Environment committee  TCE is used for degreasing metal parts, primarily. It's rarely used for dry cleaning. But I don't know if that's relevant to this--

Environment committee  Thank you. I think that whatever you do is good. I think longer term...but you may want to learn from your initial study and then update your methodology. So I don't know whether you're talking about one long study or multiple. But it's true that the body burdens only tell you w

Environment committee  I recall--I think it was in the eighties--there was a shipment of PCBs from the U.K. that came to Canada and I think when it arrived at the docks in Montreal there was so much protest they had to send it back. Certainly importing PCBs from the U.S. to Canada makes no sense, becau

Environment committee  Thank you. First of all, let me say that PCBs were originally identified for phase-out in the 1970s, and I think that it's quite amazing that in the U.S. and Canada large stockpiles still remain untreated. And part of the reason that they remain untreated is the debate over inci

Environment committee  I'll be very quick. One is timelines. The characterization process worked because there were mandatory timelines and resources. These processes go on forever unless there are clear timelines. The second is building on the precautionary approach--what I think you've been calli

Environment committee  Well, anyway, we can debate. I believe in Canada most dry cleaning is perchloroethylene. It's actually an issue I once worked on quite extensively. I know that in just the last two weeks California came up with a phase-out of perchloroethylene in dry cleaning. There are a number

Environment committee  Thank you. Let me say something briefly about PFOS and phthalates and then draw a more general conclusion from it. I think the important thing to watch on PFOS and PFOA, and this is certainly now being discussed in the Stockholm Convention, a group that is looking at new chemi

Environment committee  I really hope that the debate over chemicals can become a good-faith debate and not a spin debate. To find one-sided sets of arguments from all kinds of places always tracing back to the same sources is discouraging. Yes, they looked at blood, because you can't take a human bod

Environment committee  I wanted to say something about CEPA, but maybe you've been talking about CEPA enough and want to discuss this issue. Maybe we can come back to some thoughts on CEPA in the question and answer. Thank you.

Environment committee  Thank you. I'm honoured to be invited to testify before this committee. My name is Jack Weinberg. I'm a senior policy adviser to the International POPs Elimination Network, which is a network of non-governmental organizations in 70 countries. It started around the negotiation of