ENSU Committee Meeting

STANDING COMMITTEE ON ENVIRONMENT AND SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT

COMITÉ PERMANENT DE L'ENVIRONNEMENT ET DU DÉVELOPPEMENT DURABLE

EVIDENCE

[Recorded by Electronic Apparatus]

Wednesday, October 7, 1998

• 1538

[English]

The Clerk of the Committee: Hon. members, I see a quorum. Your first order of business, pursuant to Standing Order 106(1), is the election of a chair. I am ready to receive nominations or motions to that effect.

Moved by Mrs. Kraft Sloan, seconded by Mr. Assadourian—

Ms. Paddy Torsney (Burlington, Lib.): Without even hearing it?

An hon. member: Surprise me.

Mrs. Karen Kraft Sloan (York North, Lib.): I'll surprise you.

It gives me a great deal of pleasure and honour to nominate Charles Caccia as the chair.

Mr. Sarkis Assadourian (Brampton Centre, Lib.): I second the motion.

The Clerk: Moved by Ms. Kraft Sloan, seconded by Mr. Assadourian, that the Hon. Charles Caccia do take the chair.

Is is the pleasure of the committee to adopt the motion?

(Motion agreed to)

[Translation]

The clerk: I invite the President to take the Chair.

• 1540

[English]

Some hon. members: Hear, hear.

The Chairman (Mr. Charles Caccia (Davenport, Lib.)): Before proceeding with the election of the two vice-chairs I will have to subject you to a short speech, but I feel that it is in order to do so, and I promise to keep it within a three-minute time limit.

It is indeed an honour to be supported by all of you in carrying on the task of chair of this committee, and I appreciate your support, despite my outbursts of impatience at times, some rude behaviour—less frequently, but nevertheless—and the fact that I do not always comply with all the wishes expressed by members. I promise to be more patient and more understanding. I don't know whether I will be able to keep that promise—

Some hon. members: Oh, oh.

The Chairman: —and if this sounds like false modesty, maybe it is, but nevertheless, I am aware of the frustrations that sometimes do take place in the hearts and souls of members, be they in the opposition or on the government's side.

I would like to make only this additional observation. This is probably the most complex committee on the Hill: it tries to integrate the three dimensions in policy making—the environmental, the economic and the social—because that is the essence of sustainable development.

And when we do that, as we have already at times experienced, we put ourselves on an extremely difficult path. Implementation of sustainable development is a path that is easily articulated, as I am doing now, but not easily implemented. And it is, I submit to you, as revolutionary as Marxism was 150 years ago.

It is, therefore, a revolutionary concept, one that is very timely for our particular point in history, and one that is going to test the political ingenuity of any party in Canada and on the globe.

So when we embark on this phenomenal journey on C-32, I urge you—and I'm sure that you have already thought about it—to keep in mind sustainable development and what it means. It is a concept that this government has fully embraced and endorsed, not only in 1993 but also with the declaration signed by the minister and cabinet ministers in 1995. It is a concept that we have committed ourselves to at the United Nations. It is a concept that over 190 nations at the United Nations have committed themselves to as well. It is a far, distant goal that is beckoning to us and which is really putting to a test our ability, which is, again, the ability to integrate these three dimensions.

There cannot be a healthy economy without a healthy environment. And there cannot be an equitable society without the other two elements integrated in that goal.

So our committee is probably the most complex of all committees on the Hill, and your membership and your hard work will be necessary in order to make sure that this bill and any other future work that we do stands very close to this particular goal.

It has taken me four minutes instead of three, and I will now thank you again for your confidence. I'll do my best to earn it.

I'll proceed with the election of the two vice-chairs, as proposed. We need one vice-chair from the government side and one from the opposition. The floor is open for nominations.

Madam Carroll.

Ms. Aileen Carroll (Barrie—Simcoe—Bradford, Lib.): I would like to nominate Karen Kraft Sloan, a person of inordinate experience in this regard, as the vice-chair from the government side.

• 1745

The Chairman: Thank you. Let's do this one at a time.

All those in favour, please so indicate. Any opposed?

(Motion agreed to)

The Chairman: Madam Kraft Sloan is the vice-chair on the government side.

Could we now have a nomination for the opposition side?

Mr. Casson, please.

Mr. Rick Casson (Lethbridge, Ref.): Mr. Chairman, I nominate Bill Gilmour as the second vice-chairman.

The Chairman: We have a nomination in the name of Mr. Gilmour. Are there any other nominations?

Ms. Aileen Carroll: Could he promise not to be mean to us?

An hon. member: He doesn't know what “mean” means.

The Chairman: All those in favour of Mr. Gilmour's candidacy? Any opposed?

(Motion agreed to)

The Chairman: The motion is carried unanimously, as was the previous one.

Thank you.

Now the clerk is telling me that we have to proceed with the orders of the day.

Mr. Rick Laliberte (Churchill River, NDP): Mr. Chair?

The Chairman: Mr. Laliberte.

Mr. Rick Laliberte: In terms of procedure, you may have needed a seconder for those motions. I would be willing to second both motions.

The Chairman: The clerk indicated to me that it's not essential, but if you wish to be recorded as having seconded the nomination of Mr. Gilmour as well as the nomination of Madam Kraft Sloan, so be it. Thank you.

Before we proceed with Mr. Walker and STOP, you will also recall that we then have a session at 5 p.m. with the minister and some of her officials.

May I also remind you that there is an exhibit in room 253D today, which includes an important reference to the environment and nature that is part of an overall program being announced today, the name of which now escapes me. The only reason for raising that here is to encourage you to drop in and see it before the exhibit folds and disappears. It is worth your while.

Let me also indicate to you that tomorrow at 9 a.m. we will be hearing from the Environmental Law Centre of Edmonton. Their brief has been in your offices since yesterday.

And then, Mr. Clerk?

The Clerk: Then, Mr. Chairman, at 10 a.m. the departmental officials are going to speak to the committee about the government amendments for C-32.

The Chairman: So at around 10 a.m. the officials of Environment Canada will be here presenting the government amendments already.

Finally, the good news is that as a result of arrangements made in connection with the clause-by-clause process, we'll start that on November 1, so members of the committee will hopefully have adequate time to review the submissions and to prepare themselves with amendments.

The clerk will indicate tomorrow what the desirable deadline for amendments is. That deadline is not rigid and unbreakable, but amendments coming in sooner rather than later will certainly facilitate the work of the committee and of the staff.

And finally, as for the research arrangements, the members of the committee can count on three persons at the table who will be able to answer questions on amendments proposed by members or questions by members who wish to better understand the impact of such amendments. We will have Christine Labelle for the scientific side, Monique Hébert for the legislative side, and John Moffet for the toxics side. These three combined, this think-tank, so to speak, will provide members with the best possible available pool of knowledge in order to facilitate the clause-by-clause process.

• 1550

Mr. Gilmour.

Mr. Bill Gilmour (Nanaimo—Alberni, Ref.): Just so we don't all do the same thing, will the clerk be flagging things? We've had many witnesses with proposed amendments. Will we get a list or a brief that goes through the bill telling us, for example, that the chemical companies or the environmental groups recommended this clause in this area, or do we have to go through them all ourselves? I'm just trying to save us from all doing the same thing.

The Chairman: The research people would have to do that kind of work on the basis of the briefs received—

Mr. Bill Gilmour: Okay.

The Chairman: —because you are to make the selection of the amendments of your choice, obviously.

Mr. Bill Gilmour: But will we have to put the whole package together ourselves?

The Chairman: Let's hear what the clerk has to say.

The Clerk: Mr. Chairman, the first volume of the summary of evidence, which is circulated, hopefully should be useful in that regard, and I think we're about ready to send the final version. Perhaps the researchers could come to the table, Mr. Chairman, if they have anything they'd like to add to that.

The Chairman: Here we have our humble researchers who prefer to shy away from the limelight, but nevertheless, that's not always possible.

And then I will recognize you, Mr. Herron. Do you have a question that is also related to the research?

Mr. John Herron (Fundy—Royal, PC): Yes.

The Chairman: Please go ahead.

Mr. John Herron: With respect to the amendments—because it is my first time going through this—what happens if the amendment I table is very similar to what Ms. Kraft Sloan's amendment might actually be, given that we're so like-minded?

Some hon. members: Oh, oh.

Mr. John Herron: What happens at that point where the amendments are actually rather parallel?

The Chairman: Well, maybe that's a good question that we should sort out now as to whether it should be in alphabetical order or by party name, giving precedence to the government side and then the opposition by virtue of their numbers. And perhaps, it seems to me, the second approach is better than the alphabetical one, because one is born with whatever family name one is born with, and that has no political roots. My inclination would be—if it is acceptable, of course—to have it by party affiliation and by their size in the House of Commons.

Ms. Torsney.

Ms. Paddy Torsney: As a “T”, I just want to say that often in other committees when amendments are very similar members talk about them in general terms, and the committee might then agree as to which one is more appropriate to their needs.

The Chairman: On amendments, yes, that can happen, but mostly if there are amendments to delete a word. If the two are deleting the same word, we will have the problem that Mr. Herron is raising, and I would be inclined to handle it in that way.

Madam Kraft Sloan.

Mrs. Karen Kraft Sloan: Sometimes we have a package of amendments ahead of time, and it might be that members decide to collaborate, either to put one amendment forward or to have it as a Kraft Sloan/Herron amendment.

The Chairman: Joint amendments.

Mrs. Karen Kraft Sloan: Absolutely. It's a show of cooperation, it's supportive—it's nationalism in Canada, dare I say it?

The Chairman: Thank you.

Now the group has to answer the question that was posed before, by Mr. Gilmour, I believe.

Ms. Monique Hébert (Committee Researcher): Yes, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. Gilmour, at the beginning of this session a summary of evidence, phase one, was circulated. It regroups, on a clause-by-clause approach, the submissions that were made in relation to these clauses. Now we've updated that, but because so many briefs have come in at the eleventh hour, we've not been able to incorporate them all.

So certainly the majority of the briefs we've received will be in this second document that we'll be circulating tomorrow. However, briefs like the one being provided by CELA and CIELAP, for obvious reasons, have not been incorporated in our summary of submissions. It's fairly detailed, and I think it's set out fairly clearly, and members will know precisely where to go if they're so inclined.

• 1555

The Chairman: I forgot to mention that in the week when we come back there will still be a couple of witnesses, who, for organizational reasons, could not be heard yesterday. One of them is the Canadian Bar Association and the other is CELA.

The Clerk: Yes, and the Canadian Institute for Environmental Law and Policy. That will be on Tuesday morning, October 20.

The Chairman: That will conclude our range of witnesses.

The Clerk: The bar association, Mr. Chairman, is to be here on Wednesday afternoon, October 21. By e-mail to all offices, we circulated the schedule and a sort of a draft outlook from here until the end of December.

Ms. Aileen Carroll: Mr. Clerk, at the risk of sounding facetious, there have been many different instructions coming in and going out of our offices. When did you send that one? In the last couple of hours?

The Clerk: Yesterday or this morning, Mr. Chairman.

And I share your concern, believe me.

The Chairman: Madam Torsney.

Ms. Paddy Torsney: In the fall program notes that were given to us, there are dates missing, so I wonder if we could actually go through it. I did have a little difficulty understanding what it meant. For instance, the notes say, “North-South Institute, Canadian Development Report 1998, briefing,” one meeting, with the institute president as the witness. When?

The Chairman: Could we perhaps have this discussion tomorrow so that we don't keep our witness waiting? Now we are going into the nuts and bolts, and tomorrow morning there will definitely be time to do that, either before we start or at the conclusion of the meeting.

With your indulgence, I would move, then, towards opening up the meeting to have Mr. Walker address the members of the committee. Mr. Walker is well known for his activity as executive director of STOP in Montreal.

Welcome to the committee. We certainly appreciate the fact that you were able to make an appearance at short notice. The floor is yours.

Mr. Bruce Walker (Director of Research, STOP): Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman and members of the committee.

I'm the research director of STOP, which is a Montreal-based citizens' environmental group. When I appear in a national forum, it's important to point out that STOP is a citizens' group incorporated in the province of Quebec. Some of you may have groups with similar-sounding names in your own ridings or your own communities, but there is no relation between the one I represent in Montreal and those organizations elsewhere in Canada or the world.

This brief was prepared by several active members of our board of directors, and I would like to name them: Mr. Georges Hébert, president of STOP; Mr. Thomas Welt, treasurer of STOP; and Madam Jennifer Patton, director of STOP.

I basically have four key points that I would like to bring to the committee's attention. But I'd like to begin by essentially saying that to us this bill is a significant improvement over the current version of CEPA. You hear a lot of witnesses who begin with that and then tear the bill to shreds, but I think it's important to state that from our perspective, from an NGO perspective, from the perspective of clean air, clean water and intelligent solid waste management, this bill is a big improvement over what we as Canadians now have.

Some of our differences are philosophical, some of them are semantic—which you will of course get into in the clause-by-clause and literally comma-by-comma markup of the bill—and some of our objections are rather fundamental.

The first one I would like to highlight has to do with the use of the term “cost-effective”. Certainly in paragraph 2(1)(a), we frankly do not believe that you need to refer to cost-effective measures in the legislation. That is of course done under any regulation: for those of us who spend time reading regulatory impact analysis statements and so on, cost-effectiveness is one tool used to measure whether it's a good idea or not.

But frankly, STOP believes that the use of the term “cost-effective” in the law would put a legislative straightjacket around Environment Canada and around the minister. And I don't think that's a good thing to start with.

• 1600

This compares with, for example, the U.S. Clean Air Act, where, for purposes of developing national ambient air quality standards, it actually says in the U.S. Clean Air Act that it is illegal to take cost into account when you're determining safe levels of exposure to pollutants in the air—or criteria pollutants. Canada is taking the reverse situation. Our recommendation is simply to delete the reference to cost-effectiveness, or in the case of 2(1)(a), to delete one word, “cost-”.

[Translation]

I was mentioning earlier that the French version of this article is not done because no reference was made to cost. Reference was only made to efficiency.

[English]

Our second significant concern has to do with the clauses dealing with environmental protection action, clauses 24 through 32. I will quote, then, from page 8 of STOP's brief:

These sections guarantee that no potential plaintiff will be able to have the slightest idea of the extent of what he is getting himself into in terms of relevant subject matter, time or money. Foreseeability of result is reduced to zero. They further say to potential plaintiffs, “If you're wrong you lose, but if you're right you can still lose.” They constitute a blank cheque to practitioners of litigation by attrition.

Not surprisingly, that section was written by our president, M^e Hébert, who is himself a practising legal aid lawyer in Montreal.

So basically we're saying there's not going to be a whole avalanche of what might be termed “frivolous suits” as a result of this—and perhaps just the reverse.

We have a concern regarding part 6 on biotechnology, specifically in regard to clause 104. This is described on page 9 of our brief. We have a concern regarding the proposed definition of “living organism”. We admit that it's difficult to define something like that. As we say in our brief:

There is no consensus on what constitutes a living organism among scientists. This definition could lead to serious doubt about what products of biotechnology are covered by this bill. The bill should cover the materials from life that are used to create the genetically modified organism. Such products could include plastids from bacterial sources, viruses and other sources of genetic materials not covered by the above definition.

The fourth and final key point I would like to highlight has to do with part 7, controlling pollution and managing wastes, and specifically with clause 149 dealing with definitions in regard to vehicle engine and equipment emissions.

I should say to begin with that STOP is delighted with one part of this clause: an 18-year-old battle of STOP's seems to be resolved, that is, to transfer the legislative authority to regulate motor vehicle emissions in this country from Transport Canada under the Motor Vehicle Safety Act to Environment Canada under the Canadian Environmental Protection Act. We support that legislative change. In fact, STOP was just about the first organization to do so.

Mr. Chairman, I think you will remember that almost 18 years ago, the report of the House of Commons subcommittee on acid rain was called Still Waters—and I brought a copy with me—and this was one of the recommendations in that report. In fact, the committee at that time applauded STOP for that recommendation and endorsed it.

Eighteen years later, it's actually coming to pass, and we're delighted to see that. We're delighted to see a broader definition of “motor vehicle” as well, so that the Government of Canada will be able to regulate currently unregulated sources such as off-road vehicles, which are largely diesel-powered and are found in the construction, mining and forestry sectors.

But we are shocked to learn that under this bill the government proposes to exclude the authority to regulate aircraft, locomotives, and ships. We take particular exception to the exclusion of locomotives, largely because we know more about that.

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In the case of locomotives, only the Government of Canada has jurisdiction to regulate their emissions or regulate their activity, for a variety of historic and practical reasons. We believe Environment Canada is the federal department best situated to regulate the environmental activities of locomotives, but this clause would in fact make it impossible for Environment Canada to do that.

To Environment Canada's credit, it has in fact, without legal jurisdiction, already signed a memorandum of understanding with the major railways regarding nitrogen oxide emissions in the Windsor-Quebec City corridor.

We urge you to eliminate those exceptions and those exemptions.

That completes my presentation, Mr. Chairman. I await the members' questions.

The Chairman: Thank you. That was very helpful.

Mr. Casson.

Mr. Rick Casson: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

I'd like to refer to your section on clause 16 about voluntary reports and the whistle-blower provision, Mr. Walker. You're suggesting that this whistle-blower provision be expanded to take in all employees, not just federal employees. Is that the gist of what you're saying?

Mr. Bruce Walker: Yes, that is correct. Whistle-blower protection should essentially be as broad as possible. In fact, we would even go further and suggest that you change the title of the section from “Voluntary Reports” to “Whistle-Blower Protection”.

Mr. Rick Casson: Some of the things that we've heard from other witnesses—and you got into a bit about definition here or you said hadn't seen the word “toxic” mentioned somewhere—were that a lot of them were concerned that the word “toxic” wasn't defined or that “toxic” wasn't defined properly in virtual elimination. Did you get into that at all in your analysis of the bill?

Mr. Bruce Walker: We deliberated internally. Admittedly, it is difficult. As an organization, STOP currently sits on numerous federal and national multi-stakeholder advisory committees and strategic option process issue tables, terms that you're all now familiar with. Trying to come up with appropriate definitions can be difficult, even within the mandate of these advisory committees.

Frankly, most of these substances or “pollutants”, if you wish, that we deal with tend not to be the persistent bioaccumulative substances, for example. Some of them may be toxic, like benzene, for example, so frankly, we deferred to the other members of the rather broad environmental non-governmental organization community, including our friends at the Canadian Environmental Law Association and others who have of course studied this in far more depth than we have.

However, it is important to remember the origins of this law. Back in the 1970s, it started as basically a commercial chemicals law, the Environmental Contaminants Act. And in the 1980s, when the previous Conservative government decided to roll other environmental legislation like the Clean Air Act and the Canada Water Act into CEPA, it was done in a very clumsy way, frankly. It made things difficult. MMT is a good example. You couldn't use CEPA to regulate MMT, so the government chose a different method, which turned out to be, as we have learned—but not to my surprise—inappropriate or illegal.

Mr. Rick Casson: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

The Chairman: Thank you.

Mr. Charbonneau, please.

[Translation]

Mr. Yvon Charbonneau (Anjou—Rivière-des-Prairies, Lib.): I would first like to welcome Mr. Walker, who represents an organization that is well known in Québec for its consistent positions and expertise on environmental issues.

You bring us several important suggestions, elements of the criticisms on which we will return during the debate section by section with possibilities of amendments based on your proposals.

I would like to come back on what you said at the very beginning of your presentation when you insisted, in your introduction, on pointing out that this Bill, in this version, was a substantial improvement, that it meant progress, I suppose, compared to the existing legislation.

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I would like to ask you to come back on this aspect and summarize the elements that lead you to make this judgement on this Bill, i.e. that it is nonetheless an improvement.

Mr. Bruce Walker: For example, there is the National Pollutant Release Inventory (NPRI) issue, INRP in French, in which I am directly involved. I am a member of the multi-party advisory committee which helped the government create the NPRI five years ago. I am also a member of the new multi-party advisory committee on this issue.

In the past, the NPRI was an orphan federal program because it did not have a legislative basis. So this Bill, in section 46 or 49, I forget the number, provides a legislative basis.

[English]

So for the first time, NPRI has a legislative home. Not surprisingly, like most critics, we tend to comment on the things we disagree with rather than on the things we agree with, so I appreciate the opportunity to respond.

[Translation]

With respect to the atmosphere, there are improvements, as I mentioned, regarding on-road motor vehicles and off-road motor vehicles, in the control of fuels, for example. Therefore, according to the planned modifications, the federal government could legislate on various additives to gas, diesel fuel, various fuels. This is something that must be done. This gives a summary of the improvements.

Mr. Yvon Charbonneau: On the issue of public participation, the recourse, how do you evaluate this issue? Are we moving ahead or going round in circles?

Mr. Bruce Walker: I must admit that it is not a major step forward, but rather a very minor improvement. We have expressed criticism on this. As far as we are concerned, our involvement, as I said earlier, is essentially limited, at the national level, to multi-party advisory committees. There is no need for an authorization by federal legislation to set up such committees.

[English]

The work of the various multi-stakeholder committees that I and other STOP representatives sit on—including Mr. Don Wedge who sits on the national packaging protocol task force, for example—is not significantly affected by the addition or deletion of text in this bill, to be honest.

Frankly, it is more affected by two things: the budget of Environment Canada, something over which your committee has some influence, and the political will of Environment Canada, over which you also have some influence.

And to be honest, very few of these committees actually need a legislative mandate. In fact, we are pleased that the Government of Canada is choosing the consultative route in developing regulations, codes of practice and guidelines.

But we are concerned that most of them do not reach a consensus on some of the fundamental points and frequently stop as a minority dissenting view in many of these codes of practice and guidelines. What concerns us is not the legislative strength or weakness but the political will of the government to say, “These are the various recommendations. We have to make a decision.” Those decisions are essentially value judgments, and that's why we're so concerned about things like cost-effectiveness being in the legislation.

There are situations, hypothetically at least, where it would be very difficult for a whole roomful of economists to determine the cost-effectiveness in dollars per unit tonne of nitrogen oxides or biochemical oxygen demand for a given initiative. It might not be an expensive initiative; it might be relatively inexpensive. But if you have to demonstrate the cost-effectiveness of it as a prerequisite—

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It reminds of the acid rain debate in the early 1980s. In that debate, one of President Reagan's key advisers, the chair of the Office of Management and Budget, David Stockman, asked, “What is a fish worth?” Various Canadian environment ministers—including your chairman at that time—and various Canadian ambassadors lambasted Washington for taking such a cost-effectiveness approach, such a cold, calculating, bottom-line approach, to a major public policy and environmental issue.

Well, the government proposes, frankly, to enshrine cost-effectiveness in everything that's done under CEPA rather than where it belongs—in Treasury Board guidelines, in regulatory guidelines and so forth. That's where cost-effectiveness needs to be dealt with. I fully agree.

The Chairman: Merci, Monsieur Charbonneau.

[Translation]

Mr. Asselin, followed by Ms. Kraft-Sloan.

Mr. Gérard Asselin (Charlevoix, BQ): First, in part 1 of your document, it is said that the government is to table an annual report to Parliament on the agreements relating to the administration of this legislation and equivalent provisions.

In your document, again in part 1, you say that there should at least be reports on provincial activities regarding inspections, inquiries, audits, and enforcement; data on spills and waste; as well as information on the disputes raised by these agreements.

The problem is this. We have been waiting for several years, and not specifically with Bill C-32, that the federal government adopt legislation, and in the eyes of the population, it did its homework. But, on paper only. As for the quality of air, the quality of water or whatever, no change will occur within the next 10 years, and here, it's back to Kyoto and other places to realise that greenhouse gas emissions have not decreased, they have even increased. In the eyes of the population, Canada has adopted standards knowing they can hardly be applied, if at all.

The problem, once again, is enforcing the law. If I am a legislator, I can draft any required legislation. However, I must have the means for controlling and enforcing this legislation. If I have legislation adopted and do not see to its enforcement and control, then this is nothing but a show put on for my constituents. I have achieved things, but I did not do anything good.

There is also a problem with overlapping and duplicating, because the environment affects everybody. Everybody wants to go to heaven, but no one wants to die. I will explain: when I say that everybody wants to go to heaven, but that no one wants to die, I mean that municipalities, in the management of their territories, are the master craftsmen and have intermunicipal sanitary landfill boards, park control and management committees, garbage collection and sanitary landfill committees. And here, the municipality issues a permit.

To use this permit, the intermunicipal sanitary landfill site needs a permit issued by the Québec government. The ministère de l'Environnement du Québec issues a permit based on the landfilling standards. And here, we have another problem. When underground water seeps out and we realise that this underground water coming from the intermunicipal sanitary landfill site leaks into the St. Lawrence River, public waters are polluted, and this is of federal jurisdiction.

Who will control, who will live up to their responsibilities to enforce the legislation and determine that this is a polluted site? Is it the municipality? Is it the provincial government? Is it the federal government?

And, with this rationalization process on zero deficit for municipalities, and the provincial and federal governments, when a position is abolished or someone retires, the person is not replaced. In the federal public service, certain positions in the Department of the Environment have been vacant for two or three years; they have not been filled. No one enforces the law, no one conducts inquiries, and no one monitors the enforcement of the law. Everybody does just about what they want.

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Do you agree with what I just said? Personally, after speaking with SME representatives, and federal, provincial and municipal officials, this is the way I see it. We have to wonder if Bill C-32 will really correct the situation if we do not have the human resources required to enforce it.

Mr. Bruce Walker: A typographic error at the end of page 4 of our paper has just been brought to my attention. Section a) “Provincial Activities” should read: “Federal-Provincial Activities,” therefore in the context of the federal-provincial agreements. You are right. The MP is right. This Bill does not change something that has existed for 130 years in Canada, and the main statutory and regulation responsibility, for most fixed sources of conventional pollution, is of provincial jurisdiction. This does not change.

There are more and more problems because political borders are not respected, be they federal-provincial or international. Therefore, the federal role is very important. Next week, I will be attending a national advisory workshop on Canada-wide standards for ground-level ozone and specific materials. This is therefore a harmonized standard for the entire country. Québec, as you know, did not sign this agreement, but they will send at least two delegates as observers.

The Chairman: Thank you, Mr. Asselin.

Ms. Kraft Sloan, please.

[English]

Mrs. Karen Kraft Sloan: Thank you very much.

I have a reasonable familiarity with most parts of the bill, but the fuel section is something that I really require some good advice on.

In part 7, for example, in clauses 140 and 160 in the bill, is this written in such a way that it would allow us to regulate and enforce the control of MMT in gasoline? Or do changes have to be made in (c) or in other paragraphs of the clauses?

Mr. Bruce Walker: The essential reason we didn't comment on it in our written brief is that we believe it is currently adequately drafted, at least in regard to regulating the allowable concentration of a variety of substances, either those that are naturally found in the crude oil from which various combustion fuels are derived—sulphur and benzene would be good examples—or those that are additives which are deliberately added to fuels—lead being a good example from the 1980s and MMT a very current one.

Would the law allow you to ban it so that the concentration would be 0.0 parts per quadrillion or something like that? There may be some legal argument there, but we consider it adequate and an improvement over the existing sections.

Mrs. Karen Kraft Sloan: Could you clarify the argument on the banning issue? What is the problem there?

Mr. Bruce Walker: For example, rather than simply adopting a regulation that says it is illegal to add substance x to gasoline or diesel fuel, it would be rather more likely—and certainly the government would have the legislative authority—to adopt a regulation that would limit the concentration in fuels of a wide variety of substances and so forth, as the federal government should, in fact.

Mrs. Karen Kraft Sloan: Limit it to zero? Is that what you're saying?

Mr. Bruce Walker: It might actually be difficult to do that. You could make it low enough that it would have an “insignificant” impact on the environment, one might say. But if you said it was illegal to add it, then you might still run into that problem. You can adopt a rather strict, very low concentration, which may do it from a practical point of view.

In fact, I believe the current regulation regarding lead in gasoline is that lead is not legally banned but is strictly regulated, and it was strictly enough regulated that the oil refiners, who fought that throughout the 1980s, have simply stopped adding lead to gasoline.

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Though there is, I believe, currently in the Canada Gazette and the Consolidated Regulations of Canada somewhere—I haven't read it recently, I must admit—what is known as a legally allowable concentration of lead in what is called “unleaded gasoline”.

Mrs. Karen Kraft Sloan: Right.

Mr. Bruce Walker: Rather than saying there shall be 0.0 parts per quadrillion, it says there is a small amount allowable which is insignificant from an environmental point of view. And from a policy-making point of view, it was low enough to have the effect of banning it.

Mrs. Karen Kraft Sloan: So you would recommend going this route as opposed to making it an illegal substance or making it illegal to add to—

Mr. Bruce Walker: Well, in this case, using the fuel section would be far smarter than saying, “Oh, gee, do we determine whether or not it's toxic in the Canadian environment?” And then we spend five years determining that and then you go through a whole process of “what do we do about it and how do we do it?” That's why we like the fuels: you don't have to go through that enormous rigmarole, frankly, that so-called toxic substances have to go through.

Mrs. Karen Kraft Sloan: So if you wanted to limit the concentration so it's essentially negligible, then, you would do it through the fuel clauses. If you wanted to make it illegal to add it to gasoline, you'd have to go through the toxics clauses. Is that what you're saying? Are you saying that in the fuel clauses you can't make it illegal to add?

Mr. Bruce Walker: You can regulate it so that no one would bother adding it. An acceptable concentration would be so low that what would be the point of adding it? Additives, of course, are different from substances that are naturally found in fuels.

A big public policy debate has been going on for the last year regarding sulphur in diesel fuel and sulphur in gasoline. Sulphur is found naturally in the crude oil and in the gasoline, and it's a question of— To be honest, I occasionally enjoy watching the auto industry and the oil industry go head-to-head, because for 100 years they've had a very symbiotic relationship at our expense, at the public's expense.

In STOP's view, the fuel clauses give the Government of Canada adequate and sufficient legal authority to regulate and control fuels, at least those fuels— Our concern is not so much with the fuels, but with those types of vehicle engines that are exempted.

Mrs. Karen Kraft Sloan: Okay.

The Chairman: Last question, please.

Mrs. Karen Kraft Sloan: At the beginning of your brief, when you're talking about the preamble, you say that the precautionary principle “is reduced to a shadow of itself”. Do you have thoughts on how the precautionary principle can be strengthened in the legislation itself?

Mr. Bruce Walker: STOP believes that at least the preamble of Canada's national environmental legislation needs to express the spirit and the willingness of Canadians to have as clean an environment as possible and that perhaps it's at least in the preamble where the Government of Canada's reach should exceed its grasp.

In other words, we should be striving for perfection—we'll never get there, admittedly—and clearly, enshrining cost-effectiveness requirements right upfront is, in our view, as I said earlier, imposing a legislative straightjacket on various government departments, not just on Environment Canada. Removing that requirement would, I think, go a long way toward demonstrating that precautionary principles say, “Where it makes sense to do so, let's do it now, and let's do it even though we don't have all of the information.” Because we will never have all the information. Even on the issues we dealt with 10 or 20 or 30 years ago, whether it was phosphates in detergents or lead in gasoline or controlling or banning various chlorofluorocarbons and so on, you will never have all the information.

Who ever thought up the idea of putting the term “cost-effectiveness” in this bill? In a cynical moment, I thought to myself, gee, why don't they put the term “sound science” in the bill too? And as I said, every trade association in this city uses the term “level playing field”.

• 1630

Well, the U.S. Clean Air Act doesn't talk about cost-effectiveness. In fact, in sections of the U.S. Clean Air Act, it is illegal to take cost into account, notably in the development of national ambient air quality standards. And in July 1997, President Clinton adopted new and tougher standards for ground-level ozone and particulate matter, standards that are already influencing both policy making and, to some degree, air quality in Canada. It is in fact illegal to take cost into account in developing those ambient air standards.

Where one takes cost, including cost-effectiveness, into account has to do with the measures one will implement to achieve those tougher clean air standards, whether it's through tougher vehicle emissions, fuels, stationary sources, area sources or change of lifestyle and so on. That's where we look at cost, benefits, cost-effectiveness and microeconomic and and macroeconomic factors. But to build it in upfront is a fundamental mistake, I think, and in fact it's a narrower interpretation than you will find—at least in the U.S. Clean Air Act.

Mrs. Karen Kraft Sloan: My question, Mr. Chair, had to do with how the precautionary principle could be strengthened in the bill itself, not just in the preamble.

Mr. Bruce Walker: I'm sorry. I don't have particular recommendations for that.

The Chairman: Thank you.

Ms. Torsney, followed by the chair.

Ms. Paddy Torsney: Thank you.

I indicated that I wanted to ask a question when you were talking about MMT in the gasoline and regulating to such a low level that it basically doesn't exist anymore. I wasn't sure then that I could jump over and say you support the virtual elimination clauses of the bill. I checked through your brief and I'm not sure that you addressed those issues.

Mr. Bruce Walker: STOP did not address either the definition of the word “toxic” or questions of virtual elimination. We deliberated internally and decided that we would focus on those things where (a) we had strong grounding, and (b) we were in full agreement.

So frankly, rather than go out on a limb, as I'm representing an organization and not just myself, let me say that we have no particular comments on those definitions, other than for certain substances that are deliberately manufactured and introduced into the environment. For those, we prefer that zero means zero.

However, that gets very complicated when you're talking about combustion by-products, for example. That would include dioxins. If you actually said that zero discharge applies to dioxins in Canada and to polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons—PAHs—that would shut down every diesel vehicle in the country. That would shut down every home-heating oil furnace and every wood-combustion device, because regardless of the level of control at the smokestack or the tailpipe, there would still be some discharge greater than zero. So for combustion by-products, it's actually very difficult to achieve zero discharge. And in fact, if you mandate zero discharge, you could have those unanticipated effects.

For substances that are deliberately manufactured somewhere and then introduced into the environment, the way to get to zero is simply not to manufacture them and not to use them in any way at all. That's more philosophy than it is legislation-writing, so as I said earlier, we will defer to the large number of environmental groups that have already presented briefs before you on those very controversial subjects.

[Translation]

The Chairman: Ms. Girard-Bujold, please.

Ms. Jocelyne Girard-Bujold (Jonquière, BQ): You say, Mr. Walker, on page 2 of your paper, last paragraph, that the phrase “toxic substance” should be followed by the words “and biotechnology products.” Why would you want us to indicate this in the declaration and preamble?

• 1635

Could you give us examples that would require legislators to include biotechnology products? You say that so many things are happening, that frenetic activities in this area lead you to say why you think this way, and why your organization feels it is important to include it in the preamble.

Mr. Bruce Walker: I must admit that it was not the issue of biotechnology. This is not really our area. I am not the STOP specialist who wrote this article. To us, at least, in the preamble, it is no use separating toxic substances from biotechnology products. Both are linked in certain cases. So we favour reduction rather that management and control. It is a philosophical difference, but I believe it is also very important.

[English]

Again, if I can give examples from just about every trade association in the city that you hear from, many of them now practice “continuous improvement” rather than simply meeting the regulations. They will ratchet down from current levels of discharge or emissions to be as clean as they can be. We're pleased with that and we think the law should better reflect and in fact even encourage continuous improvement.

Regulations have the unanticipated impact of freezing technology and even freezing emission levels to meet the regulatory standards. Usually that's a much tougher standard than the standard prior to the regulation having been implemented.

But there is not necessarily a requirement to go further, of course. Pushing for continuous improvement and thus talking about reduction rather than simply control and management is a far better way to go. Because after all, what was a safe level of exposure to almost anything 20 years ago was not safe 10 years ago.

To use an example of something that isn't in CEPA, I'll mention drinking water. Ten years ago Health Canada said the safe level of exposure to trihalomethanes in drinking water was 350 micrograms per litre. A couple of years ago it revised that to 100 micrograms per litre. Maybe in five years it will be 50 and so on.

And that example happens in just about everything in the air, in just about everything in the water and in just about everything to which we get exposed. Science is telling us that what was a safe level of exposure or a safe level of discharge in fact no longer is. I say “safe” in a scientific sense, not in a legal enforcement sense.

Thus, to us, continuous improvement and reduction as a philosophy, as a fundamental component of the law, is essential.

The Chairman: Mr. Laliberte, please.

Mr. Rick Laliberte: I have just a couple of questions, one out of curiosity. Is “STOP” an acronym for something?

Mr. Bruce Walker: Thank you for asking that. A lot of people believe it is. STOP has been our full and formal legal name since we were incorporated in September 1970 as a non-profit citizen's environmental group. We chose the name as a good bilingual name. We occasionally have a problem with Quebec's Minister of Transport, who doesn't seem to like that term.

Some hon. members: Oh, oh.

Mr. Bruce Walker: We chose the name because we were trying to stop pollution, but the legal name is simply STOP.

As I said earlier, we are incorporated in Quebec and are not related to any other organization elsewhere in the world that may have the same name. In other words, there are no chapters of STOP. We are not a national or international organization.

The Chairman: Do you have another question, Mr. Laliberte?

Mr. Rick Laliberte: Yes.

In your comparison to the U.S., you consistently alluded to acts and regulations that exist there compared to what we have here.

• 1640

In light of the MMT agreement, which dealt with an international trade agreement, should this committee be having some sort of input? Should we get input from a witness from the Commission of Environmental Cooperation in order to be able to deal with the international effects or trade effects and this bill specifically? Should we get input in order to open the door to some relevance to the American systems that affect our ecosystem? Should we also get input about their industries and companies that deal with us and will be affected by this bill?

Mr. Bruce Walker: I think it would be very useful to hear from the CEC. In passing, just today the CEC released its latest Taking Stock report, and in the communiqué CEC issued, you will find STOP's name. We've been heavily involved in their pollutant release and transfer report activities.

I don't know if you have already heard from the International Joint Commission or from other bodies that have a lot to say. Certainly, the various reports of the International Joint Commission have been extremely useful to STOP and, I know, to other environmentally concerned Canadians and Americans, notably with respect to the whole question of zero discharge and virtual elimination, specifically as it relates to the Canada-U.S. Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement.

Mr. Rick Laliberte: Thank you. I guess we'll deal with that with the committee, but thanks for the information.

The Chairman: Thank you, Mr. Laliberte.

Briefly, to conclude, first I would like to bring to the attention of members of the committee the presence in this room of clerks from the Parliaments of the United Kingdom and Kenya, who are participants in the fall 1998 parliamentary cooperation seminar.

We welcome you and we are very honoured by your presence.

Mr. Walker, I have just a couple of questions.

Having expressed in your brief the views that “STOP regrets the passive attitude” expressed in the declaration or preamble, that the precautionary principle is “reduced to a shadow of itself”, that the environmental protection action is only the “illusion of a recourse” and that cost-effectiveness ought to be replaced by another term, do you still think that the proposed legislation is an improvement on the existing legislation?

Mr. Bruce Walker: Perhaps regretfully, I have to admit that it is, Mr. Chairman. Frankly, the existing law was pretty bad, pretty poor. That's no surprise. I don't think that's going to get published in any newspapers tomorrow. That's been common knowledge in the broad environmental community—and I mean government, industry and—

The Chairman: And should your proposed changes not be effected and not come into force, what would your conclusion be?

Mr. Bruce Walker: I think the Canadian environment and the Canadian people would suffer needlessly, frankly, if the members of the House and the Canadian public cannot agree on providing Canada with something long overdue: a tough, fair, honest law that will give all of us protection from things we know about now and from things that perhaps can only be dreamed up in the years and decades to come.

The Chairman: Thank you.

The other question is very simple. If “cost-effectiveness” were to be replaced by “effectiveness”, as you propose, what definition would go with the word “effectiveness”? It's a very tricky word.

Mr. Bruce Walker: That is correct. It is a tricky word. Our original idea was that it wouldn't have to be defined in the definitions. In fact, our idea was that even using the word “effectiveness” would not open up the government to a potential challenge in court that a particular initiative, regulation or order of the minister did not meet the test of the law, because it is presumably the intent of all governments all the time that everything they do is “effective”.

• 1645

The Chairman: Do you see in the word “effectiveness” a combination of economic and environmental values?

Mr. Bruce Walker: I think that is frankly inherent in the definition. I agree that the two go together, whereas “cost-effectiveness” has a very explicit, narrow, economic definition, as I said, like dollars per tonne, dollars per unit of pollution avoided.

The Chairman: Thank you very much.

That completes our round of questions. We are very indebted to you for the very precise and helpful brief that you submitted to us.

We will now have a brief suspension of this meeting. But before doing so, may I ask members of the committee to listen for a moment to our colleague, Mr. Charbonneau? He has patiently waited for an opportunity to put forward a case for one short hearing to permit the Museum of Nature and the Canadian biodiversity information people to appear before this committee to explain their efforts in coordinating the database that is available in the biosystem out there in the field, so to say.

Perhaps, Mr. Charbonneau, you would be so kind as to put forward that specific request so that tomorrow morning when we go into the schedule we can make a decision.

[Translation]

Mr. Yvon Charbonneau: I would like to take these few minutes to summarize the elements of a presentation that was made to us, to you and myself, in June, by representatives of the Canadian Museum of Nature. The Canadian Museum of Nature, in cooperation with Environment Canada, Natural Resources Canada, Fisheries and Oceans Canada, and Agriculture Canada, have developed the Federal Biosystematic Partnership, a group of partners in biosystematics. The term “biosystematics” is not generally widespread or used very much.

However, during their presentation to us, we saw the overall importance of their project, which consists in developing, through a network of partners, a database on the existing aspects of biological systems. They mentioned partial databases that exist in certain departments and agencies, but nothing systematic, it seems, has been done in Canada in this area.

Canada was the first country to sign and ratify the United Nations Convention on Biodiversity in 1992. It seems that the means have not followed and that we are currently losing the experts who were in certain agencies and departments, because these experts are attracted by the proposals made in the United States. The United States has a $200 million program for creating such systematic databases. In Canada, we only have a series of fragmented initiatives in this area.

• 1650

I therefore believe that it would be important, for our committee, to invite these people, as we have had the privilege of hearing them, both of us, to invite them and hear their proposals and projects. These people from the Canadian Museum of Nature Board will undoubtedly be accompanied by their partners. They may take this opportunity to draw the attention of the authorities and our committee on this major need and on the necessity of investing resources right now.

I therefore suggest that we invite them for one or two sessions, as you wish, depending on the list of guests you may have in mind on this issue, in order that we may hear them, question them, and evaluate their proposals.

The Chairman: Do you think, Mr. Charbonneau, that we could include both in one session to hear the witnesses?

Mr. Yvon Charbonneau: I believe so; one session of two and a half or three hours should be enough, I think.

The Chairman: Following what Mr. Charbonneau told us, I think we could make a decision tomorrow morning as to when we could do this and then give the bio-infrastructure and Canadian Museum of Nature representatives an opportunity to speak to us, probably during a session in the last week of October. We will discuss this tomorrow morning and make a decision. Do you agree?

[English]

We can now perhaps suspend the meeting for a few minutes until the minister arrives.

Thank you very much.

• 1652

• 1707

The Chairman: We are resuming the study of Bill C-32 and are very pleased this afternoon to have appearing before us the Minister of the Environment, the Hon. Christine Stewart, who is accompanied by two officials, Mr. Guimont and Mr. Lerer.

We welcome you, Madam Minister, and we invite you to take the floor and make your statement, which probably will be followed by a round of questions.

Hon. Christine Stewart (Minister of the Environment): Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman and members of the committee. It's a pleasure to be here again in your consideration of Bill C-32, our amended Canadian Environmental Protection Act, a piece of legislation which is very important to me as Minister of the Environment, but more significantly, I think, which is of great importance to Canadians at large.

You've made reference to François Guimont, the assistant deputy minister, and Harvey Lerer, the director general of our CEPA office, who are here with me, and I have other officials and experts from my department behind me, so if you get too technical, I have good resources upon which I can rely.

Thank you for this opportunity to speak to you about this piece of legislation. I want to briefly touch on a few things: first of all, where we have been in this process to review and renew CEPA; where we are right now; and finally, what I see as our final destination.

It's been a long and sometimes challenging journey to get to this point. As you all know, this process started in June 1994 with a year-long review of CEPA by this committee. Your report, entitled It's About Our Health! Towards Pollution Prevention, laid the foundation of the bill that is before you today. The December 1995 government response formed the basis for drafting legislation. The process has now come full circle with the passage of Bill C-32 at second reading and its referral to the committee.

• 1710

This effort has highlighted the fact there are many different views on what the new CEPA should look like. As parliamentarians, it is our job to sort through the different messages and ensure that the legislation we pass is effective. I think it is fair to say that all the players—governments, stakeholders and all Canadians—share our goal of wanting to protect the environment for current and future generations.

The Chairman: Excuse me. Could we obtain a copy of your statement and could we circulate it?

Mrs. Christine Stewart: Yes. I believe it's available.

The Chairman: Could we perhaps have copies before we go too far?

Mrs. Christine Stewart: Yes.

Bill C-32 is comprehensive in scope. I'm counting on you for the detailed task of clause-by-clause review. In the time that you have kindly provided to me today, I would like to outline some of the reasons why I believe C-32 will be good for the environment.

First, it will expand our tools available to tackle and prevent pollution by: introducing pollution prevention and emergency planning for toxic substances; providing new authority for economic instruments; and adding to our arsenal of enforcement powers by including authority for enforcement officers to issue orders on the spot to stop or prevent illegal activity.

Second, Bill C-32 will improve the existing framework to meet the challenge posed by toxic substances. It will put in place a more efficient process for the identification and assessment of substances, including the requirement to review decisions of other OECD countries to ban or restrict substances to determine whether similar action should be taken in Canada. It contains deadlines for preventive or control actions for toxic substances: two years to develop proposals and eighteen months to finalize them.

Bill C-32 requires virtual elimination of releases to the environment of the most dangerous of substances and provides authority to prohibit generation and use where releases cannot be prevented.

Mr. Chairman, the third area where this bill is an improvement lies in its expansion of opportunities for public participation. I'm a firm believer in the public's right to know what is happening in our communities and across the country. I know many members of this committee share this view.

The new CEPA will require the establishment of an environmental registry with the purpose of facilitating access to information published under CEPA. The bill also creates a statutory obligation to establish and publish the national pollutants release inventory.

Simple access to information is not enough. It has to be linked with the right to act. The new CEPA recognizes this by giving members of the public more opportunities to let their views be known before decisions are taken. It also includes the right to sue if the Minister of the Environment fails to enforce the act and this results in significant harm to the environment.

Bill C-32 will also modernize the existing act. It modernizes CEPA by incorporating several environmental principles, including the precautionary principle, pollution prevention, and sustainable development. It modernizes CEPA by recognizing the inherent aboriginal right to self-government and providing opportunities for aboriginal people to play a greater role in environmental management: it includes them as our partners on the national advisory committee. It modernizes CEPA by providing tools so Canada can meet its new obligations arising out of international agreements such as the Basel convention and the 1996 protocol to the London convention on ocean dumping.

This bill builds on the foundation of the existing act, Mr. Chairman. In summary, this bill will be good for the environment because: it expands the legal tools available to tackle pollution; it improves the existing framework for controlling toxics; it reflects new principles and international obligations; and it provides new opportunities for public participation.

These are just some of the highlights. As you proceed with your clause-by-clause review, you will see that there is much more in the legislation that will strengthen environmental protection in Canada.

Clause-by-clause review of this bill will be a daunting task. It is lengthy and complex, and all who have appeared before this committee have suggested changes. After four and a half years of work and Parliament's approval at second reading, I do not believe that now is the time for major course changes.

• 1715

When you report back to the House, I am confident that we will have a bill that fully captures the spirit and intent of what the government proposed in 1995 in its response to the excellent work of this committee. We need the added strengths of Bill C-32 to protect the environment for our children and our grandchildren.

Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.

The Chairman: Thank you. Mr. Casson, please.

Mr. Rick Casson: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Thank you, Madam Minister. I appreciate you being here today. I believe the clause-by-clause review of this bill will be a daunting task.

You mention the fact that CEPA will allow more input from and more involvement by the public. Some of the witnesses we've heard from expressed a concern with the fact that they weren't allowed what they felt was enough time or enough opportunity for input in the development of this bill so far. Possibly you or one of your assistants could address that fact. What has happened? Do you feel there has been enough public involvement? If not, if these people do have a case, what can we do at this point in the bill to include them?

Some of them who were here said this was actually their first opportunity to come forward. How exhaustive was the effort to go out and seek input from the industry? A lot of people have come before us and said that this is a good bill, that we should pass it quickly. A lot of those people were from industry. And we have had some from possibly the other side of the coin who say this won't work.

For us to be able to make a really sound judgment, it would be comforting to know that everybody has had input—both the people who want it passed right away and the people who don't. Maybe you can comment on that.

Mrs. Christine Stewart: With respect to the comments that I know you have heard, I can be sympathetic to a point, but it's a very subjective judgment about whether there's been sufficient time for people's opinions to have been captured. As I was saying in my statement, the review of the existing CEPA legislation has been going on for four and a half years. I've been in my position for a year and a half, the time between the previous legislation dying on the Order Paper and the new legislation you have before you right now.

I have met and talked to people from all sectors of society. Some have been spoken to in greater depth than others, but my own judgment is that we have had sufficient dialogue on this legislation. We have listened to a very good cross-section of opinion about the legislation.

As a result of that, I consider that the legislation as it exists today is a very good balance of the opinions I have heard from a large cross-section of opinion in the country. You are never going to please all the people all the time. That's something I've known—and probably we've all heard it—for a long time, but I can tell you that as Minister of the Environment it certainly comes home to roost as a truth. As I say, I think this legislation creates a good balance of opinion and concern about the protection of our environment.

Mr. Rick Casson: Mr. Chairman, are we limited to asking questions about CEPA?

The Chairman: Yes, that's correct.

Mr. Rick Casson: I'll pass for now, thank you.

The Chairman: Monsieur Asselin.

[Translation]

Mr. Gérard Asselin: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

First, Madam Minister, I would like to welcome you to your committee, since you are the one responsible for it before the Parliament.

Our committee was mandated to study Bill C-32, which follows the CEPA. We were tasked with hearing several witnesses, we will soon undergo the review section by section of the Bill, and we will report to the House, after which it should normally be adopted by Parliament.

Our concern is the following, Madam Minister.

• 1720

As you know, you are the third minister of this government who was asked to present this Bill. Ms. Copps and Mr. Marchi preceded you. I hope this Bill will be adopted soon so it will not be forgotten once again on the Order Paper, in case the Prime Minister decides to shuffle his cabinet or present a Throne Speech.

A moment ago, Madam Minister, you told us that you were accompanied by officials from your department and that they could answer our technical questions. This worries me because I am afraid, seeing the army of personnel behind you, that the document may be incredibly technical. Yet, it should not be that technical. The problem is not necessarily technical, Madam Minister.

In future, I would suggest that you be accompanied by only one of your officials, although your staff may be considerable. This official who will accompany you will need to translate the documents that you will table before the committee. These documents should normally be submitted to us in both official languages.

I am sure you presented a very interesting document, because I have heard the translation. Unfortunately, the document I was given is exclusively in English. I would have liked to have the French version.

A voice: I have a French copy.

[English]

Mrs. Christine Stewart: I regret that, but I think you have the translation. It is en français.

[Translation]

The Chairman: In French.

Mr. Gérard Asselin: I'm sorry. I am pleased to see that your department has a translation service.

Madam Minister, there is concern at all levels, provincial, municipal and federal alike, that the federal government is about to adopt Bill C-32, thus projecting a good image and mainly rehabilitating the Department of the Environment. Where the shoe pinches is with the means for inspection control. It is one thing to adopt a bill, but if it is not enforced or hardly is because of a lack of human resources, it will be of little help.

We know that the government is committed to achieving zero deficit. Several witnesses said that at the Department of the Environment, several positions have still not been filled and that some of them have been vacant for two years, mainly in the area of inspections and on-site controls. I am not talking here about office automation. There is a problem with inspections and inquiries. There are overlapping responsibilities. We do not really know who assumes which responsibility. When a problem occurs and it is the federal government that must move in, it is often much too late.

I would also like to know about the agreements you reached with all the provinces, and probably the territories too, on the role and control each must exercise in the application of Bill C- 32. How did you share the control responsibilities?

I must admit that I am seriously concerned. It is one thing to enact the best bill, but if there is no control and no penalties following inquiries by human resources, people will say that the Bill did not improve anything. The situation might not be worse, but people will be able to abundantly criticize this Bill.

[English]

Mrs. Christine Stewart: I think you raise some important issues. As Minister of the Environment, I want to make sure that this legislation, when passed, is better than the words on the paper. It is a piece of legislation that has to be enforced.

And this committee went through a review of enforcement within my department and presented the government and me with a report, to which you will receive a response quite soon. By law, you have to receive it quite soon, and you will. I think it was important that you raised these issues, and I was pleased that you did. I think it was a worthwhile exercise. I hope you will agree.

However, in terms of this piece of legislation and enforcement, there are new provisions within this legislation to improve the ways in which we can control substances. There are different clauses that refer to that, but they are a substantial improvement upon the current legislation we have in place.

You also asked, if I can quote you, about “who is in charge” with regard to enforcement.

• 1725

That also is a very complex issue. Within just the federal jurisdiction there are different authorities in charge of protecting the environment. I'll mention the fisheries and oceans department off the top as one that has some authority for inspections around water issues.

But there are also different jurisdictions that have responsibilities, most notably the provinces and territories in this country, and I am working with provinces and territories to develop a seamless web of protection. With the exception of Quebec, we have signed a harmonization accord, and one of the sub-agreements of the harmonization accord is about enforcement.

We have inspection and we're dealing with enforcement. And when we have set down on paper the principles of how we will link our jurisdictional authorities in this seamless web, then, on the basis on those principles, we will sign bilateral agreements with each of the jurisdictions.

Without the harmonization accord in Quebec, for example, we have an enforcement agreement with regard to the pulp and paper industry in particular, and it's worked very well and very effectively. Emissions in that industry have been reduced 90%, if I'm correct, in the last few years.

[Translation]

Mr. Gérard Asselin: Under the Kyoto agreement, the federal government committed itself to reducing greenhouse-effect gases. What control means were implemented, and what reports will indicate next year that we are going in the right direction? Will we have to wait until the end of our mandate to learn that we did not meet our objectives? Will we be presented reports indicating the progress achieved since our Kyoto commitments, describing the actions taken by the federal government and their impact, and confirming that we are going in the right direction?

[English]

Mrs. Christine Stewart: Absolutely. There will be ongoing reports.

When Canada, with other nations around the world, went to Kyoto last year to negotiate the Kyoto protocol, we did so because we recognized that it was important to put in legally binding agreements. There had been an agreement at Rio five years earlier that we should be reducing greenhouse gases, but we didn't do it to the extent that we agreed was necessary at that time.

So we knew that legally binding commitments were necessary. Through very difficult negotiations, we achieved that. We came home from Kyoto and got the agreement of first ministers—the Prime Minister with all the premiers. Then, more recently, the Minister of Natural Resources and myself, with all of our provincial and territorial counterparts, got the agreement to work on the development of what we call a “national implementation strategy”.

The purpose of that strategy is to look at the major opportunities in Canada for reducing greenhouse gases, along with the major challenges and the best practices, in order to understand the most cost-effective way for this country to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

If somebody knows of a way to reduce CO₂ that is going to cost $5 a tonne and somebody else thinks it can cost $20 a tonne, we have to share experiences. We've put together 15 so-called sectoral tables. For example, there is one on electricity, one on transportation, one on public education and one on the mechanisms such as emissions trading under the protocol. We've done this in order to get a provincial-territorial-federal consensus on the way we should be expending what are going to be large resources in order to achieve our opportunities.

We recognize that at the end of the day the biggest win will be for the environment—if we do it right. If we don't do it right, the loss will be there as well. There's a big opportunity for us and we know we're going to have to invest to make that happen. We have to put our dollars in the best place possible.

Besides that, from the federal perspective, we're also on another track, track one, which is early action, helping Canadians understand the issue and understand the kinds of actions that they can take right away to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. There will be continual reports about that.

• 1730

With Minister Goodale, I'm going to Halifax in a couple of weeks to once again meet with my counterpart ministers of environment and energy. There will be a report coming out of that meeting.

The Chairman: Thank you, Mr. Asselin. Mr. Laliberte, please.

Mr. Rick Laliberte: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

This has certainly been a learning experience in understanding environmental protection in this country. A lot of witnesses have highlighted the topics that you stated in your brief: the precautionary principle, pollution prevention, and sustainable development. And I would add biodiversity there, because it's also integral in international agreements.

But all these seem to exist in the preamble. So trying to envision what the witnesses were saying, Bill C-32 is pulp fiction: it has a nice cover but when you start reading the story it wanders off from the beautiful picture on the front. Everybody has this image of the precautionary principle. With virtual elimination as an example, why wouldn't pollution prevention look at banning the toxic substances first, at eliminating them? And if that's not possible, then you go to virtual elimination.

But in this definition, or in the processes, you go to virtual elimination and don't mention that if what goes in is undetectable at the end of the pipe, it'll be okay under this act. I think it's a very major misconception to say pollution prevention is there.

The other issue is biotechnology, which is such an unknown. But I think adding those substances and the citizen's right to know, putting data and information into the public domain, giving the rights to the citizens in a limited format— This is what we've heard as well: that the whistle-blower protection does not go beyond the federal domain, and the citizen's right to know in terms of the right to sue is not covered entirely, as it should be.

And the harmonization accord comes into question with all of this, because you seem to be looking at the possibility of an act which serves the intent, but with the enforcement problems and the resource problems—and I think this is what the hon. member was trying to say—the political will and the financial resources will have to equal the intent of this act. And that's what our previous study has done as well.

So all of that is a major task for you: to make this a very non-fiction work and take it off the pulp fiction side of things. I think reality has to step in.

The other thing I'd like to add is something under biodiversity. It sort of got missed here, but some of the aboriginal submissions stated that traditional environmental knowledge should be recognized as well, and it doesn't follow through beyond the preamble unless you interpret the convention that way. The act should recognize that as well. I think it's very relevant in issues like the snow geese and what's being done now with the habitat.

There are so many examples that happened over the summer. One is the MMT issue. I don't know if you want to speak on that, on the precautionary principle and how that came about and how vehicle emissions can be controlled with our domestic initiatives in international trade under Kyoto, as you touched on.

• 1735

Mrs. Christine Stewart: That's a long list of questions. I'll attempt to answer as many as I can.

First of all, in regard to trying to recognize traditional aboriginal knowledge, I think there are clauses in the legislation that are important and that recognize the importance of having that information and working with our aboriginal communities. It recognizes the fact that there are aboriginal communities that have self-government—their own ability to set legislation in place and so on—but because aboriginal communities will be a significant part of the national advisory committee, I think their voice is going to be heard through this legislation in a new and very important way. I think the recognition of the importance of that in the legislation is significant, and I hope you agree with that.

If I could go back to where you began, with the preamble and the setting of principles, this is a very complex piece of legislation. We've talked about that. When the authority of a piece of legislation is trying to be understood on a clause-by-clause basis— If it goes before a court of law, the preamble to a piece of legislation is intended to help a judge, for example, to interpret the meaning of all of those clauses that follow. The preamble sets very important principles that will guide any further analysis of what each clause of a piece of legislation is understood to mean. The preamble is attached to all of the clauses, so I think it's extremely important that we have principles articulated in the preamble.

I think the legislation does say that considerations of the health of ecosystems are important. CEPA legislation is legislation that is intended to protect the environment and the health of Canadians. And certainly, a healthy ecosystem is key to having a healthy environment. There is that recognition: biodiversity is the essence of a healthy ecosystem.

In the legislation we do have improved citizens' right-to-know and right-to-sue legislation. There are clauses in the bill that articulate how this will happen.

As I was saying in my opening statement, it's extremely important to me that citizens have the right to know about what is happening in their environment. There is my own initiative in my department of putting into place millennium eco-communities, which are going to bring that knowledge base down to each individual member of Parliament's constituency and help members to work with their citizens to understand these realities within their community. I think it's very important.

And as I've explained to you and a few others, the hub of that initiative is the Internet. I'm trying to put as much information as possible on the Internet. For example, this legislation speaks about our national pollutant release inventory and the fact that it will be more accessible. It is now more accessible, even without the legislation. It's now available on the Internet. It's information that is more accessible to the Canadian public.

I want people to understand how the release of substances occurs within their own constituencies so that they can take more responsibility at the grassroots level to work with governments and our legislation and regulations to improve the environment.

And again, it's certainly important for me to continue to work with my provincial and territorial counterparts to create this seamless web of protection. There are gaps, and I think that through the process we have in place we're learning to understand what those gaps are and what work we have to do to fill the gaps to try to make sure we avoid duplication. That harmonization accord will be up for review in two years' time so there is a lot of work to be done in order to demonstrate that it is an effective instrument for protecting the environment.

• 1740

You asked me to speak about the precautionary principle. The precautionary principle is articulated in the preamble, and I think it's complete, as complete as any other standard on precautionary principle at the present time. It says that where there is risk we can take action, that we don't need certainty, that when there is risk, we would take action.

And how does that relate to MMT? MMT is an issue of substantive concern to a lot of Canadians, and we've heard a lot of things about MMT that can cause uncertainty and a sense of insecurity. I don't want our environment to be threatened by any substance, but we do need adequate science to work, to do anything, on a precautionary principle.

With regard to MMT, I have said that I welcome all the science out there that indicates there is anything that negatively impacts on the environment or human health in relation to MMT. And the moment I get that science—or science papers or whatever they are—it will be put to a third party independent review committee so that there'll be an arm's-length analysis. But that doesn't absolve my own department or Health Canada scientists from taking their own look at those papers as well.

I'm hopeful that whenever science comes forward, on any substance— And it does from time to time. Substances that we think are safe today, we may find through science tomorrow are not safe. I need that science in order to move forward on a precautionary principle. It doesn't need to be 100%, as I've said before, but you need to have a scientific basis on which to take action, and it would be my intention to do so.

[Translation]

The Chairman: Thank you, Mr. Laliberte.

On the second round, Mr. Charbonneau followed by Ms. Girard-Bujold.

Mr. Yvon Charbonneau: Mr. Chairman, first allow me to tell Madam Minister that the members of the committee appreciate her availability and the clarity of her explanations, as much now as some time ago when we met.

We must consider in our comments that Madam Minister boarded a sailing ship. Work had already been initiated. So I believe it is legitimate for us to ask questions or criticize, but we must understand that this is a process that had been going on for a long time before this minister took control.

My two first questions are about certain paragraphs of the preamble. My first question relates to the paragraph which deals with cost-effective measures, in French mesures efficientes. One of our witnesses pointed out that, according to him, there is a significant difference between what is said in English and what is said in French. I do not know which way the translation of this paragraph goes, French to English or English to French, but as far as I am concerned, as a Francophone, I would prefer that the French be the real text and that the English be adjusted this time.

The introduction of this principle or phrase “cost-effective measures” in the preamble raised many comments on the part of several witnesses. But since they have the French version in hand, it becomes much more acceptable, because in French, according to the meaning I for one give it, efficiency may include economic factors, but it is not limited to cost-effectiveness factors.

• 1745

They are the best ways to achieve certain results. That is what efficiency is. The best ways include several aspects. This in fact is reflected in section 2 of the Bill, where the phrase can again be read:

[English]

2.(1) In the administration of this Act, the Government of Canada shall

(a) take cost-effective preventive and remedial measures

and

[Translation]

in French, it is said that he must:

take efficient preventive and corrective measures—

Once again, I do not know if it can be found elsewhere in the text, but I think the French version should prevail and the English version should be revised to match the French version and a version that is less restrictive than what is evoked by the phrase “cost-effective.”

I will now ask my second question. My real question is that I would like to know if Madam Minister really wishes to keep this phrase “cost-effective measures” as it appears in English or if we could reach a broader consensus.

In the last paragraph of the preamble, it is said that the government “must be in a position to meet Canada's international environmental obligations.” I recall that in May, in his second annual report, the Environment Commissioner told us that the Department of the Environment did not really have a complete or systematic vision of the level of achievement of his international environmental commitments. He said that Canada was good at exposing its vision of the problems, but when the time comes to know to what extent our commitments have been met, it becomes more confused. Since these comments were made in May, have steps been taken to know more about how we are meeting our commitments?

My third question is more general. Are you able to tell us, Madam Minister, if any organization, be it a large or small business, union, aboriginal, or government organization, has had access to you, to your services, or to the experts on the same level during the consultation period that led to this version of the Bill?

[English]

Mrs. Christine Stewart: Thank you very much. Again I will start with the last question first.

Certainly I have been open to speaking to anybody and everybody who has requested an opportunity to speak with me. I haven't waited for people to come to me. I have gone out and spoken to a very broad cross-section of people and sectors within our society about the legislation and I have listened to what they have had to say. That's been my experience.

I listen to the history of this legislation and it's my understanding that there has been repeated consultation with a very broad cross-section of sectors in our society in relation to this legislation. And I can say it's the same with the endangered species legislation that I hope to bring forward. That's my view. That's my judgment.

Again, though, I will repeat that it's a subjective judgment as to whether there hasn't or has been adequate consultation. But we've spent a lot of time on this, and I think this legislation represents significant improvements and potential benefit for the environment, so I would like us to move on with it. On the basis of listening to a broad array of sectors, it does represent a very fine balance of opinion and acceptance, as I understand it.

• 1750

To go to your first question on “cost-effective measures”, those words in English and the version in French, the intent was that the definition as it appears in the preamble is identical to the Rio declaration, so I think first of all we should look at what the Rio declaration says in French versus what it says in English and see what the difference is.

Certainly I'd be willing to have my officials who understand the nuances of French much better than I do take another look at these French translations and see whether it's possible that the French text has a broader interpretation than the English. Where do we go with that and are there any possibilities there? We'll take a look. I don't have an answer today.

On the issue of the other part of the preamble, which states that “the Government of Canada must be able to fulfil its international obligations in respect of the environment”, I think that Canada is known for taking a international leadership role in regard to the environment. But I can tell you what has been a concern of mine, as Minister of the Environment: in our department, our work on the international front needs more coherence.

Over the last decade, even, the environment in general has become much more prominent in the international arena. There is a wide array of conventions and protocols that affect the environment, and there are protocols in meetings on each one of those conventions. There are meetings everywhere all the time. My sense is that we have to do more work to capture and be in control of our international agenda.

Foreign Affairs has a responsibility, generally speaking, for heading our international negotiating teams on any issue, including the environment. Having had an association with that department, I know that they would look to our department for expert advice on what we should be doing internationally, on what our position should be. I want to work more closely with Foreign Affairs, and the minister there is equally interested in this. The Prime Minister has said that the policy agenda and the international negotiations in relation to climate change would be my responsibility as Minister of the Environment, which is a switch.

I give you these comments of mine to say that it's of concern to me. But in the international community itself, I have spoken to my counterparts around the world, and I can tell you that I'm not the only Minister of the Environment who's feeling frustration about the huge array of international interventions that are made all the time on behalf of the Government of Canada without explicit input from ministers of the environment.

Dr. Tolba, who is the new executive director of UNEP, the United Nations environment program, is very concerned about this issue, as is the Secretary General of the United Nations. Together we are trying to bring more coherence to the international agenda as well. I don't believe the shotgun approach ever has the kind of beneficial effect that working more coherently can have. I have a strong desire to see improvements in this area and I'm working with my deputy minister to achieve that.

[Translation]

The Chairman: Thank you, Mr. Charbonneau.

Ms. Girard-Bujold, please.

Ms. Jocelyne Girard-Bujold: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Madam Minister, what you have been saying since the beginning is really praiseworthy. As you know, there is currently an environment law. Our committee prepared reports, as did the Environment Commissioner and the Auditor General. The latter is very critical and says that you are currently unable to enforce this law because you have less and less financial and human resources to do so. Mr. Asselin raised the same issue.

• 1755

Several things are introduced in the new legislation. What will you do to implement this, to leave a good document and allow us to say, in a few years, to our children: “we had a nice bill, but governments did not provide the financial resources required to implement it.”

I would also like to talk to you about section 185, which deals with importing and exporting hazardous products. I am very concerned because, more and more, in my Saguenay—Lac-Saint-Jean region, hazardous products such as PCB's are processed and eliminated, and others will eventually be added. We have almost become a reservoir for the elimination of hazardous waste.

You say that fees could be charged to exporters. Is that not against NAFTA? Are there people around you who may have seen the financial impact on small or other businesses of these fees they would have to pay for the elimination of these products?

[English]

Mrs. Christine Stewart: First of all, I want to defend our department on the enforcement side. As I said before, I think this committee's review of enforcement issues as they apply to my department was very important and helpful. Every single department in the government went through a program review process and significant resources were taken from every department. But I want you to know that in my department—this was before my time—they defended enforcement. One program sunsetted, which I think encompassed three officers on the Fraser River, and they were lost, but overall it was one area that my department defended, saying that there should be no reductions in enforcement.

Nonetheless, your work is important, and my department is undergoing a review of all its enforcement activities. My report in response to yours will be forthcoming. Our review hasn't finished, and it will be ongoing. As we bring in legislation that has more enforcement implications and different kinds of implications, it's of great importance to me that we have the capacity to meet our legislation demands.

There is the reality that probably through this review process we will find we can use the resources we do have better and more effectively, and that's helpful. At the end of the day, we can be as efficient and effective as possible, but we have to be able to meet the demands of new legislation.

In regard to working more effectively and more efficiently, we are looking at ways to work in partnerships. You may have noticed a few weeks ago in the news the fact that the illegal trade and transport of environmental products has become a very major issue. In dealing with environmental issues, we have to make sure we get the proper kinds of sophisticated intelligence and we have to make sure that we're working with the most sophisticated partners. It's important to me, and the review is an ongoing process.

With regard to hazardous waste and import and export, there are a few issues. One has to do with cost recovery.

You asked specifically about NAFTA, and I don't know whether you were looking at the Myers challenge that is out there right now, whereby they said that our prevention of the export of PCBs prevented them from having business and so on.

• 1800

Our legislation indicates that you can export as long as the receiving country will handle those substances to the same standards that we have here at home, but then we also have international obligations—the Basel convention—that we have to adhere to.

The Chairman: Merci, Madame Girard-Bujold.

I have only Mr. Asselin left, followed by the chair, unless other members wish to seek the floor.

[Translation]

Mr. Asselin, please.

Mr. Gérard Asselin: I would have a short question following that of my colleague, the MP from Jonquière.

Concretely, Madam Minister, what will really be changed, tomorrow morning, when the Bill is enacted? What will be the environmental implications of the federal government regarding the control and destruction of PCB's? Concretely, tomorrow morning, what will be changed, with this new legislation, in the control and destruction of PCB's? Are we going to wait that a disaster occurs as in Saint-Basile-le-Grand, in Québec, before recovering and adopting radical positions? Or does the federal government want to give itself means of control over those who produce, store, or destroy PCB's?

[English]

Mrs. Christine Stewart: PCBs are already regulated under the existing CEPA. In my province of Ontario—and I don't know exactly what happens in every area—and in Canada as a whole, the facilities for eradicating PCBs have been very limited.

We have been using a facility in Alberta that was inadequate for the task, from the federal government perspective. Or it is inadequate at the moment; it may change and it may improve. At the moment, though, we consider it inadequate for the task.

But in my province of Ontario, the provincial government has the authority to permit companies to destroy PCBs. I understand that on the basis of the urgency of the issue, they have let several permits in Ontario and several companies are ready to begin to commercially process the destruction of PCBs. So again you're getting into an area where there is federal and provincial jurisdiction. We regulate, but the provinces have a role to play as well. With the pressure of PCB substances mounting, they have, in Ontario at least, and I think in Quebec as well, if I recall, permitted some private industry to get into that business, but it's a regulated business.

The Chairman: Merci, Mr. Asselin.

Mr. Laliberte, please, followed by the chair.

Mr. Rick Laliberte: I just want to go back to a question I raised earlier about what pollution prevention is, in the minister's view. Should there be an elimination of toxics before virtual elimination? Should something state that? Right now we go straight into virtual elimination.

Also, you spoke about the need for enforcement being a sophisticated means of operation to find illegal dumping—or legal dumping, whatever. But in terms of the bill, the whistle-blower protection covers only federal employees. Private, municipal or provincial employees—or just individual members—who want to tell a story are not protected by anything like this. I think that would certainly enhance your enforcement aspects.

You touched on Swan Hills. Does this bill protect any of those emissions? Those emissions that come out of Swan Hills are blowing right into my home area. We have a vested interest, not only for our livelihood but in regard to those impacts—with the health department and the collaboration between the two ministries, as has been raised here.

There's another aspect of the nice preamble. As I mentioned, a lot of submissions said that, but what will the minister do if there is a consolidated effort not to accept this bill by a group of NGOs? Or what if a vast majority of NGOs said this bill did not fit the original intent and is not serving the expectations? Would there be an extended delay?

• 1805

You said you would like to get this done, and that's what the industries have been telling us—that they want to get it done—so I'd like to see the balanced side, taking our time.

Mrs. Christine Stewart: You are going to hear from some industries that don't like this legislation. You will hear from people within all sectors who may not like this legislation.

But I understand from my conversations that overall there is a balance of acceptance among sectors in the country.

You are the elected officials. This legislation is before this committee and it will be before the House of Commons because you are the elected officials that represent all interests—NGOs, business, industry, municipalities. They elect you. You are the final arbiters of what happens to this legislation, and I'm trying to help you in your deliberations, in going through this clause by clause; I'm trying to help you understand from my perspective the great benefits of this amended legislation and what has been involved in bringing it to this point.

I did forget to answer your question on virtual elimination versus a ban. I understand—and my officials can correct me—that legally speaking, zero doesn't exist, that virtual elimination is next to zero. It's the smallest measurable quantity, and it's as a ban. You can ban outright only if you cannot control the discharge of a substance; in that case, don't use it at all, and the legislation indicates that. If you can use a substance and control its discharge, and if the substance is considered to be hazardous to the point where it should be virtually eliminated, the words “virtually eliminate” simply mean that it must be reduced to the smallest measurable amount, because in law zero doesn't exist.

You had one other question, and I've missed it, I think.

A voice: Whistle-blowers.

Mrs. Christine Stewart: Yes, in regard to whistle-blowers, we cannot, because of inter-jurisdictional problems, say what the case will be at the provincial level, but we do speak within the federal authority and the federal jurisdictions, and there is a very broad ability for citizens at large to come forward with complaints and lodge them. There is a process for doing so and a process for making those complaints and orders to the court publicly available.

The Chairman: Madam Kraft Sloan, please.

Mrs. Karen Kraft Sloan: Thank you, Minister Stewart.

I want to ask you if you feel that endocrine disruptors are adequately covered in CEPA.

Mrs. Christine Stewart: I think they are. I think the whole issue around endocrine disruptors is new because it's an emerging science, and as it emerges, it raises very startling facts that we have to be concerned about. But I believe the legislation doesn't discriminate and allows us to take full action on any substances that could be determined to be in that category of endocrine disruptors.

Mrs. Karen Kraft Sloan: Thank you.

The Chairman: Thank you.

• 1810

To conclude this round—and the evening is already setting in—may I ask the following question, Madam Minister? It has to do with the document issued by Treasury Board in November 1995 entitled Government of Canada Regulatory Policy. It's a document that sets the pace for the regulatory approaches with respect to legislation passed by Parliament. This committee went into the subject matter a week ago and had Mr. Lerer here as a witness.

The Treasury Board people answered questions from members of this committee. We asked them why the requirements of the Canada regulatory policy stressed only trade commitments—and I'm reading from the document—under the WTO, under the Agreement on Technical Barriers to Trade, under NAFTA, and under the Canadian Agreement on Internal Trade and so on. In other words, the document and the policy are heavily weighted in favour of ensuring that the general obligations in trade are respected.

Secondly, the same document goes on to state the importance of benefit-cost analysis in setting standards under the regulatory process. We had a fairly lengthy discussion as to what that means and how that process is set into place. Because of the late hour I won't go into details now, but certainly the document says—and I'm reading from the text—“It must be demonstrated that the benefits of regulatory requirements are greater than their costs.”

Furthermore, when it comes to another section of regulatory process management under the heading “Regulatory Burden”, for the first time sustainable development is mentioned. It is the only instance in which sustainable development is referred to and in a manner that leaves something to be desired.

Therefore, the question is, when it comes to the bill and clause 320, where regulations will be issued, if they're going to be issued under the guidance of these documents under the Government of Canada Regulatory Policy, it could well be that the thrust of this bill could be considerably affected and reduced in its impact.

You were kind enough to circulate a letter through our clerk during the summer. It is your reply to the president of the Saskatchewan Chamber of Commerce. In order to pacify him—if I may use that term—you make a reference in your letter to the fact that any proposal for regulatory action, to achieve, and I quote:

the virtual elimination of a substance from the environment must meet the requirement of the Government of Canada Regulatory Policy (1995).

And this is the document from which I have read a few passages.

It would be very helpful to hear from you, for the guidance of this committee, what impact you think the Government of Canada Regulatory Policy will have on the drafting of the regulations, in view of the fact that the document is so heavily oriented to trade policies and trade commitments.

Thank you.

Mrs. Christine Stewart: I can tell you that as regulations are drafted and I review them I would want to make sure that the environment is protected to the highest standard possible.

• 1815

But I would also say that the whole notion of environmental considerations—and I'm not speaking from a basis of a lot of knowledge, but some experience—in developing regulations is perhaps in its infancy of consideration. And maybe that whole process itself needs to be reviewed to see how the intrinsic value of environmental principles can be better reflected.

As I understand it, we're the only country in the world that has a commissioner for sustainable development. Maybe we ask the Auditor General to do certain reviews. Maybe we want the commissioner to review regulatory policy. I'm not sure. I'm just telling you that I think we're hopefully moving into a new era where environmental considerations will be deemed to be more important. You quoted from a cost-benefit analysis statement which says that benefits must be greater than costs. Well, we know that, and we have many instances to show where benefits are greater than costs. I think we have to draw on those experiences.

On the other hand, in order to achieve those benefits, you have to incur costs. And I'll go back to using climate change as the example. We know that there's going to be an enormous benefit to the environment in achieving greenhouse gas reductions. We know there's going to be a cost, but we also know that there's a cost benefit to investing in reduction. So I think there has to be some review and some greater appreciation of experience. I don't have an awful lot more to add than that.

The Chairman: It's certainly very helpful to hear you. Might I add, perhaps as a comment or as a suggestion, that in order to ensure that the environment is protected, as you just said, it might be necessary to prevail on Treasury Board and to insist that in their requirements, in Appendix A of that particular document, they also include the general obligations of Canada in the environment and not just in trade, in order to achieve a balance of objectives in the Treasury Board regulatory exercise. If you achieve that, then your task of protecting the environment will be made easier.

As to benefit-cost analysis, I might draw your attention to the fact that in the same document there is a reference under that heading which reads as follows:

The Business Impact Test, or equivalent analysis, must be undertaken to assess the effect that major regulatory proposals will have on Canadian businesses.

There again it seems to be rather unbalanced as a statement, because if that is a factor that has to be included in the analysis of benefit-cost, it could have a negative impact in terms of protecting the environment. So it may perhaps be worth your while to make representations to the president of the Treasury Board as to the necessity of this document, which is now three years old, being updated to better reflect Canada's obligation in more than just the field of trade.

Mrs. Christine Stewart: There are many businesses that can bear witness to the fact that taking environmental measures has been a cost benefit to them. We have to draw on those experiences.

But I accept what you're saying and maybe together we can move forward.

The Chairman: Are there any further questions?

The committee is satisfied. Therefore, we thank you very much for your appearance, and we thank your officials as well.

This meeting stands adjourned until tomorrow morning at 9 a.m. Thank you.