Mr. Speaker, I would like to read from a book entitled Our Stolen Future written in 1996 by three famous scientists: Theo Colborn, Diane Dumanoski and John Peterson Myers. It states:
Through the creation and release of billions of pounds of man-made chemicals over the past half century, we have been making broadscale changes to the Earth's atmosphere and even in the chemistry of our own bodies. Now, for example, with a stunning hole in the Earth's protective ozone layer and, it appears, the dramatic decline in human sperm counts, the results of this experiment are hitting home. From any perspective, these are two huge signals of trouble. The systems undermined are among those that make life possible. The magnitude of the damage that has already occurred should leave any thoughtful person profoundly shaken.
Theo Colborn appeared before the Standing Committee on Environment and Sustainable Development during its review of pesticides. She urged us very strongly to review our legislation and to bring in better and improved legislation.
I would first like to commend the minister for bringing forward this new legislation which is, by any standard, an improvement on the existing one which goes back to 1969 and is therefore 33 years old.
I should mention that the process for managing and regulating pesticides goes back quite a long way.
The previous Conservative government produced a report that was known as the purple book. In October 1994, I was one of four parliamentary secretaries assigned to implement the recommendations in the purple book. One of the recommendations called for the establishment of a pest management agency, which is now called the Pest Management Regulatory Agency, that would be transferred from the department of agriculture to the department of health in 1995.
After the environment and sustainable development committee held hearings over many months, it made recommendations in a report produced on May 16, 2000 entitled “Pesticides: Making the Right Choice”.
I would like to take a minute to congratulate my colleague from Davenport who was chair of the committee at the time. The committee did very deep study on a critical issue for all of us concerned with human health and the environment. It was a groundbreaking report that led to the introduction of this legislation, which thankfully follows many of the recommendations contained in the report.
We can see many improvements reflected in the recommendations from the report. The bill's primary objective is to prevent unacceptable risks to people and the environment from the use of pest control products. The critical question of assessment of risk is based on the consideration of children's health, pregnant women, seniors and, in certain cases, of special risk in a safety margin 10 times greater than would otherwise be predicated.
The bill provides for a public registry which is a good start to giving the public access to health information. Whistleblower protection is provided in a meaningful way. There is the possibility of sharing information among government departments, a question which was raised by the commissioner for sustainable development who had strongly criticized the government for lack of communication among its departments with regard to pesticides. The bill provides for the burden of proof for the safety and value of the product to be clearly on the registrant or applicant, which is a big step forward.
As my colleagues have stated, there is room for a lot of improvement. I say this constructively hoping that when the bill reaches the health committee much improvement will occur and it will be treated in a very constructive manner by the government in addressing the question.
Let us look at the Pest Management Regulatory Agency which licenses and re-evaluates pesticides so they can be sold to the public. No statutory mandate in the legislation is given to the PMRA. All responsibilities and obligations fall on the Minister of Health.
In 1995 the PMRA was established as an administrative branch within Health Canada. We need to create an arm's-length agency. As we recommended, the PMRA should be accountable to parliament. The committee report gives the example of the patent office which is an agency set up within a department but given a full statutory mandate.
The committee also recommended a very clear mission for the PMRA. It recommended that it give absolute priority to the protection of human health and the environment when considering whether to approve a pesticide for use in Canada or allow its continued use. The committee recommended that it promote the use of sustainable pest management strategies that seek to reduce use, risk and reliance on pesticides. It emphasized the development of safer pest control products and to inform and educate the public about pesticides and the risks associated with their use. No such provisions are contained in the law and they are in my view essential.
My colleague from Davenport referred to the precautionary principle and its narrow application to the act. There is no mention of it in the preamble and there is a narrow application in the legislation itself. It is essential that the new act implement the precautionary approach in all aspects of decision making. Mrs. Barbara McElgunn of the Learning Disabilities Association of Canada made the following statement at one of our hearings:
Critical to this issue is the fact that for the majority of priority chemicals or for important new innovations, there exists very little, or no, human health safety data. Many decisions on chemical safety have been taken on very limited toxicological data re their safety to developing organ systems, i.e. children. It takes many years to obtain these data. Under current law and policy in Canada, it takes many more years to develop regulations to protect public health and the environment. Therefore, under the Canadian Perspective on the Precautionary Principle, the health and safety of Canadians is placed in a “Catch-22” situation, that says, “We must have strong scientific evidence before precautionary action can be taken--but we don't have that exact evidence, and therefore we cannot use the precautionary principle to act in a timely and protective manner
This is why we need the precautionary principle which Canada endorsed way back in 1992 at Rio in all facets of this legislation. The definition in the proposed legislation falls short of what the committee recommended and short of international standards. The committee recommended the following clause:
Appropriate preventive measures are to be taken where there is reason to believe that a pesticide is likely to cause harm, even when there is no conclusive evidence to prove a causal relation between the pesticide and its effects.
There is no definition of acceptable or unacceptable risk in the bill. In fact the whole purpose of the bill is to avoid an unacceptable risk. The implementation of the bill would depend on the subjective interpretation of this concept, which is not defined. The precautionary principle is only applied in the proposed legislation in re-evaluation or special reviews. At an operation level the precautionary principle must be used in all decisions respecting pest control products.
There is no requirement to consider aggregate and cumulative exposure. The committee addressed at length that the minister shall consider available information on aggregate and cumulative exposure when determining maximum residue only. That is not sufficient.
There is no science based inherent toxicity criteria, that is, there is no threshold for endocrine destruction, neurotoxicity or carcinogenic content of a pesticide specified for testing of the products. There is no requirement to re-register or evaluate pesticide for use on GMOs.
Another issue that the committee dealt with was an educational mandate. I remember legislation I passed in Quebec, in 1987, where one of the central features was an educational mandate. Without educating the public at large or the people who use pesticides, farmers and others, we will never change attitudes toward pesticides. We had a system where CEGEPs and schools gave instruction on pesticides and changed attitudes in the public mind.
The committee recommended that PMRA be expressly mandated under the new legislation to inform and educate the public about the risks associated with the use of pesticides and the availability of less harmful alternatives. Attitudes about pesticide use must be changed through aggressive public education programs. PMRA should not be given the exclusive responsibility to carry this out given that many federal departments make vital contributions to public awareness raising. It should be spread throughout the system. Public education should be a key mandate of the legislation.
We need a commitment in the bill to the pollution prevention principle. There is no substitution principle included in the bill, that is, a requirement to deregister older pesticides once newer and safer ones are registered.
There is a lack of consideration given in the bill to alternatives, to the essential need to use alternatives when they are available and use them on a fast-track basis. Track 1 toxic substances of the Canadian Environmental Protection Act are not explicitly disallowed, again a breach of committee recommendations.
There is no requirement to obtain information or to evaluate registered formulants and contaminants. There are no requirements either for the establishment of a government-use database or to develop reduction plans. There is no phase-out of cosmetic pesticides as referred to by my colleague from Davenport.
I will address the question of transparency under the bill. The need to involve Canadians in the decision making process and to inform them about pesticide use in the environment is clearly evident in the amount of attention this issue has garnered in the press and in the public forum for several years now. The key to fostering public confidence in pest management is to develop an open and transparent system. Canada does not have a tradition of allowing the public to act as a watchdog to the extent the U.S. does now. We have many lessons to learn from our American neighbours in enabling public participation in decision making.
That includes access to what we call CBI, confidential business information. Yesterday, the minister stated:
Confidential business information will be defined very narrowly in Bill C-53 and will include only financial information, manufacturing processes and formula ingredients that are not of health or environmental concern. This means that the identity and concentration of formulas that are of health or environmental concern will not be held in confidence and can in fact be made available to the public on labels and material safety data sheets and through the public registry.
That is a good step forward but it falls far short. The restrictions on CBI should be much tighter. For example, there is no definition of what financial information should be protected. Knowing how wily industry is on all these issues it will find a way to make confidential what the public wants to be transparent.
It is my hope that the details of this legislation will be examined closely by the Standing Committee on Health. What constitutes confidential business information is broadly defined in the bill in that the person who is providing the information decides if the information is CBI or not.
Another point regarding transparency is that there is no requirement for a sales database, for which we had asked. There is no direct mechanism for submission of independent scientific findings. We asked for that as well. There is no requirement to establish a database on reported adverse effects. There is no specific mention of the Pest Management Advisory Council. There is no requirement for harmonization between the protection of human health and the environment in order not to weaken Canadian standards.
Nicholas Ashford, a professor of technology and policy at Massachusetts Institute of Technology warned us in 1996 of the most serious environmental problem facing industrialized countries today. He is known for his work on the theory of multiple chemical sensitivity, MCS. He was one of the first to suggest that people who become sensitized by exposure to one form of contamination are much more liable to be affected by a whole range of other pollutants, including detergents, traffic fumes and tobacco smoke. He gave many examples.
Theo Colborn and her colleagues stated that only after DDT had been spread as liberally as talcum powder across the face of this earth did we realize that DDT brought death to wildlife, but in a different way. She added that when concerns emerged about the persistence of DDT and its impact on wildlife, regulators imposed controls on less persistent compounds such as methoxychlor and we now know that the same chemical which is still in wide use disrupts hormones.
We have gone from one pesticide to another, from one chemical to another, producing more millions of chemicals and pesticides all over the world and spreading them all over our earth thinking that each new one is better than the other and we will be safe. Yet we are finding out time and again that what we judge safer this time is found to be toxic and dangerous to human health and the environment, especially for children, seniors and pregnant women.
We owe it to ourselves to accept the bill as a big improvement on the previous legislation, but to also ask the minister constructively to allow the committee on health to look at the improvements we have all suggested and make the bill into leading legislation for the federal government. This is my strong hope.