Environment committee  Thank you, Mr. Chairman and members of the committee. It's an honour to be with you. I would remind you that we not only submitted extensive written testimony back in June, but we had two earlier opportunities to provide oral testimony. So we will confine our remarks today to e

Environment committee  All right. My two-hour statement in 10 minutes, by the look of it. In the case of road salts, the agencies understand that proper management not only conveys environmental benefits and can be done consistent with accomplishing the mission of keeping the roads safe, but it can al

Environment committee  Thank you for giving me the opportunity to respond on that. We believe that although there was peer review and a formal Gazette comment period, there were several deficiencies in public participation in the assessment process. We've testified to those before. We would say that t

Environment committee  I'm not sure that I understand—

Environment committee  I think the reports that Environment Canada has received—as part of the code implementation, they receive annual reports—have shown actually just the opposite, both in Toronto and throughout Canada, but very strongly throughout Ontario, which has been wildly enthusiastic about co

Environment committee  Thank you. I would say that our remarks will have to be confined to our issue, which is road salts. In that, I think the appropriate response is a voluntary code of practice, as has been worked out. I don't think a regulation can be sufficiently flexible to reflect the operating

Environment committee  I just wanted to offer a quick comment, which I hope is clarifying. When you talk about industry, that's not the situation we're facing. We have five salt producers in Canada. That's all. It's easy to enforce against them. That's not what we're talking about. We're talking about

Environment committee  If I may start to respond, we are not comfortable with the designation of road salts as CEPA-toxic. That's why we have argued that they should not be added to schedule 1, or they would be CEPA-toxic. At this point, Environment Canada has made a designation, which is sort of, th

Environment committee  The discussion, as I testified earlier, put out as a nationwide press conference stating that salt is toxic, and the headlines parroted back “Salt is Poison”--that's what hurt.

Environment committee  And that's what poisoned, if you will, the working relationship and set us back several years.

Environment committee  Once the cat is out of the bag.... That was the problem.

Environment committee  It was taken into account. In other words, the recommendation was that road salts—all sodium chloride, potassium chloride, magnesium chloride, and calcium chloride—were going to be called toxic. That's not localizing it. Obviously all salts, or any of those salts, are not toxic.

Environment committee  Correct, but it was a discussion that caused the problem.

Environment committee  Mr. Teeter wants to talk, I think, about part of it, but I want to specifically address the point made earlier, the point that CEPA deals with human health. It does, but it doesn't have to. In the case of road salt, it specifically was not alleged that salt was toxic to human h

Environment committee  The department has produced two years of annual reports. We've been briefed on them at stakeholders meetings. I don't have the figures in front of me, but they're very impressive in terms of the percentage; I think somewhere around 90% of the municipalities, counties, and provinc