Environment committee  The strategy I would employ would be to make the requirements mandatory under the act. REACH, the EU chemicals law, is much more precautionary than what we have here in Canada. The EU is a huge market that many these same companies produce products for.

Environment committee  Right.

Environment committee  I guess I don't have a perfect answer for that. I think it's this committee's job to put the priority on protecting public health and the environment.

Environment committee  I don't have any particular expertise on environmental rights, so I will let Linda Duncan speak to that. The kinds of recommendations I've made for reforming CEPA would take out the possibility of there being disparate impacts on particular vulnerable communities. This means, a

Environment committee  I think the strengths of REACH lie in the alternatives assessment and safe substitution in the data-gathering provisions, the fact that there is a reduced emphasis on exposure until much later in the decision-making process relative to the Canadian system. Again, the whole idea

Environment committee  Again, what I am proposing is that we have a mandatory precautionary regulatory control in place for toxic substances, a requirement to consider the safe alternative. The requirement is that they come forward with evidence that they've looked into what the alternatives are, and w

Environment committee  One example would be the basic recommendation I make to take the exposure assessments out of section 64. That would have the result of going across the board and allow us not to have these assumptions about safe levels of exposure built into our decision-making. Another option t

Environment committee  The government does.

Environment committee  Yes, that option is available in the act.

Environment committee  That's a good question. You can tie this exact shortcoming that you identify with respect to the regulation of BPA to the fact that there is an exposure requirement in section 64. Basically what happened on the BPA assessment is that the evidence was good, quite strong, that at v

Environment committee  Yes.

Environment committee  I address that in my brief in places where I think both the act as it stands is adequate to achieve precautionary outcomes and in places where the implementation of the act has fallen short. I also acknowledge places where I think the departmental officials doing the screening as

Environment committee  I can't answer that part of it, but I think what they benefit from is the toxic substances staying on the market longer than they should be.

Environment committee  I don't know. I think certainly in 2006, when the chemicals management plan was launched, it did seem that quite a lot of resources were put towards getting those screening assessments done in a much more timely way than such things had been done prior to that. I think, in many c

Environment committee  As I explained, one of the options available in the act is to go through the very rigorous screening assessment process, find a substance toxic, list it on schedule 1, and then take a regulatory option that includes “taking no further action”. I think that's completely opposite t