Health committee  Yes, sure. I echo ThinkFirst's information. It's taking what is most effectively proven by evidence. In terms of best practices, it's not a one-size-fits-all. A good example is the helmet. A helmet on a head is a protective piece of safety equipment for someone on a bike or in

Health committee  We were involved with the Consumer Product Safety Act. What it does is take a precautionary principle perspective. It requires manufacturers to keep records and report incidents. It also gives the government the power to ban a product. Previously, there was only a negotiated ban

Health committee  Safe Kids Canada focuses on parents of younger children. Our information is with the parents and caregivers, because they're the ones making the decisions on purchasing the safety gear and ensuring that their children are wearing it. They are the ones who tell children they shoul

Health committee  We've done a number of different activities in this area. A number of years ago we launched an ethnocultural program that investigated what languages were spoken most in ethnocultural communities in the Toronto area. We selected three. We have limited funding, so we were looking

Health committee  Absolutely.

Health committee  Thank you very much for the opportunity to speak today and to share Safe Kids Canada's views on disease prevention and health promotion. Safe Kids is a national leader in preventable injury. By building partnerships and by using a comprehensive approach, we work to advance safet

Health committee  I can. Thank you very much.

Health committee  Safe Kids has done some outreach to ethnocultural communities in a very limited way. Because of the way we're funded, we have to rely on the sponsorship we get in order to fund our activities, but we have reached out in terms of home safety issues and car seat issues to a number

Health committee  From our experience, the legislation itself, without any kind of enforcement, has a positive effect. With enforcement, there's even more of an effect. We have a public line that we get inquiries on, and there is some degree of importance given to those issues that have legislati

Health committee  The challenge also is the culture of safety. It takes a long time. You can look to tobacco as another public health issue that's taken quite a long time to become ingrained in society as a whole and to be accepted as something that shouldn't be engaged in. There still are people

Health committee  With my colleagues at ThinkFirst Canada and the Brain Injury Association of Canada, there has been an explosion of new information around concussions and sports injuries in particular. For me--I'm not an expert in brain injury--the continued focus in terms of the cross-sectoral

Health committee  There are a number of successes, and I think it starts with a strategy. When we look at the EU countries, the ones that have been most successful in reducing their injury rates are the ones that have a plan, a plan with priorities, with resources, and with measurements. So genera

Health committee  I think we have seen successful initiatives in and around some of those leading causes of death. There is always more to be done. In the case of booster seats, three provinces still don't have booster seat legislation. We're now seeing some evaluation from the provinces that do h

Health committee  Safer. So they fall off the bike, but they're wearing a helmet or they're wearing the right gear for whatever sport they're engaged in. We have made good strides in terms of car seats, but motor vehicle crashes with child passengers remains one of the top three causes of death i

Health committee  You're right, there is a variation in terms of risky activities that people can undertake. There are ways to mitigate the serious injuries. When I talked about bumps and bruises and scrapes and things like that, that's not the type of injury we're interested in mitigating. It's