Mr. Chairman, I couldn't agree more.
What has changed, is your question. Information technology, iPads and iPhones, screen time, sedentary behaviour has changed a lot. With respect to the built environment, the municipal planners are great at being able to tell you the radius that is required on a street in a new urban development so that in the winter a snowplough can turn around when clearing the street. But they're not as good and they don't have the training or the background in community development to tell you exactly what is required for a new community to be liveable and to promote healthy behaviour.
I'd like to tweak on what you were saying, but I couldn't agree more. I think what's also changed is our need to, as parents, value more deliberately what we didn't have to before. If we have sidewalks, we're laughing. If the neighbourhood associations and the built environment are lobbying their municipal government to put in sidewalks so the kids don't get hit by a car, victory is claimed, but that's not enough.
The argument, as you know more than anyone, belongs to the one who can frame it in his or her terms. We have in this country learned a lot around how to speak with our trans-sectoral or multi-sectoral partners what is engaging and what is not engaging. In the seventies, we thought surely if people knew smoking was bad for them, they'd all quit, so we put pamphlets in pharmacies and our job was done. In the eighties, as conceptually we'd learned a little more about the incentives and disincentives that are required to help people make decisions, we bandied around terms such as making healthy decisions the easy decisions, and we started to realize there were these barriers that we're talking about now.
What Dr. Bossé said is true. There's a lot of work to do, but it's a really exciting time. I started my career 20 years ago in the public service, left for the private sector, and now am just coming back to the public sector. Everything is cyclical, as we know. There's a huge window of opportunity where the stars are aligning on physical activity, nutrition, obesity, and broader healthy living issues. I think with the leadership and the collective wisdom not just of these NGOs, but the federal, provincial and territorial governments, there is a unique opportunity and it behoves us to grab the reins where perhaps we have not over the last 20 or 30 years. Canada was a world leader.
I think the potential is really there. I could speak to it perhaps by answering some other questions, because I'm getting the signal.