And it's not just heights and weights that we need. Increasingly, we're understanding that those measures can tell erroneous tales in the absence of understanding the physical activity or the baseline fitness level or the waist circumference of the individual. So we need a more robust mechanism to do this.
A request came through recently--you've read about it in the media.... Child seats are no longer big enough for our chunky children--they're not made the right size, but we don't know how big they should be--similarly with airplane seats, and so on. How big are people now? We don't know. Lawsuits are going on. Transport Canada is involved in some of these things. On a national representative sample, we don't have any data. We go to other countries to get it because we have no mechanism.
The Canadian health measures survey is starting to get at that, just the front end of it, but ongoing funding is needed to be able to answer some of these questions that permeate other departments, not just health.