Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I think there were four questions, and I have four minutes.
I'll go quite quickly through the issue you raise in terms of environmental indicators.
I think, Mr. Chair, the honourable member is absolutely right that the Canadian environmental sustainability indicators program, which runs at about $9.2 million a year, was renewed for two years by this government in the budget. That program will enable the collection of water quality information, air quality information, and protected lands information across the country. It's a very important program, and in my view, and in the view of the federal sustainable development office, that renewal has been intrinsically positive to our ability to create results-based indicators to track the strategy.
I think the member's right in the sense that there are other environmental indicators, beyond the ones funded in this program, and that you have to have a picture of the whole thing. But the continuation of that $9 million program is really key to providing us with the tools we need for this.
In terms of the funding for Environment Canada, I don't know where it ranks. I know that our mains this year have asked Parliament for $1.1 billion. That would make it far above the second or third smallest. I think we're somewhere in the middle of the pack, but I couldn't say exactly where.
In terms of EC being the enviro-cop of econometric capacity, let me say that as the assistant deputy minister of strategic policy, I am responsible for economic analysis in Environment Canada. I can tell you that our ability to do econometric modelling and enviro-econometric modelling can't be touched.
The Department of Finance sometimes gets nervous, because we can model impacts that they can't touch and don't understand. I've been in charge of econometric modelling at the Department of Agriculture and at Environment Canada, and actually, we have a pretty good capacity.