Assessing the Administrative Utility of the Qsar Information System

Information on toxic substances is expensive if not altogether inexistent. In this paper we identify some properties of the QSAR Information System and show how they can be administratively useful to the regulatory agencies involved in implementing the Canadian Environmental Contaminants Act. This is done by analyzing how the system’s properties relieve the pressures exerted by three limiting factors in the Act: 1) costs and delays, 2) the criterion of acceptable risk, and 3) the administrative hearing. The Act imposes a heavy burden of proof on the agencies and it is unlikely that QSAR outputs would be acceptable as direct evidence of a chemical’s toxicity. However, the QSAR Information System can be used as a screening tool for the identification of those high-risk chemicals for which agencies may gather more costly direct evidence.