Environment committee  The patchwork makes life extremely difficult for people in communities. For example, I mentioned the ozone and particulate Canada-wide standard, which they're now considering in British Columbia when they assess a new polluter--when somebody wants a permit to put in a new boiler

Environment committee  Yes. I like the consultation, but I'd actually like to see more clear leadership from the federal government when it's actually operating under CEPA instead of letting a provincial bureaucrat derail the process for a couple of years here or there. It's very frustrating and very d

Environment committee  Oh, I love it.

Environment committee  I think there should be a review for effectiveness built into it somewhere, and it could then be renewed fairly simply. But there needs to be some kind of going back, first of all, to check that the provinces are actually doing what they committed to do. Provinces tend to be even

Environment committee  Well, the dioxin regulation that stopped the pulp mills from making dioxin from bleaching was under the Fisheries Act. That wasn't CEPA; that was the Fisheries Act. So right there, that's a really good example, because that was incredibly successful. CEPA could have teeth too, I

Environment committee  I thought it was under the Fisheries Act.

Environment committee  Okay, I stand corrected.

Environment committee  As a clarification, part of that shift was by using chlorine dioxide gas rather than straight chlorine gas. Chlorine dioxide is a chlorine-based compound that is also quite dangerous to use.

Environment committee  Okay. There have been some very near misses with explosions of chlorine-based gas--not chlorine gas but chlorine dioxide gas. There was a really close call in Powell River, British Columbia. But in terms of PCBs, the process that creates dioxin, which I was talking about when the

Environment committee  Oh, transformers. Oh yes, of course.

Environment committee  Yes, and the PCBs are still in the transformers anyway. So any time a transformer is broken, PCBs are released. We say we don't use PCBs any more, but actually we reuse them. We put them back in the transformers.

Environment committee  We pushed the Canada-wide standard on ozone and on particulate matter. In fact, we went to our own provincial environmental appeal board on that Canada-wide standard, and so on, to the point where the province now includes that standard in its technical assessment when it issues

Environment committee  Okay. Basically, the problem is that in the meantime the pulp and paper company has discovered a way to wash the wood chips to get the salt out of the wood chips. That is the pollution prevention that we were looking for. But there is no way to go back and get the Canada-wide st

Environment committee  Thank you very much for this chance to present to your committee. I have a written presentation that has been sent for translation. It will be along, I guess, in a week or two. I apologize that I couldn't translate it myself. I'm going to be talking on this issue of government

Environment committee  Oh, great. That's good. I'm going to focus on the Canadian Council of Ministers of the Environment's Canada-wide standard for dioxins. But that is only as an illustration of my point. The same kinds of points could be made about other subjects that are subject to Canada-wide sta