Thank you, Mr. Chair. It's a pleasure to be here.
Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen.
My name is Robert Smith. I'm the director of environment accounts and statistics at Statistics Canada. I don't have anything to tell you today about Statistics Canada's involvement particularly with the Canadian Environmental Protection Act, because we actually have no involvement with that act, but I am here to tell you a little bit about Statistics Canada's activities in reporting on the environment, which is obviously relevant to today's topic of measuring success.
I'll be very, very brief. There are just a few products that I want to bring to your attention.
In particular, I think copies of my presentation have been distributed to all of you, and attached to that I hope you will find copies in English and French of this particular publication that I want to draw your attention to.
If you look at slide three of my presentation, you'll see a bit of history of this publication. In fact, it dates back to the year 2000, when the finance minister at the time asked the national round table to make some recommendations to the government on how the government might report on sustainability in a broad way. The national round table convened a three-year process to consider that question of reporting on sustainability and ultimately recommended six indicators that the government might report, three of which were chosen by the government for reporting in 2004.
Environment Canada, Health Canada, and Statistics Canada were asked to jointly prepare these three new indicators, and this document is in fact the first report of those three indicators. So, in some sense, the report does represent the latest and one of the more significant efforts of the government to report on environmental progress, and I thought it was important that it be brought to the committee's attention today.
You can find an electronic copy of the report and the supporting documents to the report on Statistics Canada's website, and I've given you the address for that.
The next version of this report will be prepared in November of this year, and it will be an annual report from that point forward. We're working on improvements to the indicators on a variety of fronts--methodological, conceptual, and empirical--and there's the possibility that the indicator set will expand over time as new indicators of sustainability are proposed and adopted.
As I say, that was the particular report that I most wanted to bring to your attention today.
In the couple of minutes that I have left, I'll just draw your attention to two other sets of products that are produced by Statistics Canada.
The first of these is mentioned in slide five. This is a compendium of environmental statistics that Statistics Canada has been producing now for nearly 30 years, actually. We produced it for a long time on a five-year basis, but more recently we've been preparing this compendium on an annual basis. It's called Human Activity and the Environment, and it really is a report that describes exactly what its title would suggest. It is a broad statistical portrait of human activities in their broadest sense and their implications for the environment.
It's a very popular report. We put it out on an annual basis, as I said. It's used an awful lot by teachers because it's a reasonably accessible report. High school students can read it and understand it fairly easily.
Each annual version of the report covers one issue in depth. For example, if you look at the 2005 edition, which I've given you the web link for, you'll find that the 2005 edition covered waste management issues in considerable detail. The year before that, we dealt with water resources; the year before that it was energy; and before that it was air quality.
We're working on this year's report, which will look at transportation and the environment, and future reports we hope will cover issues related to cities and the environment. Then to mark the International Polar Year in 2008, we will focus on northern issues.
So I wanted to draw your attention to that report. You can access it quite easily on our website.
The final set of products that I'd like to mention to you quickly are simply the surveys that Statistics Canada runs on environmental topics. We have four surveys that we've been running for about a decade now and we have good established time series for those surveys. They cover the use of environmental protection technologies by businesses and governments.They also cover the production of those same technologies by companies that are specialists in environmental goods and services, and we also cover waste management activities in that set of established surveys.
Our survey program is under a considerable expansion right now. Statistics Canada has recently made a significant investment in the expansion of its environmental statistics program. With that money we're going to be undertaking new surveys in the areas related to households and the environment; the industrial consumption of water; a survey of water quality at municipal water treatment plants; and a survey of farmers, to get a handle on the quantities of water that they use for irrigation and livestock watering purposes.
That's a very quick overview of some of Statistics Canada's main environmental information products. There are others I could talk about, but I won't because of the need to keep my presentation short. In summary, we hope that many of these products do provide value in terms of measuring progress and success with respect to the environment.
I'm more than happy to respond to questions about any of the products, or indeed about some of the products I didn't talk about, if there's interest in those as well.