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 verification and puts on the stamp of approval--after following audits and verifying the data and the procedures--that the results are trustworthy.
Under our new substances program, I don't know how far they've implemented it, but they are working toward requiring that the data that is submitted to them for evaluation complies with good laboratory practices. In other words, the data that's submitted has to show that they have followed the practices and had the auditing I referred to.
In addition, on our existing substances side, if we had restricted ourselves to good laboratory practices data we wouldn't have reached any conclusions to speak of regarding those 69 or 71 substances that are on PSL1 and PSL2. A lot of information is generated in academia, in private labs--by industry using their private labs following GLP perhaps. But often it's just information in literature that's peer-reviewed.
In part of the risk assessment process in my department, as I understand it, the risk assessor has to evaluate the quality of the data they're looking at in the report or test. Has it been peer reviewed? Has it been reproduced elsewhere? I think you should have a fair amount of confidence that we try to ensure that the data we rely on in doing a risk assessment is credible, reliable, and contributes to our policy of being protective.