Environment committee  But the observation I would make first is that the environmental work of the office in Canada is superb. For instance, the assessment of your nation's action on climate change in 2006 was an extraordinarily good piece of work. So that is clearly what can be done within your current structure. I think the more important point to make is that auditing is just one of the powerful tools for the assessment of progress, the assessment of the intent of what governments do.

Environment committee  How important has that been to bring people to a deeper and better understanding of the need to act on a more urgent basis--for example, on things like climate change?

Environment committee  Maybe I should make my point more explicitly. Take the issue of climate change. The government says we promise to reduce by 100,000. It releases a plan that's laid out over a number of months, and it has a number of different components, without anyone really watching all of the components.

Environment committee  I will agree on your first condition. I'll disagree with you on your second, because when it comes to climate change, the whole point has been the planning. Ineffective plans have led to the results we have right now. I don't say this for partisan reasons. I'm looking as objectively as I can at the case as it was made to Canadians in signing Kyoto and then in laying out some plans to achieve Kyoto.

Environment committee  When you have governments making proposals, promises, commitments, and then presenting a plan that doesn't meet the commitment over something such as climate change, as an example, is it incumbent upon somebody auditing that government to make comment if they know full well in advance that the target is X and the solution is Y? Perhaps. As Mr.

Environment committee  The first thing to remind ourselves I think is that the creation of this position was largely part of the response the government made in response to the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio, when as a country we signed on to the Rio Declaration and to a forestry statement and declaration and of course to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. In 1993, the Liberal campaign red book contained a new, innovative proposal for the creation of this Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development. To the best of our knowledge, and having gone back through some of the debate with parliamentarians at the time, Mr.

Environment committee  It's something—for me, anyway, in the private sector—I'd never encountered before I came to Parliament: that the auditor's comments were just refused outright by departments, or ignored, or delayed over time. We have to take a look at the climate change file in particular. I can remember—and I have the reports here—recommendations, and then recommendations, and things getting continually worse. One of the concerns you raised was around that implementation.

Environment committee  The surpluses are still continuing to grow, but we are no longer justified to make any comment, because the legislation has changed and Parliament has agreed that the rate can be set in another way. That's fine. On climate change, government has an international obligation, and we are perfectly entitled to ask if government is respecting that obligation—

Environment committee  Where is the line between commenting on ineffective government spending, or promises made and not kept, and advocating for policy options, which in Ms. Gélinas' last report she commented on, saying on climate change that the government had not taken it seriously enough yet and needed to ramp it up? Where is that line?

Environment committee  The only thing that I would like to clarify, as I said in my opening statement, is that there seems to be, certainly in certain quarters, people trying to attribute this to the audit report that was produced in the fall of 2006 on climate change. This situation has absolutely nothing to do with that. As I mentioned in the statement, the reports that are tabled by the commissioner go through the same process as any other audit of the office, which means that the senior management and executive are involved in the choice of the audits.

Environment committee  I think the benefits of these amendments are that they would provide an improved basis in CEPA to support managing greenhouse gases and air pollutants and would be able to do so probably more quickly than doing this through Bill C-30; that they'd be a step forward in the federal government working more effectively in partnership mode with the provinces, and I think that's important in all areas, not just climate change and air pollutants; that they'd also improve federal flexibility in dealing with different situations in different provinces, which I think is important in our federal-provincial jurisdictional system; and that they'd also improve public confidence in reporting.

Environment committee  Canada participates with the G-8. Our chair went to that meeting, the Gleneagles dialogue on climate change. There's also the Asia-Pacific Partnership. One of the interesting things about the Asia-Pacific Partnership is that there are members in the partnership that have taken on, whether they be voluntary or not, some targets for reductions of both air pollution and greenhouse gases, or have shown promise to do that.

Environment committee  So why cut more than $1 billion in climate change funding for programs that were acting in Canada, if your stated goal is to achieve reductions? The first move you did was to cut more than 22 programs.

Environment committee  As you know, in our budget we put $2 billion towards the development of climate change—programming and regulations—and as you can well imagine, all of that money will be used, and it will actually be more money than has ever been spent before on this important environmental issue.

Environment committee  When you say that we are staying within the Kyoto framework yet not meeting the targets, if Kyoto is not about meeting the targets, then what is it about, other than a set of meetings? The whole point of the initiative is to reduce the impact we're having on climate change. You yourself have said this is a grave and serious issue. Yet to make a statement in Nairobi and here in Canada, almost misleading Canadians to believe we're staying in a framework but not meeting the central piece of that framework, is intellectually dishonest at best.