Thank you for the observation. At Health Canada, we certainly share the passion and concern for protecting Canadians.
We feel that we have made significant progress. We actually believe that there are a number of steps that have been taken and appreciate the commissioner's comments about the progress that has been made since the last audits that you referenced.
With the investments that we've had to move forward on the risk assessments in a much more methodical, and paced, and deadline sort of way, the pace has augmented significantly, as I mentioned. There has been a significant investment of dollars and we have moved through the list of chemicals in this triaged way very significantly. We recognize that there is much more to be done, but we have been working to work through along the schedule that has been outlined.
With regard to the lack of a risk management strategy for lead and mercury, I think the commissioner noted that in fact there are many individual strategies that have been taken, and in fact there have been steps taken to monitor the efficacy of these strategies. I think we are gratified that we in fact can see some of the positive results from the biomonitoring and other methods that we've taken to actually measure our 20 regulatory regimes, for example, in lead or mercury, to ask if they are producing results.
I think the commissioner makes a very good point, in that in fact it would be advantageous--and we agree with this recommendation--to pull together all of those individual mechanisms, or individual regulatory steps that have been taken over the years, into one risk management strategy. In a sense, because lead and mercury have been known challenges for such a long time and we've been going through the process of addressing those, over decades essentially, they were not brought together in the same way that we're using for the modern chemicals, in a coordinated risk-assessment way.
So there are two points I would make. One is that on the newer chemicals, we are doing this in a consolidated risk-assessment way, and for the older chemicals, lead and mercury, we believe there is a series of very effective measures, but we also agree with the recommendation to pull those together.
The last point I would make is that we continue to want to move forward with updated legislation, for example, such as the proposed Canada Consumer Products Safety Act. We continue to want to push the envelope to update the tools that we have to keep Canadians safe and we're very dedicated to that. Thank you.