Health committee  Thank you, Chair. I have just a short comment, which is to say again that it is worthwhile to follow up on that baseline report or, as they were calling it, comprehensive review. And it has been promised already to Parliament. The public accounts committee has been promised a co

Environment committee  Thank you, Mr. Chairman. There are several programs that have been put in place by Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada. The key one is agricultural environmental farm plans. Basically, agricultural producers look at their own farm situations to ask where the big environmental risks

Environment committee  This is joint federal-provincial programming.

Environment committee  Thank you for that question, because that is one of the central messages from our work, which is that the department has spent about $370 million as of the time of our audit and it really doesn't have a good sense of the impacts. There are quite a few specific issues we raise in

Environment committee  I have two comments. The first is that our comments were about the fact that the department is responsible for ensuring it can demonstrate, so we really weren't commenting on whether the programs were good or bad. That's consistent with our mandate. On the second question, yes,

Environment committee  Thank you, Chair. I have two points on that question as well. First, it's very important to emphasize the importance of improving how well that department can demonstrate results. It's important for all the obvious reasons—taxpayers' money, etc.—but it's equally important for t

Environment committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. The level of greenhouse gas emission is the main reason we conducted this audit. It highlights the importance of improving the situation and the department's ability to get results.

Environment committee  Very briefly, we were impressed that this department was actually moving on the whole realm of agri-environmental indicators. These are essentially state of the environment indicators that try to capture that sense. You may want to have the department here to brief you more exten

Environment committee  Thank you, Chair. The APF was created in 2003. In terms of the issue with the tracking of operational funds, we go on to note that the department has already taken some action in that regard. They've set up a system for tracking operational funds.

Environment committee  In the 2007-08 fiscal year they set up systems to fix this problem, that they were not able to track operational funds.

Public Accounts committee  Yes. Thank you, Chair. One of our concerns is that it's not just a backlog but a growing backlog, so they can't deal with the assessments as quickly as requests come in. The nature of the concern is simply that these are new pests--new plants, pests, and illnesses--and obviously

Public Accounts committee  Thank you, Chair. I'll take your points maybe in reverse order. In terms of the notion that agriculture both creates problems and has benefits, absolutely, and we talk extensively in the audit about that. For example, we use the example of carbon sequestration. If soils are well

Public Accounts committee  No. Thank you, Chair.

Health committee  Madam Chair, thank you for this opportunity to present the results of two chapters in our December 2008 report, a study on federal transfers to the provinces and territories and our audit of Health Canada's reporting on health indicators. With me today, as the chair has mentioned

Health committee  Thank you, Madam Chair. As we noted in our audit, the department is obviously facing several challenges. This is very difficult work to undertake. That is true, and this perhaps gets to the earlier question as well. There are many challenges. It seemed to us that probably the