Government Operations committee  That question is very difficult to answer from a statistical point of view. We're in the business of providing historical facts on what has transpired in the past. We do not do any forecasts, and unfortunately, the input-output models are not temporal models that can tell you anything about the timing of the stimulus.

Government Operations committee  What input-output models can give you is a base estimate of the relative magnitudes of stimulus, and that changes over time, so we would have to go back and do a type of simulation based on queries about specific industries to answer that question.

Government Operations committee  We can give relative impact statements, but economists generally take our database and they build econometric models that build behavioural aspects of the economy into their models and then do that type of analysis.

Government Operations committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you for inviting us here today. I would like to take a few minutes to give a brief statement about Statistics Canada's role as the national statistics agency and about a few products and databases that may be of interest to this committee. Our mandate at Statistics Canada is to collect data about Canadian society and the economy and make information products available so that Canadians can make informed decisions and policy-makers can make informed choices.

Environment committee  Thank you for inviting us here today. I am from Statistics Canada, as is my colleague Robert Smith. We would like to make a brief presentation about our environmental statistics program. Then we'll be happy to answer any questions. If that's all right, I will turn it over to my colleague Robert Smith, who is the director of our environment statistics program.