Environment committee  Mr. Chair, if I might add, to some degree the amendments made to CEPA in 1999 did impose the requirement that if a substance were added to the list of toxic substances, there would be a two-year time period for a preliminary statement of the risk management practice, or instrumen

Environment committee  I will try. I am not a risk assessor; I manage risk assessors in Health Canada. I would like to give the message that anybody I've encountered at Health Canada doing risk assessment for human health takes a very protective and conservative approach. The basic policy undertaken is

Environment committee  They're not necessarily government officials. For various parts of the good laboratory practices run in this country, it's done under the auspices of the Standards Council of Canada. In other countries they have a specific entity that carries out the good laboratory practices ver

Environment committee  Well, there are a number of reasons, resources being one. We have done biomonitoring in targeted populations in the past, and continue to do so. There has been regular monitoring of human milk for contaminants, though I'm not sure of the frequency.

Environment committee  Yes.

Environment committee  I'm not sure I agree with you that I'd call it effective.

Environment committee  It is a piece of information that contributes to the knowledge in deciding whether you have a problem in the first place, or whether the problem you're trying to resolve has successful approaches for doing so. But biomonitoring is only a piece of the puzzle. We don't necessarily

Environment committee  We've used it to the extent we've been able to. I should mention--you may have heard this already--that we have been partnering with Statistics Canada to run, in fiscal year 2007, a Canadian health measure survey. We've been planning this for two or three years now. The survey

Environment committee  We'll be testing blood and urine anyway.

Environment committee  I can't give you an exact time, but I would say decades, probably.

Environment committee  The program I'm most familiar with is run by the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. I don't know the numbers of people in their most recent one, but it was large, as they do it in a statistically valid way. They have it set up to satisfy ethical and other c

Environment committee  Mr. Chair, as Mr. Reed pointed out, some of the recommendations referred to the Pest Management Regulatory Agency. I have not prepared nor am I able to respond to those that deal with that part of my department. With respect to our activities that deal with CEPA, one of the recom