Environment committee  As you know, Mr. Bossio, the Ontario Environmental Bill of Rights is currently undergoing a process of legislative review by the province, so there's a fortuitous opportunity. We can learn from both the successes and the failures of that law as we design environmental rights prov

Environment committee  Thank you very much. I've been studying and working on the right to a healthy environment for about a decade now. I've helped other countries draft constitutions, draft legislation, and I've also studied the impact on countries when they do recognize the right to a healthy envir

Environment committee  Yes, I agree with you. There is a range of enforcement tools available under the Canadian Environmental Protection Act. We should, and we do, make use of many of those tools. However, at the end of the day, when people are breaking the law, my opinion, which is shared by many C

Environment committee  Thanks very much. That's quite a handful of questions. In terms of Health Canada, one of the things that Health Canada has started doing in recent years is a national biomonitoring study, which is a study of which chemicals and in what concentrations are actually being found in

Environment committee  That's correct. All uses were banned in Europe as of 2005. There were some exceptions allowed to continue, but all of those exceptions have now expired. The European Union has found substitutes for asbestos in brake pads.

Environment committee  CEPA has been on Canada's books since 1988. It was overhauled in 1999. With the risk-based approach we are taking years, and in some cases decades, to put in place the risk management measures that we would have put in place much more quickly with a hazard-based approach. One ex

Environment committee  Initially, the problem in Canada was that we didn't have enough resources for adequate enforcement. There weren't enough boots on the ground and in the field. There's also a question of willingness to prosecute. That's why places like the United States, dating back to the Clean

Environment committee  The last thing I was going to say is that the environmental protection actions in CEPA have never been used, and so clearly they're not working.

Environment committee  The basic difference is that for toxic substances for which we have information that they're carcinogenic, mutagenic, toxic to reproduction, or very persistent and very bioaccumulative, the European Union takes that subset of all toxic substances and says, “For these cases, we're

Environment committee  The reasons for that would really deal with political opposition to pollution taxes. The fact that other countries have been able to move forward with pollution taxes suggests to me that we need to find the political will to put those in place. You could even compare us to the U

Environment committee  Thank you, Madam Chair. My eighth and final recommendation is that we need to have more mandatory timelines in CEPA. Health Canada and Environment Canada have just finished an amazing job of categorizing thousands of substances. That was because the law required them to do it by

Environment committee  Thank you very much, Madam Chair and honourable MPs. It's a pleasure to be joining you here today. It is now 30 years since the Progressive Conservatives under Prime Minister Mulroney pledged to introduce a comprehensive new environmental law for Canada. The Canadian Environmen

Environment committee  No, it's clear that the current system is not working. That's why I and other witnesses have put forward the recommendation that we do what the OECD has said is an international best practice and resituate responsibility. It could be joint responsibility, so that we have the best

Environment committee  Look, the right to a healthy environment is recognized in law in 150 countries around the world. It's in the constitutions of more than 100 countries around the world. It's in the law of Ontario, Quebec, and the three northern territories. It hasn't had any of those adverse conse

Environment committee  If you accept my recommendations—for example, having targets that have to meet those SMART criteria—then there's actually two mechanisms that could take place. One is that the commissioner could be empowered to say, “These targets do not meet the criteria; there's no measurabil