#environment canada

A potentially powerful weather system that could bring a severe thunderstorm threat to parts southern Ontario is on track to hit Wednesday. According to Enviornment Canada, the storm will look very different in various parts of the province. Winter storm warnings are in place for parts northwestern Ontario, including Thunder Bay. Meanwhile, freezing rain warnings are in place for many parts of northeastern through eastern Ontario. According to Enviornment Canada, up the 15 mm of ice accretion with power outages and tree damage is possible.

But for those in southern Ontario, the Colorado low is expected to bring heavy rain, gusty winds and a severe thunderstorm threat.

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On May 11, 2019, Canada announced a series of decisions on seven halogenated flame retardants. Troublingly, the government decided to ban only two individual flame retardants and to leave five other similar chemicals on the market. This regulatory approach is weaker than that of the US, where entire classes of these harmful chemicals are facing bans. Ottawa’s decisions expose Canadians to toxic hazards.

Industry uses flame retardants in many manufacturing processes and products, exposing humans and wildlife to these chemicals in various ways. One way is they migrate out of consumer products like furniture, electronics, flooring, and clothing. Through air, dust, and skin contact, they then migrate into bodies, accumulating in fat and contaminating breast milk. They cause reproductive and neurological effects in developing foetuses and infants, and they cause diabetes and obesity, lower sperm counts and infertility, and cancers. As endocrine disruptors, flame retardants can be harmful at very low doses, particularly in “critical windows of susceptibility” such as in utero, or during puberty and pregnancy. Some groups have elevated health risks, such as gymnasts, who tumble on mats dosed in flame retardants, and firefighters, who absorb toxics on the job through their skin and lungs, and who are fighting for bans.

Hopes ran high when, in 2013, Environment Canada and Health Canada began assessing ten flame retardants together, in a “grouping assessment” under the Canadian Environmental Protection Act, 1999 (CEPA). Assessing classes of chemicals, rather than evaluate them one-by-one, is often viewed as a promising tactic in tackling “regrettable substitution.” Regrettable substitution occurs when regulators ban a toxic substance only to have industry rapidly replace it with a new substance that is chemically similar and equally harmful. Many flame retardants currently on the market are regrettable substitutes for polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs), notorious toxic flame retardants that have been banned or are being phased out in most countries.

These hopes have now been dashed. Instead of restricting halogenated flame retardants as a class, the government decided that only two chemicals should be regulated as toxic substances. (Only seven of the ten chemicals in the grouping assessment have received final decisions; decisions for the last three in the group are still pending, and it remains to be seen if they will be banned.)

Environment Canada’s contribution to April fools.

The federal government should publish its full review of fossil fuel subsidies as it works toward phasing them out, says an Ottawa-based corporate watchdog.

Environment and Climate Change Canada is currently poring over all federal non-tax measures that support the oil and gas industry, as it prepares to deliver on a climate-friendly G20 promise to eliminate the "inefficient" ones by 2025.

Earlier this week, the department said it would decide later how much of that review would be made public, but after a line of questioning from National Observer, a spokeswoman clarified that the full document is "expected to be made public."

The spotlight on Environment Canada's publishing question comes after a series of criticisms of Canada's progress on the promise to kick inefficient fossil fuel support to the curb.

Last year, a scathing auditor general report found that Ottawa had not yet developed a strategy to phase out the inefficient subsidies by 2025, despite making the initial promise in 2009, placing it in the mandate letters of both the environment and finance ministers in 2015, and reaffirming it again in 2016.

The auditor general, Michael Ferguson, also noted that the Finance Department had refused to share information about how the government was keeping its promise to phase out the subsidies.

A few months later, in October, federal MPs held a secret meeting about fossil fuel subsidies, prompting an environmentalist, Annie Bérubé from Équiterre, to accuse Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's Liberals of trying to prevent politicians from studying the issue.

Last year Auditor General Michael Ferguson called out the lack of transparency surrounding fossil fuel subsidies in Canada and the extremely slow progress towards phasing out these subsidies, but little has changed since then.