Madam Speaker, it is a pleasure to join the debate today on Bill S-5, an act to amend the Canadian Environmental Protection Act, after having had the pleasure of working on it for over 15 meetings on the Standing Committee on Environment and Sustainable Development.
The Canadian Environmental Protection Act, or CEPA, is Canada’s most important environmental law. CEPA is focused on preventing pollution, managing toxic substances, and protecting the environment and human health. The powers created by CEPA are firmly recognized as a valid exercise of the federal government’s criminal law power. It not only protects us from harmful chemicals, but is also the instrument that was utilized to ban certain single-use plastic items.
CEPA also has a key function in the management of greenhouse gases. The regulation-making authority under CEPA allows the federal government to control the fuel efficiency standards for light duty vehicles and the methane emissions from oil and gas. It will also be the tool used for the forthcoming zero-emissions vehicle mandate, the clean electricity standard and, perhaps, the cap on emissions from oil and gas.
Members can see why this is an important law, but it has not been updated for almost 24 years. The Harper government did not bother to review or update it over the course of the Conservatives' mandate, but it is obvious that much has changed over this period, and our knowledge of chemicals and the environment had greatly progressed. This much was affirmed through the extensive study that was done by the Standing Committee on Environment and Sustainable Development from 2016 to 2017. Many of the recommendations in this report were incorporated into legislation, which was first tabled before the 2021 election and now again in Bill S-5.
I want to thank the members of that committee, including my former colleague, Will Amos, who did important work to get us where we are. I also want to thank the many individuals who have worked on this over the years, including organizations such as the David Suzuki Foundation, Ecojustice, the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment, the Chemistry Industry Association of Canada, and Canada’s own UN special rapporteur on human rights and the environment, Dr. David Boyd. It is quite a marvel that both industry and environmental NGOs agreed on the overall framework of this bill and signed a letter to that effect before it was tabled last year.
Bill S-5 is an extremely technical bill, and so I will not get into all of the intricacies of it, but I do want to mention a few highlights.
Bill S-5 would make several major advancements, including, for the first time ever, recognizing a right to a healthy environment in Canadian law. Many of my own constituents, including Lisa Brasso, have been advocating for this right for some time through the Blue Dot campaign, where I was an early signatory during the 2019 election campaign. Since Bill S-5 was tabled, we strengthened this right at committee such that the right will no longer need to balanced against other factors, and it now incorporates the principles of environmental justice, non-regression and intergenerational equity.
Through an amendment I introduced at committee, the act will now expand this right to include a clean, healthy and sustainable environment. This will bring Canada into alignment with internationally accepted definitions, which we voted for at the UN in July of last year. In this respect, “clean” refers to the fight against pollution; “healthy” refers to ecological balance; and “sustainable” refers to the nexus between the environment and development. This is critical in the act, which is most responsible for advancing sustainable development, so that we practice domestically what we preach internationally.
Bill S-5 would also take major steps forward in advancing transparency and accountability so Canadians can have confidence in how chemicals are being managed. It would refocus departments on planning for assessing substances of highest risk first; provide dedicated timelines to reassess these priorities; provide an avenue for the public to request that a minister assess a substance when new data about a substance becomes available, which would require a response in 90 days; require that reasons be given if the final risk assessments of chemicals exceeds two years; require annual progress reporting and timeline reporting; and strengthen provisions around confidential business information.
Bill S-5, for the first time, would assess the potential impacts of chemical substances on vulnerable populations and the cumulative effects that toxic substances may pose to vulnerable populations. It would ensure that we assess the relative vulnerability that individuals, such as pregnant mothers and children, may have to certain chemicals as well as populations that may be more persistently exposed to a substance.
This will dovetail nicely with the legislation we have also recently passed through this chamber, which will require a national strategy on environmental racism and environmental justice. I want to thank my former seatmate, Lenore Zann, for tabling this, and the member for Saanich—Gulf Islands for reintroducing it after the last election. It is important that we make progress on this because environmental racism is not just a historical blight. We continue to see this today, with the most recent example of the Kearl project tailings leaks and their cumulative impacts on first nations downstream.
That is why I invited Imperial Oil and the Alberta Energy Regulator to appear at the Standing Committee on Environment and Sustainable Development to answer for what happened and why they kept the affected communities in the dark. Big oil and what affected communities widely pan as an industry captured regulator, or in the case of the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation, a “complete joke”, are convinced that they can pull the rug over Canadians' eyes and people will move on. However, the federal government is stepping in to investigate the company and has gathered all implicated parties to figure out long-term solutions to the entire monitoring and notification system.
It also bears mentioning the related amendment the NDP has proposed. The NDP is trying to make the case that we need to specifically list tailings ponds to have the ability to get information on them under section 46, the information-gathering provisions of CEPA, but this flies in the face of the fact that we already have this ability through powers rooted in subsections (c), (e), (f), (h), (i), (k), (l), and a new proposed subsection we added in Bill S-5 to cover activities that may contribute to pollution.
There is a related agreement with Alberta on oil sands monitoring that is rooted in these powers, but the problem in this case is that Alberta inexplicably violated its duty to notify the federal government. I do ask my NDP colleagues to read the full legislation first, to understand how it addresses information on tailings, rather than simply pressing Ctrl+F and typing “tailings” before providing misleading amendments that there is such a gap. To do otherwise, I believe, is an insult to Canadians' intelligence, and it takes time out from other measures that may actually make the legislation better.
I want to take a few minutes to discuss how Bill S-5 could have been improved. For example, I am disappointed that the legislation will only require the that the right to a healthy environment be considered in the administration of the act, rather than require the protection of it. While I have confidence in our minister to bring in a robust system to protect this new right, there is a risk that future governments and future ministers may roll this back.
Second, the committee also narrowly rejected an amendment I proposed that would have required the minister to take measures to protect the right to a healthy environment where ambient air quality standards are exceeded as part of the implementation framework. I think this is a major missed opportunity. Canada is one of the few developed nations that does not have mandatory ambient air quality standards. The federal government’s own 2016 assessment showed that poor air quality costs Canada at least $120 billion and 15,000 deaths per year, making this an obvious action for us to take to save lives and avoid major health costs. I was encouraged that the minister committed that the implementation framework will clarify how the right to a healthy environment lens will apply to the clean air agenda, but this could have been made explicit in the legislation.