Thank you. I have just a couple of quick points.
First of all, the federal government has not been doing the proper measurements. Let me use two examples--trends and biomonitoring. We've already talked about biomonitoring. As far as I know, my organization, Environmental Defence, has published the most ambitious biomonitoring studies in the country to date. Frankly, it's bizarre that the government of the United States and governments all over Europe have tested hundreds of their citizens, and it falls to a Canadian charity to do this rather than the federal government.
Second, on trends, for the last few years PollutionWatch, which is a joint project of my organization and the Canadian Environmental Law Association, has published the most complete analyses of pollution trends in the country. It hasn't been the federal government; it's been our organizations.
I want to take issue a little bit with Mr. Moffet. By and large, the trends are negative. That is, pollution is increasing in this country. We don't need to publish any great quantified studies to convince Torontonians, who deal with more and more smog days every year, or Montrealers, who deal with smog now as they haven't in the past, or folks in the Fraser Valley. Canadians see on a daily basis that air quality is deteriorating. But when you look at the numbers, let me just quote a few statistics. Between 1995 and 2003, if you try to compare apples to apples--so that is, if you only take a look at chemicals that have been consistently reported over that time and you only take a look at facilities that have consistently reported over that time, so you try to compare apples to apples--pollution across the country has increased by 12% between 1995 and 2003.
Another way we tried to take a look at this is by again comparing apples to apples, taking a look at similar Canadian facilities on the Canadian side of the Great Lakes versus the U.S. side of the Great Lakes. Dr. Khatter quoted the statistic “per facility we emit 93% more potentially cancer-causing air pollutants...”. So whether you measure in terms of increasing numbers of smog days, whether you measure it in terms of the NPRI reporting every year, whether you measure it in terms of these pollutants in our bloodstreams, pollution is getting worse in this country.