Environment committee  Yes, I would. That's a simple answer.

Environment committee  We are overly optimistic in the environment. Our history shows that continuously. We have totally underestimated throughout history the consequences of our actions. We know a lot of known unknowns, and there are a whole lot of unknown unknowns we don't know about yet. We just hav

Environment committee  I don't want to repeat myself, but trying to embrace what I think some of the Europeans are trying to do, realizing that we're not dealing in isolation and realizing that a lot of our problems do not come out on the point samples that we often do monitoring with.... This is where

Environment committee  Yes. Oversight by government could have advice from the external scientific community. That would be my view.

Environment committee  There are many good examples of joint independent reviews from scientists. It needs independent peer review from the scientific community. Some of that could be from the federal government to start with, but it always helps to have people, including international, seeing what you

Environment committee  I'm trying to say both.

Environment committee  Yes.

Environment committee  Yes. I deal in environmental change over not just years, but decades and centuries. History teaches us a lot. It reminds us of our successes and it shows us many of our failures. Unfortunately, the environment has many failures in it. We talk a lot about the cost of monitoring, t

Environment committee  Exactly. The other thing is that once a pollutant is out, PAH and stuff, to use an analogy, the toothpaste has gone out. Getting it back is not going to be easy. This is true of exotic species too. If you have exotic species that invade by some boat dumping, it's there. You have

Environment committee  That's true. An increase in the accessibility of scientific data is obviously an important thing, but it also needs some interpretation. The problem is that we have some areas—and it reminds me a bit of the binders of data that some of my colleagues talk about that they get from

Environment committee  Yes, of course, but if it's being mandated by the public through the government, I would think that it requires some product that is useful to the public.

Environment committee  There you go.

Environment committee  A strong scientific base to all these changes, I think, is what we need. It sounds as if it might be a bit of a cop-out on my answer here, but we have to know what all those details are on a peer-reviewed, scientific basis before we make major changes.

Environment committee  That's a very good question. Citizen science is playing a role certainly at the provincial level fairly extensively in Ontario, my home province, and other places in assisting in providing the overall monitoring programs. I was recently in beautiful Banff, Alberta, at the North

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