Good morning, Madam Chair and committee members. We welcome your interest in and commitment to health promotion and disease prevention and we thank you for the opportunity to present our experience and views on what can be done to promote health promotion and disease prevention.
BCHLA is an alliance of nine provincial organizations that have been working together since 2003 to address the alleviation of common risk factors and health inequities, which of course are a large contributing factor to chronic diseases.
British Columbia is a leader in health promotion and disease prevention. We're proud of the fact that we have the lowest smoking rates, the lowest obesity rates, and the highest levels of physical activity. However, if we look at the short-term and long-term projections, we know that B.C. and Canada will fall behind other world leaders if we don't begin taking action and doing some things differently as we move forward.
BCHLA's experience in overseeing $25 million in initiatives that were developed and delivered to address common risk factors and our involvement in policies to reduce health inequities in B.C. have provided us with a wealth of information that we hope you will find of interest and that we believe is applicable to Canada as a whole.
My colleague Mary is going to speak about those issues.