Mr. Speaker, today I rise in the House to support Bill C-6, An Act respecting the safety of consumer products.
Albert Schweitzer, doctor, philosopher and Nobel Prize winner, warned that “Man has lost the capacity to foresee and forestall. He will end by destroying the earth”.
I would like to give the House a lesson in history regarding a product and a devastating disease.
Animal slaughterhouse wastes have been recycled into animal feed since the beginning of the 20th century. In the mid-1970s, the U.S. department of agriculture decided that carcasses of sheep afflicted with the disease scrapie should not be used in animal or human foods. Tragically, the U.K. government decided that its industry should be left to decide how its equipment should be operated. It was not until 1996 that processing standards were introduced.
In the United States, government oversight and relatively inexpensive restrictions may have prevented the mad cow epidemic. In the United Kingdom, industry self-policing provided ideal conditions for the development of the progressive, fatal disease that affects the brain.
Reducing risks to health has been a preoccupation of people, physicians, and politicians for the last 5,000 years.
Virtually every major advance in public health has involved the reduction or the elimination of risk, with the result being that the world is a safer place today. It is safer from accidents, deadly or incurable diseases and safer from hazardous consumer goods.
Therefore, it is the government's duty to do all it reasonably can to accurately assess and reduce risks, such as making sure that food, medicines and other products are safe.
Although government can rarely hope to reduce risks to zero, it can aim to lower them to a more acceptable level and should openly and transparently communicate risk and risk reduction strategies to the public.
The Canadian government introduced Bill C-6 on January 26, 2009, to ensure, through regulation, that risk is reduced and that Canadians have access to safer consumer products.
The bill is important because it would fill many regulatory gaps and give government the power to issue recalls and raise fines. Companies and their directors, officers and employees may be held criminally liable for contravention and penalized up to $5 million.
The bill would prohibit the manufacture, importation, advertising and sale of a consumer product that is a danger to human health or safety, is the subject of a recall or does not meet the regulatory requirements that apply to the product.
The bill would require that all persons who manufacture, import or sell a consumer product for commercial purposes maintain documents identifying from whom they obtained the product and to whom they sold it, and provide regulators with all related information within two days of becoming aware of an incident. These mechanisms will help ensure that products can easily be removed from store shelves when a recall is made.
Bill C-6 would also give regulators the power to order manufacturers and importers to conduct tests on a product, to provide documents related to those studies and to compile any information required to confirm compliance.
The bill also would give inspectors new wide-ranging powers, including the power to order a recall if they believe, on reasonable grounds, that a consumer product is a danger to human health or safety. These powers may be invoked even when there is a lack of full scientific certainty.
This is a strength of the bill, as scientific standards for demonstrating cause and effect are extremely rigorous and often time-consuming, substantial damage to humans may result during long testing. For example, many experts strongly suspected that smoking caused lung cancer long before overwhelming proof became available. Unfortunately, hundreds of thousands of smokers died waiting for a definitive answer. Thousands of others, however, quit smoking because they suspected, as there were 7,000 articles by 1964, that tobacco probably caused lung cancer.
When a product raises threats of harm to human health, precautionary methods should be taken, even if some cause and effect relationships are not fully established scientifically.
Perhaps the following questions might be asked at committee. Why does the bill not phase out or ban known carcinogens and other toxic chemicals in consumer products? Why does the bill not create a mandatory testing and labelling scheme? Does the bill go far enough to protect the health of Canadians from toxic imports? Will the government dedicate the necessary resources to enforce the bill?
The United Steelworkers remind us that, “recalls and fines all happen after the fact. Canada needs a strategy that repairs...trade deals that have led to toxic imports crossing our border in the first place”, such as in 2007, when millions of Chinese made toys were recalled by both the EU and the U.S. The European Commission subsequently identified over 1,600 products that were considered risky.
We live in an increasingly chemical society. Toxic chemicals are found in everyday consumer products, including art supplies, kitchenware, personal products, pet food, toys, water bottles and many products intended for babies.
When researchers test the air in our homes, the average readings for volatile organic compounds increase in areas where cleaners are stored. CBC's Marketplace showed Pledge registered 273 parts per billion, Clorox wipes more than 1,000 parts per billion. Anything over 500 parts per billion could be a problem for people with sensitivities. Lysol's disinfecting spray, however, recorded 1,200 parts per million, or 1,000 times higher than the Clorox.
Experts do not know how dangerous these chemicals might be, but they are starting to worry. Dr. Gideon Koren, a pediatrician at the Hospital for Sick Children, asks, “How can we, as one of the most advanced countries in the world, allow these to enter our household for small children, without the appropriate testing to see that it's safe?”
Young children are especially vulnerable because they virtually live on the floor. Everything goes into their mouths, and their basic body systems are still developing.
We cannot continue to repeat the key mistake of the past, namely, responding late to early warnings as we did with benzene and PCBs.
Ever since anemia was diagnosed among young women engaged in the manufacture of bicycle tires in 1897, benzene was known to be a powerful bone marrow poison. Recommendations made in the U.K. and the U.S. in the 1920s for substitution of benzene with less toxic solvents went unheeded. Benzene-related diseases of the bone marrow continued to increase dramatically through the first half of the 20th century. Benzene was not withdrawn from consumer products in the U.S. until 1978, and this was done by manufacturers on a voluntary basis.
A chief medical inspector of factories wrote in 1934, “Looking back in the light of present knowledge, it is impossible not to feel that opportunities for discovery and prevention of disease were badly missed”.
As we continue to debate the bill, let us ensure that in 2034, future generations do not lament missed opportunities.
I would like to share my time, Mr. Speaker, with the member for St. Paul's.