Despite the upsurge in public concern for environmental and health issues, Canada has one of the western world’s most outdated systems for controlling toxic chemicals in consumer products. And an increasing amount of the toxic load in our bodies comes from everyday household items.
Passed in 1968, the Hazardous Products Act was scarcely talked about in recent months when lead was found in alarming levels in children’s toys, or when chemicals that pose developmental risks for children were found in plastic baby bottles. Yet this law is the federal government’s preferred legal tool for dealing with toxins in consumer goods.
It’s easy to see why few wanted to talk about what the government could do under the Act. Unlike Europe and the United States, Canada doesn’t even have the power to issue a mandatory recall of a product. The government is restricted to asking companies nicely, or issuing often invisible warnings to consumers. These voluntary measures usually follow more decisive action that has already been taken in other countries.
In the United States, if a company is made aware of a hazard in one of its products, there is a legal requirement to notify the government. Companies in Canada have no such obligation.
Fines in Canada are in the range of $5,000 — barely petty cash for major manufacturers and importers. U.S. fines for similar infractions are $1 million, and in Europe, fines can be up to 5 percent of a company’s revenues.
The government’s new Consumer Product Safety Act would fill many of these regulatory gaps, providing the power to issue recalls and raising fines to a maximum of $5 million. It would require manufacturers and importers to track information about how and where their goods are produced, and report problems they are made aware of. And it would introduce a new general safety requirement, prohibiting the marketing of a product that is “a danger to human health or safety.”
The bill is a significant improvement to Canada’s antiquated regime for regulating toxic chemicals, but it could go much further in protecting human health.
While it introduces a range of new tools, there is no requirement for the government to actually use these tools. In a properly functioning public health protection system, when a problem comes to light with a product on the market, there should be an obligation on the government to inform consumers and to remove or restrict the product. Under the new law, government may do this, but there is nothing torequire them to. Think about it — if the government is made aware of a toxic chemical in a children’s toy, there would be no legal requirement for them to even make people aware of it. Sure, there would be political consequences if the government is found to have been sitting on the information, but this after-the-fact accountability relies on the government and industry getting caught.
Perhaps most importantly, the law provides little new information for consumers on potentially toxic product ingredients. In Europe, …
