Environment committee  There are some methods that we do not yet fully have replacements for. Developmental neurotoxicity is one of those examples. What we need right now is to adopt everything that we have available at our disposal. The entire tool box of new approach methods that we have at our disp

Environment committee  I don't think there is enough of an incentive for everyone to adopt these technologies. That's where legislation comes into play. This is what happened with the cosmetics industry in the European Union. When the EU government said that they were no longer going to be able to tes

Environment committee  I agree with the recommendations that were put forward by Humane Canada and Animal Justice. I've seen their briefs. This is long, but what I proposed in my brief, which you will get to see soon, is along the same lines. You need to make the language a bit more specific, practica

Environment committee  In terms of the actual numbers, they are not available. In Canada, we do not know. We know how many animals are used in toxicity testing, based on the Canadian Council on Animal Care guidelines, but those do not include some of the private companies that are not part of this ac

Environment committee  Most of these countries have legislation already in place and national strategic road maps geared toward eliminating vertebrate animal testing in the United States. They amended TSCA, the Toxic Substances Control Act the same way that we're trying to amend CEPA here. The Enviro

Environment committee  The key benefits are that they are cheaper, faster and more predictive of human biology, and that's the most important thing. In most of these legacy animal methods, these are animals that have many differences at various levels, and they cannot accurately predict how we humans w

Environment committee  Yes, I think the three Rs, honestly, have been around. The three Rs are replacement, reduction and refinement of animals in scientific research and testing. This was written back in 1959, and not much has changed. If you think about it, if the scientific community were really ad

Environment committee  That would be a fair comment if you could put in some language there that requires the timely incorporation of these methods into regulatory risk assessment. Then I think it will be more of an incentive to really focus on reduction and replacement while working on other ways to m

Environment committee  Thank you for the question. The world is burgeoning with these new approach methods right now, and this is our opportunity to really put that into law, to put it int writing, that we need to start using these methods. Until these methods go into regulatory acceptance—and this i

Environment committee  Yes, absolutely. Some of my proposed amendments are in the brief that I provided. This is where we need to be very concrete with our language. Even in proposed subparagraph 68.1(2)( a), it says “is not reasonably possible”. Things like that are too vague. The language that I

Environment committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. It is a pleasure to be here today to speak about the historic legislative changes being made to modernize toxicity testing in Canada. Toxicity testing is the process of determining how chemicals negatively impact our normal biological functions. This is cu