Is Canada's pollution database hiding toxic spills in plain sight?

National Observer

a day ago

Canada's federal database for tracking the toxic chemicals companies and some government facilities dump into the environment is "really very misleading," researchers say.
The National Pollutant Release Inventory (NPRI) is a federal database that tracks emissions of more than 300 chemicals from thousands of factories, oil and gas wells, wastewater treatment plants, airports and other industrial facilities scattered across the country. The data are meant to help Canadians determine which chemicals that industrial facilities are releasing into the environment, whether they pose a threat and track if those amounts are increasing or not.
But some experts say that quantities alone are not enough to help Canadians keep their health and the environment safe.
"Quantity alone is one way to measure trends, but it doesn't account for the relative toxicity of any given compound released to the environment," explained Tony Walker, a professor at Dalhousie University and former environmental consultant.
For instance, his lab analyzed NPRI data on the 10 largest chemical releases in Nova Scotia, using 2015 data. The study found that list didn't reflect the actual risks chemicals posed to people in the province. That's because the top 10 chemicals released in the province were less dangerous than other products that companies released in smaller quantities, but which could have more severe impacts.
The database currently doesn't offer this kind of interpretation — instead, users need to find and analyse the toxicity themselves — rendering it "virtually meaningless" to the general public, said Walker.
Reporting thresholds also problematic
Still, some advocates say that efforts to include relative toxicity in the NPRI's data analysis could detract from more urgent problems with the system — namely, that it doesn't track enough things, nor track things well enough, as it is.
The data help Canadians determine which chemicals that industrial facilities are releasing into the environment, whether they pose a threat and track if those amounts are increasing, but some experts say quantities alone are not enough.
"It would become even harder than it already is to expand the NPRI if they included relative toxicity," said Elaine MacDonald, director of Healthy Communities for Ecojustice. "Proposals to add substances receive a lot of industry pushback as it is."
"Reporting thresholds have always been too high, and certainly aren't being used to address the cumulative exposures that occur in hotspots such as Chemical Valley," Cassie Barker, toxics program manager at Environmental Defence, added in an email.
The NPRI was created in 1993 to help the government track pollution. Its structure generally mirrors its US equivalent, the EPA's toxics release inventory, explained John Jackson, who works with the Citizen's Network on Waste Management and joined consultations on creating the NPRI.
The idea was to make it easier for regulators and the public to use data from both systems, though in practice Canada included more facilities, such as wastewater treatment plants, and potentially polluting facilities with more than 10 full-time employees.
Some facilities, such as university labs or drycleaners, are generally exempted from the reporting rule.
That leaves plenty of gaps. Take the 10-employee threshold, which in practice means that hundreds of small industrial facilities using toxic chemicals don't need to report. Fracking operations are also exempted from reporting requirements, despite the well-documented health and environmental impacts linked to fracking chemicals.
Earlier this year, the government added 131 individual PFAS chemicals to the list, a move environmental groups said was a good step forward, but isn't enough to capture the full impact of the class of about 16,000 chemicals, said Fe de Leon, researcher at the Canadian Environmental Law Association. The reporting threshold for the chemicals is also too high, particularly because even small quantities of the chemicals can be dangerous.
Jackson added that Carney's push to cut government spending by 7.5 per cent for the 2026-27 fiscal year, 10 per cent the following year and 15 per cent in 2028-29 could also hurt the NPRI's ability to function effectively — let alone add new types of analysis to the database.
A spokesperson for Environment and Climate Change Canada said in an emailed statement the ministry has taken early steps toward including relative toxic impacts of chemicals it tracks, and "continues to analyze the NPRI data from a variety of perspectives, including health and environmental impacts of NPRI substances, to build on what has already been started.
Still, Jackson was clear it's imperative for Canada to keep the database.
"The NPRI is really important. There is no other place that gives us Canada-wide, facility-specific data on what they dump or what they send off-site to a dump somewhere else. It's an incredibly important thing. And because it's so important, we are dedicated to making it better all the time. So it's not to get rid of it, but to keep making it better.'