By Paul Weinberg
TORONTO, Nov 13 1997 (IPS)

A recent North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) paper on controlling smog – emitted from motor vehicles, industry and power plants – that crosses the Canadian- U.S. border appears to contradict other government scientific information, environmentalists say.

The Commission for Environmental Cooperation (CEC) – set up under the NAFTA treaty Canada, the U.S. and Mexico, says that the ground- level ozone (a major component of smog) objective in Canada is 82 parts per billion averaged over one hour. The United States recently toughened its standard to 80 parts per billion over eight hours.

But a separate Canadian federal environment department document indicates that there are no safe limits for ground-level ozone, and even if the current standard was attained, it would not protect public health.

“There is no discernible human health threshold for ground-level ozone. The current 82 parts per billion [in Canada] objective is not fully protective of human health and vegetation,” say the authors of the Environment Canada document. It is old news that there is no threshold.

Ground level ozone is dangerous “at whatever levels, according to the government’s own studies,” says John Wellner, smog and climate change campaigner for the Toronto Environmental Alliance. He adds that only the politicians, not scientists, are adhering to the position of acceptable levels.

Two streams of ground ozone are identified in the NAFTA study: one going upward from the U.S. Midwest, across southern Ontario and Quebec in Canada and then back into north-eastern United States, while the second travels up the northeast into Canada’s Atlantic provinces.

In its call for a joint smog control effort by Canada and the United States, the CEC says that ground-level ozone during the hot months of the year “is a powerful respiratory irritant and a pervasive health problem through much of North America.” Exposure to ground-level ozone leads to breathing problems among people in the affected downwind areas of central and eastern North America, with asthma sufferers facing particular risk.

The CEC paper notes that in highly industrialized southern Ontario there was a five per cent increase in respiratory hospital admissions as result of a 50 parts per billion increase in ozone concentration. This effect was disproportionally more severe in children, whose admission rate increase exceeded eight per cent.

Wellner notes that recent government studies demonstrate that in Metropolitan Toronto alone 15 people a year die from smog and that number reaches about 1,800 for the entire province of Ontario.

The NAFTA study also alludes to the growing seriousness of the smog problem, noting the strengthening of a national standard for the pollutants in the U.S. by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and a parallel process in Canada where Ottawa is currently revising its air quality objectives for ozone.

Bruce Walker, research director for the Montreal based STOP, a citizens environmental group, says while both countries in North America equally share the blame for the origins of the smog, Canada and its provinces have non-enforceable voluntary guidelines for ground-level ozone emissions. In contrast the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) can legally insist that local states, cities and industries comply with its established standards.

Ontario, and the city of Vancouver, have mandatory inspection of smog polluting cars and trucks but, “generally this is more the exception, not the rule, in Canada,” says Walker. “The provinces (which play an important constitutional role in the environmental area) are not in any regulatory mood right now.”

At a time when Ontario Hydro, the provincial public hydro electrical utility is expanding its fossil fuels generation of energy because of difficulties in its nuclear power program, the Ozone Transport Assessment Group is quoted as asking for the reduction of ozone-forming pollution from large power plants of up to 85 cent from 1990 levels. John Wellner contrasts that with the Ontario government’s own smog plan which is calling for a 45 per cent reduction by the year 2015.

The authors of the NAFTA study also state that the trend in some jurisdictions in North America towards the closing of pollution monitoring stations should be “reversed” because of the critical role they play in the tracking of the benefits of emissions quality programs and compliance with air quality goals.

This is important, says Wellner, because Ontario has been busy reducing its environmental monitoring as part of its “ideologically” conservative economic policies.

Walker is concerned that in Canada as federal and provincial environment ministers currently scramble at a meeting in Regina to develop a firm policy regarding global climate change before next month’s international gathering in Kyoto Japan, smog “is taking a back seat” as an issue.

“Smog is on their agenda, but I would be surprised if it gets more than five minutes,” Walker said.

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