Environment committee  I'm not advocating for any particular policy approach. The environmental benefits are reducing waste going to landfills, improving the economics of that, and ensuring that the policy environment for all orders of government ensures that this disposed material is safely taken care

Environment committee  To use your example, sir, when a city dweller goes out to enjoy those wetlands at Oak Hammock Marsh or somewhere else, and they throw their pop bottle onto the landscape, someone can come behind and recover that and ensure that it's not simply left there or that the pop-top from

Environment committee  Thank you. The CCME does not have a position on a carbon tax. I believe three of our member provincial governments have carbon taxes: Quebec, Alberta, and British Columbia.

Environment committee  I can only respond to that based on what the waste experts from the province, our waste management task group, report to me. It falls into a number of different areas, but there is dissatisfaction amongst the technical folks across the country with the range of Statistics Canada

Environment committee  On the recycling aspect, you heard from Ms. Leung from Emterra Group about a good number of the problems and about some of the potential opportunities. There aren't enough recyclables. They aren't well enough identified. There are too many programs in large metropolitan areas i

Environment committee  We have not done any recent work in that area. We prepared, I believe in the mid-nineties, voluntary guidelines for the management of biomedical waste. Since that time, if memory serves me correctly, both the Canadian Standards Association and Health Canada have superseded those

Environment committee  I would have to defer to my technical working groups on that.

Environment committee  I don't know what information there is. I will look for it, and if I have any I will certainly table it with the committee.

Environment committee  I wouldn't characterize it as looking at pharmaceutical waste. The last significant work we did that involved pharmaceuticals was through the development of the Canada-wide strategy for the municipal wastewater effluent, which resulted in the federal regulation you heard about, a

Environment committee  Gee, you would think I'd know that off the top of my head. It is on our website. I believe that was 2009-2010, but honestly I'm guessing. The federal regulation on municipal wastewater effluent I believe was promulgated last year.

Environment committee  CCME does not monitor. We establish the guidelines by which the provinces, territories, and, in certain areas, the federal government do the monitoring. We establish the guidelines for a particular chemical or substance of concern, which is then the basis on which that monitoring

Environment committee  I'm sorry. The question is....

Environment committee  Yes. The council is indeed looking at all of that. I read an assessment from our technical group not too long ago specific to endocrine disrupters and trying to assess the state of the science, so that we can begin developing the guidelines and governments can begin to do the mon

Environment committee  Yes, in any of those discussions, the technical folks and the scientists are very conversant with the science, wherever it is coming from, and do scans all around the world. Endocrine disrupters specifically and a number of other pharmaceuticals are on what I would call a watch-

Environment committee  Lessons learned is the exercise that we're going through right now. From the people I've spoken to, some of the reasons for Nova Scotia's relative success have been the regionalization of their landfills, the ban on organics and recyclable materials into the landfills, and an abs