The Death Knell for Dispersants? (Van Ness Feldman LLP)

Oil and dispersants create a toxic cocktail that can be lethal to wildlife and humans. One study found that dispersants can make oil up to 52 times more toxic. (The Alert Project)

Canada has pre-approved only 2 products for response to marine oil spills, both dispersants: Corexit® EC9500A and Corexit® EC9580A as of June 2016.

These are terrible tools for oil spill response (largely ineffective), and pose serious hazards for marine life and humans near them during application or while they remain in the environment.

Here's a treatment of the topic for the lay audience From The Narwhal.
Canada should rethink unproven, dangerous chemical ‘cleanup’ of marine oil spills.
The idea that response could be mounted within 36 hours is too optimistic; the current industry target is 72 hours to have equipment on scene, and they frequently don't make it. That's one reason why response tools need to be community-based, not stored centrally far from likely spill zones.

This April 2023 article in The Guardian gives a human account of why dispersants need to be removed from the oil clean-up toolbox.
They cleaned up BP’s massive oil spill. Now they’re sick – and want justice.

It's time to renounce the false idol of dispersants as an effective spill response tool, in favour of those which produce a net environmental benefit. We're here to make effective, safe and environmentally-superior solutions available in Canada.

If your plan is to stick with other 1960s technologies like absorbents, or old-school mechanical gear like booms and bath-tub-toy scale disk, brush or drum skimmers, well, those continue to be expensive, cranky, slow to deploy and generally not very effective at recovering spilled oil.

A couple of things to keep in mind about oil spills. An oil spill on water can spread faster than a fire.
At Macondo, in the U.S. oil industry's front yard, oil gushed for weeks, and the industry managed to recover just 3% of the oil. The industry mantra appears to be 'Keep calm and spill on'.

If you're ready to look at technologies that are more effective, less expensive, don't produce massive quantities of toxic waste or collect more water than oil, we're here to answer your questions.

Oil may be the energy life-blood of the 20th century industrialized world, but that doesn't mean we should let it haemorrhage into our life-giving soil and water. The oil industry has proved in over a century of operations spanning the globe that spill prevention is not foolproof. Accidents happen, neglect happens, increasing occurrence of natural disasters affecting tankers, pipelines or oil storage happens; so rapid, safe response, in a manner that fits the situation, is critical.