Environment committee  I'd just say that I think what Mr. Teeter is saying about an attitude change is already happening. With the new announcement, the departments have shown the commitment to look at the risk management while they're looking at the risk assessment. That will allow them to meet the ki

Environment committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. Let me just fill in to cover three of the recommendations we've brought to the committee. One was touched on, and that is virtual elimination. CEPA recognizes that persistent and bioaccumulative toxic substances need to be virtually eliminated. Only one sub

Environment committee  Mr. Chair, my understanding is that the assessment was of a mixture. Road salt is actually a mixture of salt and other things, so we're not talking about table salt necessarily. In order to do that assessment of toxicity, basically you need to schedule it and declare it toxic s

Environment committee  Just quickly, we're always talking about substitution and reasonable alternatives; zinc is a reasonable alternative for lead. It's a little bit more expensive, and the regulatory impact analysis statement says we could substitute all of this—all of this stuff could be made up of

Environment committee  In terms of confidentiality, we have in the past proposed a separation between business-confidential information and test data. What is happening with the new substances notification program is that there is just not enough transparency for us to be able to say whether they're do

Environment committee  Having followed the categorization process, we have seen departments learn to work together better. They had a joint announcement. That was a victory, I think. The example that I gave before was medical devices and consumer products. We're unclear, on the outside, as to what the

Environment committee  Thanks for the question. I think there are kind of two parts to the announcement. In a way there's the announcement of what's been in the hopper, the kinds of things that Health Canada and Environment Canada are doing about flame retardants, about PFOS, about various other subst

Environment committee  I think we're fairly happy with the timelines. The real question, of course, is which way these assessments are going to tip or how precautionary we're going to be when we're making these decisions. How protective are we going to be in making these decisions? In particular, in th

Environment committee  There is room for a socio-economic analysis when we're trying to decide what to do with something once we've decided it's toxic. But the actual risk assessment to determine whether something is toxic or not should fundamentally be a science decision. We support the idea that the

Environment committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. I think what we're concerned about when we're talking about the interaction between acts is how weak CEPA appears to be in relation to other acts. Even within the Department of Health, besides “between” departments, we have a problem where substances can be

Environment committee  There is an additional part to our brief on the in-commerce list, but those are our main points. We can address the others in questions, if you like.

Environment committee  Mr. Cullen, I think at one point you referred to a report comparing the OECD countries in terms of emissions, and Canada ranked near the bottom on most things. Besides that, we see that Europe is dealing with a variety of toxic substances, including those in cosmetics, and subs

Environment committee  I haven't spoken yet, so I'll introduce myself. I'm Kapil Khatter. I'm a family physician and I'm also with PollutionWatch. I only wanted to say two things. One is that we are looking forward to the government's action plan and that we recognize the amazing work that's been done

Environment committee  I think we agree with Mr. Moffet that the issue is with existing substances. When we look at the mandatory timelines that are there for new substances and the resources that are put into it, if we put those same kinds of resources and timelines into putting the burden of proof on

Environment committee  I think we'd support Health Canada's position that bio-monitoring needs to be done, that there needs to be a better measure of the changes in chemical exposure reaching humans, in particular, in the environment in Canada. There is more in CEPA to establish environmental indicator