Environment committee  First of all, thank you very much for having me today. More important, thank you for the work that you're doing in this CEPA review. For those of us who aren't doctors, it's rare that you can say you're work can save lives, but this work you're doing could save thousands of live

Environment committee  Thank you very much.

Environment committee  I favour strongly a hazard-based approach, as Europe has undertaken. Again, I'm going to draw on Joe Thornton to illustrate this problem. One of the biggest barriers in toxics regulation is scientific uncertainty. Part of the problem is just identifying hazards. Is this a substa

Environment committee  This comes back to the whole question of mandatory duties on the Government of Canada within CEPA. Many of us, in terms of the expert submissions, have proposed specific mandatory duties. Right off the bat, when we talk about mercury air emissions, I'm reminded of this need for b

Environment committee  Sure. The legislation does incorporate the precautionary principle right now, but it's just not implementing it. To me, the fundamental anti-precautionary aspect of this legislation is that the burden is on government to prove toxicity, rather than the burden being on industry to

Environment committee  Yes, as it is in the European Union, exactly, so to harmonize with that.

Environment committee  I think that the precautionary principle, in my view, and I've always said this, should be paired with what I've called a utility filter. I'll give you an example. I have a family member who twice has had her life saved by an experimental drug, twice was at the brink of death wit

Environment committee  I would say that embodying environmental justice within CEPA is probably the best way to protect the federal government. As you may know, there's already an ongoing section 15 claim. I'm not sure if you're familiar with the claim.

Environment committee  Yes, it underlines the—

Environment committee  No. I fully anticipate it will get to the Supreme Court of Canada. I typically take a conservative approach to new legal claims. I've often turned down cases that look.... I can point to five or six different examples within CEPA that I would take on right now as cases. They're

Environment committee  Sure. No, CEPA doesn't appropriately manage the risk. For many different criteria, as Dr. Dayna Scott put it, we have the least protective standards in the industrialized world. For example, our regulations for persistence and bioaccumulation are the least protective in the worl

Environment committee  It does spur innovation. It does feed the economy. We know that.

Environment committee  Okay, pricing. This has been well established in Massachusetts, which has actually done the data gathering on what happened with their toxics reduction. They found it saved business millions of dollars and saved the environment many tonnes of toxic substances. I think the subst

Environment committee  Yes, great idea. I think that the requirement to protect vulnerable populations should go into subsection 2(1) so that it becomes a mandatory duty on the government, and specifically, some of the submissions have suggested that the susceptibility of vulnerable populations should

Environment committee  Professor Doelle, do you want to elaborate?