Environment committee  I think that in order to gain social acceptability, there is more than just access to justice. You're going to have to be making decisions as a government that show respect for people's right to breathe clean air, to have access to safe drinking water, and all of those other subs

Environment committee  Certainly. Let's start with access to information. At the current time, if you're a Canadian citizen looking for information, it's very difficult. I'm purportedly an expert in environmental law and I find it hard to find information about various Canadian environmental law policy

Environment committee  Except for the fact that if you design pollution taxes correctly, you can address those competitiveness concerns through revenue recycling, revenue neutrality. Again, I can go back to the example of Sweden. Sweden took a leadership position in the European Union and put quite a s

Environment committee  There's already been a lot of academic work done on pollution taxes and competitiveness, so you might be able to appoint an expert panel to draw together that evidence. If we're going to move forward on pollution taxes, we need to put it in CEPA, and we need to get started. I thi

Environment committee  I think that's a fair question, Mr. Fast, but if you look at the fact that all of our industrialized competitors, the United States and European countries...in the case of the United States they already have pollution taxes. European countries are dealing with both carbon taxes a

Environment committee  The last thing I want to address is the economics. I'm perfectly fine with creating a system of national pollution taxes and using that revenue to offset other forms of tax, which then addresses the economic concerns.

Environment committee  No, I don't think you're wrong. Certainly, the Constitution gives the federal government broad taxation powers. I think the specific issue of pollution taxes may be one that Environment Canada has encountered some resistance to, so that's why I'm suggesting it be made explicit

Environment committee  That's right.

Environment committee  Right. Well, I'm referring to emissions of over 350 toxic substances that are reported by big business in Canada to the national pollutant release inventory. My understanding is that the United States is looking at a cap-and-trade system for carbon emissions which will effective

Environment committee  That's an excellent suggestion. The flip side of that is also something we haven't spoken about, which is a consumer's right to know the hazardous substances in consumer products. The European Union has a comprehensive system. California has a comprehensive system. There is a h

Environment committee  Substitution is a great spur for innovation. The reality is, we have to find chemical substitutes that are safer, that are greener. In places like Sweden, the European Union, and California, which are leaders in chemicals management, they have created whole new industries calle

Environment committee  That's right. I also haven't mentioned, when you look at the cost benefit analysis of these stricter environmental regulations, what you find is that the costs are dwarfed by the health benefits. In the United States, for example, they estimate that full implementation of their

Environment committee  Certainly. Just to take one off the top of my head, Sweden was the first country in the world to prohibit the use of polybrominated diphenyl ethers, which is a horrendously long chemical word. It's a family of brominated flame retardants, which causes a wide range of adverse effe

Environment committee  There are two reasons, Mr. Fast. The first is that if you look at the environmental burden of disease in Canada, which I mentioned at the outset, leading experts estimate that between 9,000 and 15,000 premature deaths per year in Canada are the result of exposure to air polluti

Environment committee  I think that in coming up with solutions, part of what I've tried to do—and as the committee goes on with its work, you'll start to think I sound like a broken record—if we embed a certain number of key principles across the whole body of Canadian environmental law, then we'll ac