Environment committee  That's a really difficult one. From the point of view of improving the global atmosphere—and we've talked about climate change being a global phenomenon and Canadians' health being impacted by the global phenomena—even though we can't put an economic evaluation on it yet because

Environment committee  The point I was trying to make in my opening remarks was that a national one will provide benefits overall, because if you have a target and you allow pollution up to that target, the people within that area will be subject to that level of air pollution. If you push the level of

Environment committee  Clearly, indoor air is affected by the ambient air outside as well, but there are additional impacts on indoor air, whether it's mould, off-gassing of products and building materials, and so on. From a health perspective, we're very interested in looking at indoor air as well and

Environment committee  Not to my knowledge.

Environment committee  I was just going to say that the difficulty for us is that even the modelling of air pollutants is very complex. It's not a simple model that we have. As you've heard about the complexity of the relationship between greenhouse gases and climate change and air pollutants, it's eve

Environment committee  We can model them, but those are individual things, and it's hard to take those direct climate change environmental impacts and relate them back up to greenhouse gases.

Environment committee  To be truthful, it's not Health Canada that's doing that monitoring, it's the Public Health Agency of Canada. And yes indeed, they are monitoring a number of different kinds of vector-borne diseases, as you mentioned, such as the West Nile virus, Lyme disease. They're also lookin

Environment committee  To the best of my knowledge we're not, but then again I'm not the authority on that. Again I would advise you to speak to the Public Health Agency.

Environment committee  This is Jacinthe Séguin. She's my scientist responsible for climate change.

Environment committee  It will be the annual by 2015. With the targets we have in place, by 2015 annually we should be seeing $6.4 billion.

Environment committee  We can do the health impacts of a reduction in air pollutants, and the $6.4 billion that you referred to is our assessment of the reduction in air pollutants by 2015, given this new agenda. The Kyoto targets are related to greenhouse gases. We've never, to my knowledge...but I'l

Environment committee  We didn't do the same economic analysis for Kyoto, because greenhouse gases act at a global level and they affect the atmosphere as a whole. It's impossible for us to determine health impacts. So we can't do an economic analysis on the health impacts directly, the way we can on a

Environment committee  We were provided with some scenarios by Environment Canada, and we did the health impact of those scenarios. If you would like details on the methodology of the impact work we did, I'd like to turn to Phil Blagden, my scientist, for that work.

Environment committee  As I explained, our work is the scientific development of the health impacts, so we did look at the activities around health and the strategic assessment of the impact of the health activities, but we did not look at the broader issue.

Environment committee  We would have done, as a government, as my colleague said, a strategic environmental assessment. I think if there is an environmental person here who would have been responsible for the policy work, they would be able to speak to it.