Health committee  Thank you very much for having me and for the opportunity to speak to the review of the Pest Control Products Act. Since I began working at West Coast Environmental Law in 2001, I've had the privilege, among other projects, of working with groups of farm workers and the organiza

Health committee  That's it in essence. I should have mentioned that I also did not get my full written submissions in on time for translation. They are with the committee now, so presumably you'll get them. I have a more detailed discussion there of the PMRA's approach. As I understand the PMR

Health committee  More or less. The examples I was speaking to were not U.S.-wide. It wasn't the U.S. EPA. It was particular states in the U.S. They have very detailed information on where and how pesticides are being used. The PMRA already does collect data at a provincial level about what pesti

Health committee  I think you're quite correct that no one is in the field looking for this. The other thing is, as you mentioned, the data isn't there outside of the PMRA itself for people to really realize that the effects they are seeing are actually linked to pesticides. I spoke about data b

Health committee  My suggestion is that you consider requiring the PMRA to collect more information from the registrants on what they sold where, which is not a perfect surrogate for where it's being used, but it's not bad, and that the information be made available in this era of online open data

Environment committee  Thank you for inviting me to speak to you today from the territory of the Lekwungen-speaking people in Victoria, B.C.

Environment committee  I'm the head of West Coast Environmental Law's climate program, the author of several reports and submissions on Canadian climate law and a member, as Alan mentioned, of a coalition of organizations that really want Bill C-12 to be a real climate change accountability law. In 19

Environment committee  They've come in just this morning or maybe it was yesterday, so I don't think they've been translated yet. When they are available, I'd refer you to the submissions from us, Ecojustice, Climate Action Network and Équiterre. We identify five pillars. They are early and ambitious

Environment committee  I would say that there are substantive differences, but done well an approach involving targets can achieve many of the same functions that a carbon budget approach takes. One of the key points is the one that I mentioned in my opening. Carbon budgets have always been establishe

Environment committee  As I indicated in my opening, climate change action requires the government to take short-term action to bend the curve now—we're all familiar with COVID terminology—but it also requires that you put in place measures now that will start achieving further reductions 10 or 15 year

Environment committee  It's on a rolling basis, so there will be two five-year targets in any one year's time.

Environment committee  I understand you to be asking whether the advisory body really should have legal status, which I think it absolutely should. It should have a clearer role in actually doing some of that evaluation of government progress on the bill, as is the case in the U.K. act. The commission

Environment committee  To add to that, it needs to also include very clear information on how we will make the cuts in the next five years, before the 2025 target. I don't think there's any doubt that we would prefer to see a 2025 target, but we also think if the government is resisting that, clearly

Environment committee  One concern related to that is that the progress reports currently happen only once during each plan's mandate and just before the end of the mandate, so it doesn't provide as much time to correct the course.

Environment committee  Certainly, sequestration is hugely important, obviously, and carbon sinks are absolutely critical. I think that, if that's something the committee wants to add to the bill, that could potentially make sense. I would caution against rolling it into the existing planning and repo