Environment committee  Mr. Chair, I believe I did the best thing for the Office of the Auditor General and for the office of the commissioner.

Environment committee  We felt those comments were appropriate within the mandate and our interpretation of the role of the Office of the Auditor General, because the reports of the commissioner are released on behalf of the Auditor General. I have to be comfortable with everything that is said, and I was comfortable.

Environment committee  No. You were the first to see the announcement.

Environment committee  Yes, of course. We do not, as I mentioned earlier, actually conduct effectiveness studies ourselves. In our mandate it's very clear that we can look to see whether departments have measured the effectiveness of the programs. And the only way you can really measure effectiveness is if you have set established objectives at the beginning.

Environment committee  It's because of privacy issues, and as I am sure you can imagine, there are now lawyers involved in this file, and discussions continue.

Environment committee  Yes, but let me add, Chair, that we began this review and began the discussion about the reporting strategy and actually looked at all of this close to a year ago now. At that point the reports were not getting the same kind of visibility as the last one has, and I take that. On the question of recommendations, you were right that it is beyond our control.

Environment committee  No. It is an advisory committee that reports to me and to the Commissioner. We aren't currently subject to the Access to Information Act. We will be, but a lot of audit-specific subjects would be excluded. So this is private advice.

Environment committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. Let me just talk a minute about the word “advocacy”. The Office of the Auditor General and the commissioner are advocates. We are advocates for responsible spending, we are advocates for open and transparent contracting processes, and we are advocates for good environmental management practices.

Environment committee  We use indicators such as the number of reports that have been subject to parliamentary hearings, which gives us an indication of usefulness. We will look for other work: the number of times our recommendations have been endorsed by a parliamentary committee; we look, obviously, at operational indicators, such as timeliness; we also do surveys of departments to see whether the reports are useful to them.

Environment committee  For a little more than six years, approximately six and a half years.

Environment committee  I agreed to raise the issue in committee. Obviously, I'm not recommending that you do it, but I agree that it should be raised in committee.

Environment committee  There have been two full-time and one acting.

Environment committee  No.

Environment committee  I'd say that it went even further. This didn't concern one commissioner in particular, but a number of people go back to the report the committee prepared at the time when it was recommended that there be an independent commissioner, and they would still like that to happen. So there's been a change.

Environment committee  As the committee perhaps knows, we have a number of advisory committees at the Office of the Auditor General of Canada. Among others, we have what are called the Panel of Senior Advisors and the Panel of Environmental Advisors. The people who are members of these advisory committees are very well known.