Health committee  Sure. In terms of the effectiveness of labelling, you might want to talk to some of the folks from the tobacco groups on this panel, where labelling has been very effective. And it has been quite effective in California. Does a label convince someone to do what they're supposed

Health committee  We ourselves do testing of products and of chemicals in people's blood. I can give you the costs, but the costs are low. You can test a product for metals for well under $1,000, or a few hundred dollars. The point here is that for most products they're not going to have to worry

Health committee  Thank you. There are a couple of issues around the general prohibition. I haven't gotten a clear answer on this, but we don't actually know how far beyond the general duty of care in common law this goes. This may simply be a restatement of the duty of care that manufacturers al

Health committee  It would, and it would take those products out of the market. Lead is an interesting example. Under the Hazardous Products Act, which this bill amends, we ban lead, but we ban it in children's jewellery, not in other products--not in keychains, for example. We tested keychains

Health committee  No, we haven't.

Health committee  We're working on getting those out of baby bottles. The government has moved on that front. But probably half of our exposure is through food cans. This bill doesn't deal with food either. It goes to the labelling issue. Never mind getting it off the shelves. There are safe and

Health committee  We can certainly provide you with that text. To give you one quick example, in the general prohibition in the bill, when you state that no consumer product can be imported or marketed if it's a danger to human health or safety, you could add the words, “either through direct exp

Health committee  It's a critical piece of the pie.

Health committee  Yes. Without going into too much of the history, I'll say that after we categorized the 24,000 substances in circulation back in the eighties, the question was, what do we do with this now? We've got a list of priority substances. So the government chose about 200 to challenge in

Health committee  I'm not sure of the example you're thinking of. I know Ontario is moving forward with a toxic reduction act, placing a priority on substitution and getting cleaner production processes.

Health committee  Well, CEPA has the authority to deal with consumer products, but it generally deals with environmental emissions. With the chemicals management plan, they've inched a little bit more toward consumer products, and we saw that a little with bisphenol A. Certainly some provinces—an

Health committee  I can track down for you some of the research that has been done on Proposition 65. Proposition 65 was introduced in 1987, so this act has a long history. It has been around a long time. It hasn't been without controversy. It's fair to say that certain elements of the industry ar

Health committee  The kind of green light, red light labelling you're talking about with respect to a global harmonized system is more a product warning than a green or red light for the product. We haven't really talked about a “Good Housekeeping seal of approval” label. I think the move toward

Health committee  There's eco-labelling. There's a whole range of eco-labels out there.

Health committee  Absolutely. That's California's approach. In respect of the GHS, first of all, we need a deadline. Second, we need a much broader range of chemicals and products covered.