The government must invest in the health of Canada, stop subsidizing polluters, and drive the well-being agenda by eliminating harmful toxics and plastics.
By Helen Hsu | October 15, 2025 | Published in The Hill Times
Plastics are not just an environmental nuisance. They are fueling a public health crisis. Canada must be concerned about the mounting evidence linking plastics and their toxic additives to serious illness. Canada needs urgent federal action to protect people’s health. Individual action to reduce plastic consumption can only go so far. We need our government to lead the way in protecting the health of people in Canada.
People’s health is already at stake
Plastics create human health and environmental problems at all stages of their life-cycle. Plastics made from petrochemicals contain more than 16,000 chemicals out of which at least 2,400 are of serious concern. The health impact of plastics affects not only the workers in the industry, but also consumers through exposure to chemicals, and after degradation through the impact of micro and nanoplastics.
Research has shown numerous health complications of working in the plastic industry, from asthma, female infertility (including infertility and miscarriage*), to cancer.
Plastics also decompose and break down into microplastics which are tiny, invisible to the human eye, fragments that contaminate our environment. These particles carry toxic chemicals with them and they infiltrate our bodies. In fact, researchers have found microplastics in human blood, brain, lungs, livers, and placentas. Among some of the most worrisome toxic chemicals accompanying plastic products are PFAS (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances), known as “forever chemicals.”
Used in cookware, food packaging, and clothing, PFAS not only persist in the environment (since they are found in surface water, ground water, oceans, tap water and in the soil), but they also accumulate in our bodies: alarmingly, 98.5 per cent of people in Canada already have detectable PFAS in their blood. The impact of microplastics and forever chemicals has been linked to hormone dysfunction, fertility challenges, slowed development in children, and numerous cancers including childhood leukemia, kidney, ovarian, prostate, testicular and thyroid cancer.
A question of equity
The health burden of plastics is not evenly distributed. Children, Indigenous and racialized communities, women, and workers are disproportionately exposed. For example, in places like Sarnia’s Chemical Valley, residents, in particular, the Aamjiwnaang First Nation bear toxic loads that would never be tolerated elsewhere in Canada. Due to extreme benzene spikes, which have created elevated risks of leukemia and other adverse health outcomes, the community established its own air quality standards and oversight in response to regulatory failures and the persistent environmental injustices.
As microplastics have been found in blood, placenta, breast milk and meconium, we are running a global human experiment with no control group as everyone is exposed to varying degrees. We have seen that prenatal exposure to PFAS is associated with asthma in the child at age 6. We will only learn more health impacts in the coming years, with consequences borne by the next generation.
What Canada must do
9 in 10 people in Canada want to see federal action towards safer products.
In short, the government must invest in the well-being of Canada, and stop subsidizing polluters and drive the well-being agenda by eliminating harmful toxics and plastics. It should phase out non-essential PFAS and toxic additives in plastics through faster regulations and guarantee the Right to a Healthy Environment, under the Canadian Environmental Protection Act (CEPA); ban harmful and unnecessary single-use plastics and scale up reusable, refillable alternatives that create local jobs; prioritizing protections for the communities most harmed; invest in monitoring and research by re-funding the Plastics Initiative and strengthening the Chemicals Management Plan, and holding the petrochemical sectors accountable for their emissions.
Meeting the moment
If plastic were a country, it would be the world’s fifth-largest greenhouse gas emitter. The United Nations estimates plastics-related health and pollution costs already reach over CAD $800 billion annually. This crisis is here and it is growing.
No one in Canada should be left to shoulder invisible harms that industry profits from. Federal leadership is not optional: it is a matter of public health. At CAPE, we have made our policy asks clear to the decision makers in this joint manifesto against plastics and pollution. Plastics and PFAS are harming people now. Without decisive action, the damage will only deepen for our children’s health and the health of generations to come.
Dr. Helen Hsu is a CAPE-affiliated family physician specializing in mental health and addictions based in Ottawa.
*Zurub RE, Cariaco Y, Wade MG, Bainbridge SA. Microplastics exposure: implications for human fertility, pregnancy and child health. Front Endocrinol (Lausanne). 2024 Jan 4;14:1330396. doi: 10.3389/fendo.2023.1330396. PMID: 38239985; PMCID: PMC10794604.