Note
Authors are affiliated with Dalhousie University.
"August 15, 2014".
"The authors wish to acknowledge the support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (Standard Operating Grant No. 410-2008-1357; Partnership Development Grant No. 890-2010-0123), Public Safety Canada and the Kanishka Project Contribution Program."--Page 5.
Summary in English and French.
Résumé
"This paper reports on the results of a research project designed to identify how Canada regulates risks associated with low-probability/high-consequence events involving the chemical sector, and the contextual factors that influence this risk regulation. In referring to the chemical sector, we mean facilities, both public and private, that manufacture, store or use large quantities of chemicals. We omit from this definition petroleum, or oil and gas companies, as well as nuclear power plants. Although we acknowledge that one might classify these as dangerous chemicals, we have chosen to exclude them from the present study both for reasons of brevity and to align with Public Safety Canada’s categories of critical infrastructure, which treat energy generation and chemical manufacturing separately. For the same reason, we focus primarily on the manufacture and storage of chemicals rather than their transport by truck, rail, pipeline or other means, which again falls into a separate critical infrastructure category. We do, however, include water utilities in our study given their extensive use of chemicals such as chlorine. In addition, we are interested primarily in major incidents, whether the product of technological (or process) failure, natural disaster or malicious intent."--Executive summary.