Environment committee  Thank you, Madam Chair. How much time do I have to make my comments? Do I have ten minutes?

Environment committee  Thank you. It's a pleasure to have a chance to offer just a few comments as you contemplate the renewal of a very important federal statute, the Canadian Environmental Protection Act. I have five areas that I want to make very brief comments on. There is one you might think a l

Environment committee  I asked the head of the REACH program, Derek Knight, that question when he was presenting at an EPA symposium in North Carolina. I got up in the discussion period and I said, “Derek, I get the sense that the REACH program is a little more hazard based, a little more precautionary

Environment committee  Those are two terrific questions. I wanted to slip in one of them as a supplementary to my previous comment, so thanks for setting me up. Let me answer the question about how the new toxicology will help. If we have these very cost-effective, highly efficient, high-throughput t

Environment committee  We've had a lot of conversations with federal government scientists and regulators on their viewpoints. I actually gave a presentation to Health Canada last month on the new approaches. I think the Canadian scientific community, even in these government regulatory programs, is ve

Environment committee  I would rather have data on which to base an evidence-based decision than have to make assumptions or be overly cautious. There is a downside to the precautionary principle. Everybody would agree, it's better to be safe than sorry. If we're overly cautious, we could not be making

Environment committee  My contribution will be to give you some data to help get yourself out of that box.

Environment committee  That's a great question. You are asking thoughtful, perceptive questions of us. Let's imagine we were to set solid, evidence-based air quality objectives for Canada, and maybe even they're enforceable. We do a great job of controlling point sources, cleaner vehicles, but we impo

Environment committee  Water quality is the responsibility of the provinces. We have the federal-provincial interplay to think about. I don't have any wise advice on how to make that run as smoothly as you can, but the drinking water materials safety act, which was designed in 1997 or 1998 and made i

Environment committee  I do. The graduate program that we offer in risk at the University of Ottawa has a session on decision-making principles, communication, perception, and regulation. We cover everything. I have 10 principles of risk decision-making that we published. It's in one of the reference

Environment committee  I'm not the right person to comment on that law.

Environment committee  The report on Tox21?

Environment committee  I can send you lots of material, some shorter, some longer. I'd be pleased to send in several things on that, but I do have one point—

Environment committee  These would be publicly available published documents in English.

Environment committee  There are a couple more specifically in response to this question. It's basically the scientific literature which would describe the Tox21 concept.