Madam Speaker, I asked a question as to why the federal government was allowing the Province of Ontario to force municipalities and small businesses into chlorinating their water when the 1993 Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement commits Canada to reducing the amount of chlorinated byproducts in our drinking water. The representative for the minister said that it was nice that I was interested.
In October 1994, the federal government developed the chlorinated substances action plan to prune the chlorine tree. Despite this and the evidence to the contrary that environmentally friendly alternatives exist, the federal government, in partnership with the Liberal Party of Ontario, is forcing businesses to spend millions of dollars on water treatment systems that they cannot afford to use. It is doing so without regard for the environment and without regard to people's health.
The Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement, which was signed by Canada and the United States, commits Canada to reducing the amount of cancer causing chlorination byproducts, including the Great Lakes watershed.
The sixth biennial report under the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement in 1978 to the Governments of Ontario, the United States, Canada and the state and provincial governments of the Great Lakes Basin was delivered in 1993. In it, the Water Quality Board developed a working list of 362 chemicals confirmed to be present in the water, the sediment or the biota of the Great Lakes Basin.
Approximately half of these substances are synthetic chlorinated organic substances. In addition, there are other chlorinated organic substances entering the environment that have not yet been separately identified. Even though many of the substances have not been proven to be individually toxic, it is likely that many of these chemicals, because of their chemical characteristics, will be identified as persistent toxics and hence substances to be virtually eliminated to zero discharge.
There is a growing body of evidence that these compounds are at best foreign to maintaining ecosystem integrity and quite probably persistent, toxic and harmful to human health. They are produced in conjunction with proven persistent toxic substances. Thus, it is prudent and indeed necessary to treat these substances as a class rather than a series of individual chemicals.
Further, in many cases alternative production processes do exist.
This approach raises the question as to whether or not the use of chlorine, the common precursor for the production of chlorinated organic substances, should be sunset. We know that when chlorine is used as a feedstock in a manufacturing process one cannot necessarily predict or control which chlorinated organics will result and in what quantity.
Accordingly, the commission concluded that the use of chlorine and its compounds should be avoided in the manufacturing process. It recognizes that the socio-economic and other consequences of banning the use of chlorine and the subsequent use of alternative chemicals or processes might be considered in determining that timetable.
The issue of cleaning up the Great Lakes concerns the United States. The head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Mr. Michael Leavitt, chaired a cabinet level task force. The Great Lakes cleanup has become a national priority in the United States. The U.S. general accounting office found last year that 33 federal and 17 state programs spent more than $1.7 billion on cleanup efforts.
Canada is in no position to lecture the United States over environmental issues when lack of action by the federal government means it is hampering efforts by the U.S. to clean up the Great Lakes. Canada-U.S. relations are troubled enough without adding another item to the list of irritants.
In keeping with the political structure of Canada, a federal strategic pollution prevention program was developed in cooperation with the provinces.