Health committee  I apologize. I'm not familiar with their legislation.

Health committee  Certainly B.C. has declared it a public health emergency in B.C. If you look at the definition of an epidemic as set out by the World Health Organization, it has to do with levels of death or disease above an average level. By that definition, certainly in British Columbia, as de

Health committee  Thank you very much for the question. The evidence is overwhelmingly clear that when a supervised consumption site is properly established and properly maintained, it saves lives without increasing rates of crime in the surrounding area. There have been numerous studies, both

Health committee  Yes.

Health committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. Good morning. On behalf of Dr. Sharma and Brent Diverty, I'd like to thank you very much for the opportunity to appear today. As you know, British Columbia is at the epicentre of the current crisis of drug overdose and deaths, with the B.C. Coroners Servi

Environment committee  Using standards is a critical way that we try to work as efficiently and effectively as possible. It's much more efficient to be able to reference a standard and be part of a standard development committee than it is to come up with our own regulations. Indeed, it's something tha

Environment committee  One of the major improvements that was made was the implementation of a streamlined electronic system for notification. That allowed us, among other things, to clear a backlog. We had a backlog of approximately 10,000 notifications before implementation of this system, and that's

Environment committee  I will give a brief reply and then turn it over to my colleague Christine Norman, who's the director of risk assessment for the chemical standards program.

Environment committee  I will be very quick. I would just say, from the perspective of Health Canada, that the chemicals management plan does, in essence, take a risk-based approach that is by definition precautionary. We do look at not only the health effects of substances but the environmental effec

Environment committee  If they ended up in a cosmetic, legally they would end up only at a level that would not cause concern regarding health effects. With regard to your more general principle, if you don't mind, I'm going to turn it over to my colleague Christine Norman.

Environment committee  Thank you, Madam Chair, for the opportunity to appear today. I'd also like to thank Ms. Gelfand and her team for their report. Health Canada agrees with the recommendations and has already begun work to address them. This report addresses various issues related to the consume

Public Safety committee  We've been guided in crafting this legislation by the Supreme Court decision where the Supreme Court said there were five factors that must be considered in making a decision on an exemption. What this bill does is it elaborates on those.... It doesn't elaborate on those factors,

Public Safety committee  I don't think we can say if it will or it won't have a dissuasive effect. I think what we can say with confidence, though, is that we can map every single one of these criteria to one of the five factors the Supreme Court laid out as being important to consider in making a decisi

Public Safety committee  Information that's already available would presumably be relatively easy to put into a report and submit. I'd note that almost half of the criteria say “information, if any”. So it is recognized that in certain circumstances the information may not be available. Then all the ap

Public Safety committee  As the Supreme Court said: Where the Minister is considering an application for exemption for a supervised injection facility, he or she will aim to strike the appropriate balance between achieving the public health and public safety goals. What this means is it's not possib