Environment committee  We are engaging first nations—and I want to say this in the right way—to understand their traditional knowledge about changes they've observed on the landscape, in a number of different ways. It's not only Environment Canada, but it's also Alberta and organizations like the Wood

Environment committee  Baselines are developed in a number of ways. We do actually have monitoring data from the region that goes back a number of decades in some cases, particularly from Wood Buffalo National Park. It is a national park in a federal jurisdiction, so we do have some information from d

Environment committee  What we have now, as opposed to what the RAMP program was criticized for, is a comprehensive water quality monitoring program that looks at both the tributaries to the Athabasca River and the main stem of the Athabasca River. It extends from south of Fort McMurray, where there's

Environment committee  I don't have statistics for the website visits. It would have to be our corporate services branch that would have those types of statistics. I can tell you that there is a place where Canadians can ask questions about water quality. We also have a site where they can ask for data

Environment committee  Data requests mostly come from the academic community, I would say. Other questions are mostly from Canadians trying to get information. Sometimes they haven't had a satisfactory answer from somewhere else. So they're coming to us to see if we can supplement answers that they may

Environment committee  I don't think Dr. Schindler is directly involved with the planning, but I'm aware he has reviewed aspects and certainly talked to some of our scientists. I'm not aware that he's directly involved at this time.

Environment committee  I'd have to look to see if Dr. O'Connor is involved. Again, I'm not personally aware.

Environment committee  We have, I guess, a multi-faceted relationship with both of those communities. We have an air monitoring station located in Fort McKay. We have water monitoring operations that launch from Fort McKay. We ask the band regularly if we can use, for example, their boat launch. That's

Environment committee  Again being the simple monitoring fellow that I am, I can tell you that we're trying to figure out if fracking is resulting in contamination of surface waters.

Environment committee  I'm not in a position to do that because it's delivered by Environment Canada's office in the region. It's not directly an activity at the science program. I don't know if Mr. Moffet can comment.

Environment committee  It's not so much that we don't understand whether these compounds pose a risk to human health; the question is whether they're occurring in surface waters as a result of the fracking activity. That's the question, frankly, that we don't know.... There have been international stud

Environment committee  The principal or most prominent issue that Lake Erie is facing right at the moment is related to nutrients—phosphorus and nitrogen—that cause algal blooms that are quite prominent. Many of you may have seen pictures on the NOAA website, which takes pictures from space of these al

Environment committee  We definitely reviewed, commented on, and responded to the commissioner's report. We were quite pleased with their conclusions that work plans were effectively being implemented across the monitoring program. We continue to work within those work plans, and every year we try to i

Environment committee  It was a provincial decision, and I'm not aware of the factors that were taken into consideration when the province made that decision.

Environment committee  Water flow would be my colleague—