Canada’s Chemicals Management Plan

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The project, which the Canadian Women’s Health Network is consulting on, will involve a public forum slated for February 2010, following a web-based survey seeking input from a broad range of women across Canada. For more information on these initiatives, check the websites of NNEWH (www.nnewh.org) and CWHN (www.cwhn.ca) for updates.

Anne Rochon Ford is the Co-Director of the National Network on Environments and Women`s Health and Coordinator of the national working group  Women and Health Protection.  

Dolon Chakravartty is a graduate student in Public Health Sciences and Collaborative Program in Environment & Health at the University of Toronto.  She is the Graduate Fellow working with the National Network on Environments and Women’s Health from the Fall 2009 - Spring 2010.

FURTHER READINGS:

Altman, R.G., R. Morello-Frosch, J.G. Brody, R. Rudel, P. Brown, and M. Averick. (2008). Pollution comes home and gets personal: Women’s experience of household chemical exposure. Journal of Health and Social Behavior, 49(4): 417-435. Available on line through www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/

Steingraber, Sandra. (2007, August).The falling age of puberty in girls: What we know, what we need to know. San Francisco, CA: Breast Cancer Fund. Available on line at www.breastcancerfund.org. Steingraber is careful to point out that a myriad of factors seem to be contributing to this trend, environmental exposures being one significant one.

O’Grady, Kathleen. (2008/2009, Fall-Winter). Early puberty for girls. The new ‘normal’ and why we need to be concerned. Network, 11(1): 11-13. Available on line at www.cwhn.ca/en/node/39365

FURTHER RESOURCES:

The Canadian Environmental Law Association (CELA) is a community-based environmental law clinic funded by Legal Aid Ontario, and has advocated for improvement and reform of the Canadian Environmental Protection Act for many years. For a collection of submissions, media releases and other commentary, see www.cela.ca/collections/pollution/chemicals-management-canada.

The Canadian Environmental Network/ Réseau canadien de l’environnement (RCEN) has funding from Environment Canada to coordinate civil society participation in chemicals management in Canada: www.cen-rce.org/CMP/indexcmp.html

Environmental Defence is an environmental group that is a member of the RCEN that “gathers, reviews, and analyses evidence related to the CMP on behalf of civil society”  and makes this information available through the RCEN website. They have also mounted a campaign to encourage the federal government to designate the chemical 1,4-Dioxane as toxic. http://petition.environmentaldefence.ca/dioxane/

Film: “Toxic Trespass” www.toxictrespass.com

Film: “The Story of Stuff” http://storyofstuff.com