Environment committee  Thank you very much, Madam Chair and honourable MPs, for inviting me to join you today. My name is John Smol and I'm a professor at Queen's University, where I also hold the Canada research chair in environmental change. While I am not an expert on the Canadian Environmental Pr

Environment committee  No, I wasn't.

Environment committee  Yes, sir.

Environment committee  Yes. I cut my teeth on acid rain; I was quite young when I was doing that work. I see many similarities between acid rain.... I think it's useful to go back in history and see how things change. Acid rain was an example where the first phase was, there is no problem. The second

Environment committee  To some extent I might bring my work when I was on the six-person panel to look at the monitoring going on in the oil sands, for example, which Liz Dowdeswell reported in 2010. There are issues. A monitoring program requires a scientific base to be totally transparent, and also

Environment committee  My argument would be that I believe in polluter pays but not necessarily that the polluter does the monitoring. I think independent oversight is often critical to assess what is happening in the environment.

Environment committee  I don't deal at that level of the monitoring program. Certainly that is the direction I think most people would feel it should be going. What are the hazards associated with that? To deal with that you have to deal with the risks cumulatively, which is what I was trying to get at

Environment committee  Yes, multiple substances. We tend to be dealing with most of our stressors individually, and that's a real problem, I think. That's the first cut-off in doing something.

Environment committee  For example, almost everything I deal with...and it's not just the chemical cocktails, on top of that you put things like climate change and stuff. I'm quite surprised. You would think that, of several stressors, some would be additive and some would be antagonistic, if you like.

Environment committee  Yes, thank you. I've been involved now in oil sands research for a few years, working closely with Environment Canada, and this stemmed to some extent from the time when I was on the panel where we realized there were some issues with the monitoring. One of the biggest problems

Environment committee  The cheapest thing we can do is high-quality research, and to spend the money in a meaningful manner to get policy-relevant research done that's accessible to the international community. Certainly the Experimental Lakes Area is something I was fairly close with. That was an out

Environment committee  I think definitely the role is for the federal government to do that. As I hinted at, it's not really university-based work. It's not part of our funding structure, it's not part of our mandates, to do just basic monitoring. I think it is really the role of the federal government

Environment committee  Over the last year or so, we've certainly seen some improvements in availability of data, for example, in the oil sands region, and so forth. Usability might be a better.... Definitely, I think to have your data believed by the world at large, just like scientific data, it has to

Environment committee  I know a little about the study. I had a partial read of it when it came out. So much information is coming out, it's very hard to keep up with everything, so I can't speak specifically to that study. It goes to my analogy that we're constantly opening all these new Pandora's b

Environment committee  If we can find less toxic solutions, that would certainly be a step in the right direction, but I think it's very hard to find out.... We have had examples in the past of things being replaced without sufficient study into what they were being replaced with. We need the sufficien