Environment committee  Thank you very much, Chair. Thank you for inviting me to the Standing Committee on Environment and Sustainable Development to discuss Environment Canada's plans for ozone monitoring. With me today is Dr. Charles Lin, who holds a Ph.D. in meteorology from the Massachusetts Insti

Environment committee  Thanks for the question. Indeed, the two methods are complementary and measure different things. The Brewer instrument is a land-based instrument. It sits on the ground and measures the total thickness of the ozone layer going up; while ozonesondes, which go up with a weather ba

Environment committee  Certainly. In a memo to the minister, absolutely, I indicated that the measurements are complementary and do not duplicate each other. That's in the context of each method of measurement. The Brewer instrument is required to validate or verify the information we get from satell

Environment committee  What I was referring to in the discussion was the number of staff affected. We were in the position whereby we sent letters to, I believe, 776 employees department-wide who were affected. All employees were advised that this did not mean they were surplus. It was clear that 776 e

Environment committee  Yes, indeed. We had to comply with a Treasury Board policy, a policy that had been developed between Treasury Board and the unions, on the manner in which we treat employees under these circumstances.

Environment committee  I don't have details about the budgets. The way the department has planned and budgeted changes, with different deputies and different assistant deputy ministers, we have found that it has been difficult, because the budgets for salaries were separated from the budgets for operat

Environment committee  To say we don't plan to merge two networks would not exactly be precise. We plan to continue to use both methods. Both methods are needed. Both methods will continue to be used. You can go to our website and see a map where we measure ozone. You will see that in most sites we'r

Environment committee  I don't know yet, and I know that Charles, working with his team, has not yet come to a conclusion about the number of sites that will remain. We have made a commitment to maintain the sites in Canada's far north. They were among the earliest sites established around the world.

Environment committee  I didn't say less monitoring. What I have said is that our focus is on the results, and we've been clear that we need to have scientifically valid results and need to meet our national and international obligations. It's clear from the science that we need to use these two method

Environment committee  I'm interested in what the results are for monitoring. The example I used with at least one reporter was the level of contaminants. If I take flame retardants in Canada's north, for example—many folks know them as PBDEs, polybrominated diphenyl ethers—we have monitored them and t

Environment committee  Again I don't have specific budget numbers for the data centre. I think we've had two technicians who have been really focused on data management. This is more in the IT/IM world rather than in the science world. In discussions within Environment Canada, my colleagues in the me

Environment committee  Yes.

Environment committee  We are moving to a way of planning whereby we can identify who is working on what. As an example, if we look at some of the recent publications authored by scientists in Dr. Lin's shop, there are 11 authors or 13 authors. More and more, science is becoming a collaborative activit

Environment committee  This is pretty consistent with the level of people going back to 2006 or 2007.

Environment committee  Absolutely. As I said in my opening remarks, it was not unexpected by the scientists. Knowing what happened in Antarctica, they anticipated that this was possible in the Arctic. This past winter was the first time it was verified with scientific evidence that we had a hole. It wa