Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
My name is Dan Krewski. I'm the scientific director of the McLaughlin Centre for Population Health Risk Assessment at the University of Ottawa, which is also a World Health Organization collaborating centre in population health risk assessment.
I want to thank the committee for the opportunity to participate in today's meeting.
We'd like to describe some work we've done in the area of health policy approaches to children's environmental health that was sponsored by the federal government, Health Canada in particular. Under this project, we were asked to look at international evidence on how children's environmental health issues are addressed elsewhere and how learnings from that research could possibly inform the updating of the Canadian Environmental Protection Act.
Our research approach was to identify specific governance instruments and evaluate how effective they were in other jurisdictions, looking at barriers and facilitators involved in their implementation. We used two approaches: expert interviews, case studies, as well as a detailed review of the available evidence. We focused on a series of topics that ran through the entire analysis: lead, mercury, pesticides, endocrine disruption, and both indoor and outdoor air pollutants.
The work we did was conducted within the framework we developed for population health risk assessment, which focuses on the broad determinants of health that Kathleen Cooper talked about earlier. We were interested in genetic, environmental, social behaviour, and lifestyle determinants of health. Having identified risks to health, we looked at a variety of regulatory, economic, advisory, community-based, technological, and other options for risk management.
I'll ask Michelle Turner to talk a bit about some of the substantive issues in our report and then Mike Tyshenko to follow up with some work on risk perception and bibliometry.