Canadian Environmental Protection Act, 1999
Annual Report to Parliament for April 2020 to March 2021: chapter 1
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1. Introduction
This annual report provides an overview of the activities conducted and results achieved under the Canadian Environmental Protection Act, 1999 (CEPA) from April 1, 2020, to March 31, 2021 by both Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC) and Health Canada (HC). It responds to the statutory requirement in section 342 of the Act to provide annual reports to Parliament on the administration and enforcement of the Act.
CEPA provides authority for the Government of Canada to take action on a wide range of environmental and human health risks - from chemicals, to pollution, to wastes. For the most part, it functions as an enabling statute, providing a suite of instruments and measures for identifying, assessing and addressing risks.
The general steps followed to address each risk constitute a management cycle (see Figure 1). At each stage of the cycle, stakeholders are engaged, the public has an opportunity to be involved and exercise their procedural rights, and the government works closely with domestic and international jurisdictions and agencies.
Figure 1: CEPA management cycle

Long description for Figure 1
This diagram shows the steps of the CEPA management cycle. The 5 boxes arranged in a circle and connected by clockwise arrows represent:
- research and monitoring
- risk assessment
- risk management
- compliance promotion and enforcement
- information gathering and reporting
This report provides information on all stages of the management cycle. Section 2, “Monitoring the environment and human health”, covers monitoring and surveillance activities that allow experts to determine levels and trends of chemicals, air pollutants and waste disposal affecting the environment and human health. Section 3, “Addressing key risks”, covers information gathering, risk assessment, and risk management for substances, air pollution and greenhouse gases, water quality, and waste. Section 4, “Reporting programs and emission inventories”, covers information on releases of pollutants and greenhouse gases. Section 5, “Administration and public participation”, covers stakeholder engagement and inter-jurisdictional relationships. The report also includes Section 6, “Compliance promotion and enforcement” and Section 7, “Report of research”.
This report includes the following mandatory information:
enforcement activities (section 6)
research (section 7)
activities of the National Advisory Committee (section 5.1)
activities under administrative and equivalency agreements (section 5.1)
The Act also requires the inclusion of activities under the international air pollution provisions, the international water pollution provisions and any committees established under section 7(1)(a) in the annual report. However, there were no activities under any of these sections during the reporting period.
The online CEPA Registry is a comprehensive source of information about activities taking place under the Act, including proposed and existing policies, guidelines, codes of practice, government notices and orders, agreements, permits, and regulations.
1.1 Review of the Act
In 2020-2021, work continued in both ECCC and HC to implement the commitment made in the September 2020 Speech from the Throne to strengthen CEPA. As part of this work, ECCC and HC continued to move forward on commitments made in the government’s June 2018 follow-up report to the House of Commons Standing Committee on Environment and Sustainable Development in response to that Committee’s 2017 report on CEPA entitled Healthy Environment, Healthy Canadians, Healthy Economy: Strengthening the Canadian Environmental Protection Act, 1999. They also continued engagement on key issues, such as renewal of the Chemicals Management Plan (CMP) Post-2020 and the environmental protection gap on First Nations reserve lands.
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