Environment committee  It's a complicated question, and I'm not sure I have the answer, as a lawyer. What I would say is that this is a system-based problem. We have systems in place that rely on these historic animal tests, so it just takes time to move away from them. In part, it also requires upfr

Environment committee  Absolutely. Our position on part 6 at this time is that at the very least, what we need are regulations to protect animals. We know that attempts to modify the genetic makeup of animals—including through CRISPR—can actually have very serious, unexpected and unpredictable negati

Environment committee  Absolutely. Thank you for that opportunity. As you recognized, the act right now focuses exclusively on vertebrates, and especially.... Hopefully members of the committee have seen My Octopus Teacher in particular, which recently came out and really showed how highly intelligent

Environment committee  I would say that right now Canada is not on track, but I think we could be. That's the good news. I try to look at these things in an optimistic way. The bad news is that we're behind other jurisdictions. The good news is that, because of that, we can learn from them. We can lo

Environment committee  Thank you so much for the question. I appreciate this is a challenging topic, for the reasons you outlined. Our position is that the overall emphasis of the act needs to be on replacing and reducing the use of animals, and not just refining the way they're used, but as you note,

Environment committee  Yes. Thank you. The proposal there is really just to try to strengthen the wording a bit. The language that was originally proposed in the Senate would have required government to avoid these animals, and instead we have the word “encourage”, which was introduced because it's le

Environment committee  What I would say is that when we talk about genetically modified organisms—of course, my interest is in genetically modified animals in particular—it raises a number of issues, some of which are ethical, some of which are environmental, some of which are on human health and some

Environment committee  Absolutely. I was involved in the genetically modified salmon litigation, so I have a lot of views on that topic. I'm very happy to do that.

Environment committee  Absolutely. Animal Justice has a number of concerns, and I think that the GM salmon case exemplifies the overall problems with part 6. Some of them are very specific in terms of how the assessment was done, and some are more overarching. As you've heard, we did not consider the i

Environment committee  Good afternoon. Thank you for the opportunity to appear before the committee today to discuss this incredibly important bill. By amending Canada's toxics law, Canada has an exciting opportunity to phase out the unnecessary use of animals in painful toxicity testing and to positi