever been a controlled study that examined the difference in a community with lower lead levels in their blood, for example, and the impact that it has actually had on a community?

[Bob Bratina, Liberal, Hamilton East—Stoney Creek, ON]

When I said to the city, “Okay, you don't want to spend money on doing lead tests. Let's check the kids' blood lead levels”, apparently that was a study that hadn't been done in at least 25 years. This was groundbreaking. This study is quoted in the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control, the Hamilton study said this and that.

The answer is no, there hasn't been one, to my knowledge.

[Sean Fraser, Liberal, Central Nova, NS]

One of the issues I see coming up for rural communities, like the one I grew up in.... Everybody who lived within 50 miles of us had their own well. There was no municipal water infrastructure. Do you think the nature of the problem would be strikingly different between rural areas and urban communities?

[Bob Bratina, Liberal, Hamilton East—Stoney Creek, ON]

That's another interesting point. In Hamilton, we have some rural communities, because it's an amalgamated city. Lynden is on its own town well. It was found to have lead exceedances, and boil water advisories were put out. That's a well for a small community, but as far as individual wells are concerned, what this would call for is for people living in those communities to get a test on their water to see if there is a potential for lead exceedances, and then deal with it. You rip the pipes out, put a filter on, get a big water jug, or whatever. It has to be brought into the public awareness, and hopefully it will be, as a result of this.

[Sean Fraser, Liberal, Central Nova, NS]

I'm curious as to why this committee would be best positioned to tackle this issue, as opposed to, say, the departments of health and infrastructure working in partnership. Do you have a suggestion as to why this is the right body to deal with it?

[Bob Bratina, Liberal, Hamilton East—Stoney Creek, ON]

It's not a health issue anymore for me, for the Centers for Disease Control, or for Health Canada. It's not an issue. We don't have it. It's bad—please. So what do you get to? You get to infrastructure. Where is the lead coming into these homes? It's through the infrastructure. What's the infrastructure committee able to do about it? Well, we're not sure. It's a municipal issue, for the most part, but it was federally regulated at one time, and there is federal money available to fix infrastructure. Can we marry the two and come out with a program where we can say, as parliamentarians, that there is a problem in our country and we invite municipalities, provinces, and so on to access federal funds in a meaningful way? The loan program is phenomenal, in the Hamilton experience, because we do 500 to 1,000 lead pipe removals a year, and the money gets paid back. It will take 25 years, but we'll eventually get them all, if we want to. Why wouldn't we do that?

[Sean Fraser, Liberal, Central Nova, NS]

It's a loan program—

[The Chair, Liberal, Judy Sgro]

Mr. Fraser, I'm sorry, but the time is up.

[Angelo Iacono, Liberal, Alfred-Pellan, QC]

Madam Chair, like my colleague Alain Rayes earlier, I would like to greet Mr. Trudel and the master's students from ENAP. Some of them live in my riding, and I thank them for being here today.

Dear colleague, my objective is not to say that your motion is not important; on the contrary, it is very important. I wonder, however, how we will be able to deal with this request concerning lead in drinking water, since it does not fall under federal jurisdiction. Just like Quebec, all the provinces have jurisdiction in this area. So how are we going to oblige a province such as Quebec to respect the results of our study?

Secondly, I would like to go back to something you said in English.

Expand on that “simple task”. What exactly is the simple task that you want this committee to focus on? We know it's of medical concern. We understand that, but how can we zero in? How can we come out and have a better understanding of the scope so we know what to challenge and what to dedicate our study to? I have to admit, it's very large, so we need to narrow it down. What exactly do you wish this committee to pay attention to?

[Bob Bratina, Liberal, Hamilton East—Stoney Creek, ON]

I would like the committee to look at two things. One is the potential for class action lawsuits, such as is happening right now in Flint, Michigan, due to the indifference or inactivity, inadequacies of the United States government's Environmental Protection Agency.

First of all, we're considering what role we have, but in the exact specifics of what you're talking about, the City of Toronto decided not to accept the staff recommendation of creating a fund. Because we have infrastructure money made available, I would think the committee could consider ways that the government could allow a municipality to draw on those funds, to create a revolving loan fund, which wouldn't impact on their revenue, let's say, on a smaller community or even a larger one, like Toronto. If they were concerned about fraud or fiascos, and so on, there could perhaps be a guarantee, a backstop from the federal government saying if Toronto put a loan program in place, the federal government would certainly make sure that it functioned well.

I'm not sure of the direct answer to that, but money is available. Generally, as far as I know, communities have not been focusing their efforts on using that money to address this problem. Perhaps this infrastructure committee could resolve that or there may be a recommendation that we can't find a way to do that, but I would not want to, once again, leave my few days that I have in Parliament saying that's somebody else's problem, knowing what I know through the Hamilton experience and observing problems all across the country.

[Angelo Iacono, Liberal, Alfred-Pellan, QC]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Judy Sgro]

I understand you'd like to share your time with Mr. Ellis.

[Neil Ellis, Liberal, Bay of Quinte, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Bratina, for attending today. I want to ask you a couple of questions on the program you initiated in Hamilton.

Did you have much default on the program?

[Bob Bratina, Liberal, Hamilton East—Stoney Creek, ON]

No.

[Neil Ellis, Liberal, Bay of Quinte, ON]

Not at all.