(OTTAWA) The Liberal government on Wednesday reintroduced its bill to enshrine the “right to a healthy environment,” which proposes long-awaited changes to the 1999 Environmental Protection Act.
Posted at 6:06 p.m.
Bill S-5 entitled “Strengthening Environmental Protection for a Healthy Canada Act” may “seem very abstract and perhaps disconnected” in the current circumstances, acknowledged Steven Guilbeault, Minister of Environment and Climate Change, during a press conference.
However, the environment is a “key priority of the government, of myself and of many Canadians”, he added in the same breath.
PHOTO ROBERT SKINNER, THE PRESS
Federal Minister of Environment and Climate Change, Steven Guilbeault
The 1999 law outlines how the federal government regulates toxic chemicals and other polluting materials, with the aim of protecting the environment and people from their harmful effects.
It is through this law that commercial substances are evaluated according to their risk and toxicity. Scientists and environmentalists had called on the Liberals to modernize this law — for example, to require substance assessments to take into account the cumulative effects of repeated exposures.
Science and chemicals have “changed a lot” since the last major Canadian Environmental Protection Act, the minister said.
The bill, formerly C-28, was introduced last April and died on the order paper with the dissolution of the House and the call of an election last summer.
The government reintroduces it, identically, given the “urgency” and it does so in the Senate because it is the “best way to make it progress through a strong legislative agenda”, the legislative calendar of the Upper House being much less busy at the moment.
The bill had been “widely hailed” by both environmentalists and industry as “an excellent starting point,” Guilbeault said.
Incorporating the proposals made at the time into the document tabled on Wednesday would have taken “several weeks or even months” before the bill could be reintroduced.
“In a minority government, in a Parliament like ours, time is not an ally,” he concluded.