Environment committee  Yes, that's exactly it.

Environment committee  In its own operation, in greening government....

Environment committee  The Public Works witness, Duncan, might be able to answer in terms of reporting on emissions, from the greening of government. Are you measuring that? We could definitely look into it, in terms of an audit. That's a potential audit subject, right?

Environment committee  I'm sorry. You mean measuring what, exactly—the environmental effects?

Environment committee  There's no transparency on the weighting. How cabinet decides is a cabinet confidence. However, the cabinet directive that we're talking about on strategic environmental assessment does require public reporting when a scan leads to an assessment, and then a decision is made. It's supposed to be made public.

Environment committee  First of all, it's hardly ever done; therefore, it's hardly ever made public. I believe that in my last report we found one out of four departments, with all the proposals and all the cabinet ones, we found one that was made public.

Environment committee  I'm just going to check, Mr. Amos, whether you're asking what needs to change in order for the government to achieve measurability of climate emissions. Is that what you're asking?

Environment committee  Absolutely. The government prepares its annual emissions report to the UN. You could ask the government to report more frequently to you, to me, to review those reports. I remember our last audit on climate, where we looked at some of the regulations that have been put in place, yet we still couldn't tell whether or not the fuel efficiency regulations were achieving any reductions.

Environment committee  In May of this year I'll be issuing three chapters of my next report. In there we're looking at the federal role in getting ready for severe weather. The building code is one of the things we looked at, so you'll be interested in that. We also are looking at infrastructure spending and whether or not it achieved the environmental goals that the infrastructure spending was supposed to achieve.

Environment committee  What we're finding is they're not applying it at all.

Environment committee  That's correct.

Environment committee  Five cases out of 1,700.

Environment committee  I have the two people who know this, and they would say no, they are not even doing that.

Environment committee  I've never looked at that question in terms of capacity. When we audit the implementation of the directive, we go in and say, “How many proposals did you send to your minister? Show me them. What's the number? Then show me whether or not you did an environmental scan.” That's the first thing they have to do.

Environment committee  For those proposals, we go into the department and ask them to tell us the number of proposals they sent to their minister. They don't even necessarily know how many proposals they've sent to their minister, so we get numbers from 3,500 to 500 to 200. We're trying to get them to figure out what a proposal to a minister is, number one.