Environment committee  As you know, the commissioner's report clearly indicated there was a serious concern with lack of accountability and effectiveness--and therefore results--on all of the climate change programs. Our government, for that reason, cancelled a number of these programs and put a number of these programs under review.

Environment committee  It was a program that had a strong foundation and, according to Madame Gélinas, the Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development, was working, and your government decided to cancel it. The question I have around greenhouse gas emissions and climate change in general is, do you believe it's a serious problem?

Environment committee  This petition is of no surprise to me. I know full well the commitment that Canadians have to the issue of climate change. I also know the full commitment they have to seeing the improvement of air quality. As you know, air quality is the number one environmental concern to Canadians, and it's also a concern to Quebeckers.

Environment committee  The Kyoto Protocol was the first big international step. We are also involved in the G-8 plus five discussions on climate change. Our chair, Bob Mills, just came back late last night. He was kind enough, with all his expertise—and I value him so much for that—to go to the G-8 discussions, because I was unable to be there.

Environment committee  The environment is an issue that matters to all Canadians, and I hope this committee will put aside its partisanship and recognize that for the first time in a long time you will have a piece of legislation in front of you that will provide you with the opportunity to show Canadians your commitment, not only on air quality but on the issue of climate change.

Environment committee  How would we meet our Kyoto targets--which we agree are about reducing greenhouse gases--more effectively by investing in a water treatment plant instead of in the international credit system, which the Commissioner of the Environment thinks is an effective way of reducing greenhouse gases? Why is that domestic choice going to be better in our fight against climate change?

Environment committee  Based upon these lessons learned, what is the single focus—specific to accountability—that any climate change plan must include?

Environment committee  In actual fact, we are calling to integrate the energy and climate change. The two appear to be going in different directions. How do you reconcile that?

Environment committee  The issue was the subsidies to the oil and gas industry and the federal efforts to address climate change—and how in fact that was reconciled. We discussed the petition, and the response to the petition, on page 3 of chapter 5, “Environmental Petitions”. You can certainly find the petition and the response to the petition on our website, if you're interested.

Environment committee  For given programs, we've looked at the money in detail, and that's in chapter 3. But for the overall envelope on climate change, we were looking at systems: Do they know, do they have the systems to know, and are they credible and functioning systems? We concluded the systems were not there yet. That's what we found.

Environment committee  Leach's testimony, were you not able to find any place in government where an assessment of the overall strategy for climate change had been made, with subsidies on the one hand and subsidizing on the other?

Environment committee  Back in the fall of 2005, there was a major conference, a Kyoto conference in Montreal. Did you audit how much money the government has spent on conferences related to climate change, especially the Kyoto conference in Montreal?

Environment committee  On our side, we can send back to the committee some of the figures we have on how much money was given to other foundations with respect to climate change. We have that information in the office.

Environment committee  The decision not to look at what was going on internationally and not to do some kind of comparison was made on purpose, because the bulk of the work was to cover federal programs and federal management of the climate change file. At the time, we couldn't cover anything broader than that, so we made the decision to put the international aspect aside.

Environment committee  The main reason we looked at SDTC was that it was really the only foundation that had—and still has—a clear focus on climate change. Also, a lot of money was given to that foundation to achieve greenhouse gas reductions. Those were the main reasons why we decided to go with SDTC.