Environment committee  Thank you. I would certainly suggest that the dirty dozen are the worst of the worst by certain measures, which I don't have the background to go into and say why they qualify and others don't. But certainly on the long-range transport, among other characteristics, they exhibit

Environment committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair, and good morning. It's a pleasure to appear again on this most fundamental topic as it relates to the Canadian Environmental Protection Act. My name is Hugh Benevides, and I'm staff lawyer with the Canadian Environmental Law Association, as most of you kno

Environment committee  I would certainly embrace Mr. Ethier's recommendation that there be a greater shared responsibility and a greater responsibility on the part of industry. To bring in the element of the previous question on how to deal with the in-commerce list, some of these substances are phar

Environment committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. I agree with Mr. Godfrey's point that the label “toxic” is consistent with the symbol on the label. I think what's important here is that there be a responsibility to communicate, where necessary, the meaning of that toxic designation. But let's remember ab

Environment committee  Thank you. It's true, as Mr. Teeter points out, that once the ministers responsible for CEPA announce their intention to list a substance on the list of toxic substances they have two years, and then there's a further one and a half years to develop and implement. So it really i

Environment committee  I think Monsieur Bigras has raised an important question. I'm sure those management plans as implemented in the various provinces have, as he suggests, resulted in less use of road salt. I would simply note that without the process of investigation at the federal level of the i

Environment committee  I think so. For example, PollutionWatch, in our submission, has recommended that mandatory timelines be placed in the act, at important stages of the act, so that action is taken at those stages, just as the categorization exercise was completed. So going back to the question o

Environment committee  Thank you. The committee has heard a number of comments, more or less in agreement that context is everything. Of course, it falls that when a substance is listed, or indeed when it's not even listed, the context is something that has to be communicated. It's not solely a respon

Environment committee  Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Good morning. I don't have prepared notes this morning, because the committee indulged me and my colleagues last week. On the issue of “toxic”, my colleagues last week and now Drs. Bramley and Winfield and Professor Collins will address that today. I am

Environment committee  The issue here is particularly salient in the case of a natural substance. The potassium a country is going to import from us is the same potassium they are going to use out of their own supply if they have it, so it seems to me a fairly straightforward matter that potassium is p

Environment committee  Mr. Chair, I think it's one of the matters that we have to balance or consider against each other. One of those matters is that those other countries we talk about don't have the constitutional framework we have, so first of all--and I know it's only an expression--we don't have

Environment committee  Perhaps it was my comment that the admittedly large task of categorizing was just the first step. So being a world leader in that early step is not enough, frankly, because it's not completing the process.

Environment committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. As an observation, along with certain toxic substances in the mid-seventies it was the issue of nutrients and the growth of algae and the issue of nutrient pollution that spurred the creation of the Federal Environmental Contaminants Act in the first place.

Environment committee  I think the issue of the definition of “toxic” is a bit of a red herring in this particular part of the discussion and I'll say why. While the risk-based approach is widely taken, one has to consider that there is also, closer to the hazard-based approach, the emergence, as we al

Environment committee  On the point about the Department of Justice perhaps being comfortable with a different course of action, I come back to the discussion about the role of members of Parliament—lawyers and non-lawyers alike, so we can treat them equally. This is one of the ultimate roles of MPs, I