Environment committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. Let me start by thanking you for inviting me here to give you a chance to talk about my appointment in the Department of the Environment. I understand that this is the main reason you have invited me today. I will begin with a very brief statement. After

Environment committee  Yes, thank you. I'm proud to be an economist. Let me get that out of the way right at the start. It's interesting. I find that it's a good perspective to bring. Obviously we have a number of economists in the Department of the Environment. I've been an economist long enough to

Environment committee  Sure. Probably the domain where I've had the most experience working from a partnership perspective would be in the tax policy area. In order to move issues forward in that domain, you often work with a diverse group of participants. I'll give you three examples. First off, I'll

Environment committee  Wow. They didn't tell me I'd have to answer questions like that when I took this job.

Environment committee  I don't know the total answer to that.

Environment committee  Okay, let me take a run at this. To answer the question indirectly for the moment, my main responsibility obviously is to run the Department of the Environment and to make sure that the advice we provide is top quality, well thought through, and looks at things from all angles.

Environment committee  Certainly. I have been asked a few times the difference between an associate deputy minister and an assistant deputy minister. In my previous incarnation at Environment Canada I was the associate deputy minister. At Environment Canada there are basically two positions in the depu

Environment committee  Yes, that's right. It can be a very good learning and training opportunity, getting to see the files that come through from the deputy minister's office.

Environment committee  Yes, that's right.

Environment committee  A couple of things struck me my first time through environment. I guess the first would be the amount of science within the department. If I think of the Department of Finance, there are a lot of economic and financial aspects to that, and I'm quite familiar with them. As I came

Environment committee  I was with you until you said “mastered”. I don't feel as if I've mastered them, but I'm certainly coming back to a lot more familiar and comfortable feeling with the subject matter. There's always something to learn in every file. As the deputy minister, you don't get to probe i

Environment committee  Yes, in December 2009 or 2010, I forget which, we came out with an action plan with 29 items. It addressed key sectors of the economy: agriculture, transport, etc. There was a component on the environment that had to do with GHG emissions from autos and some rail issues, so yes,

Environment committee  That is exactly right. We provided those figures today, five working days after the deadline. It's true that we missed the deadline, but we submitted the figures today. We provided some other figures on budget 2012 to the Parliamentary Budget Office on October 26.

Environment committee  I don't have the breakdown for five years overdue, but there are over 200 recovery strategies or management plans that are delayed, yes.

Environment committee  We've made significant progress to reduce that backlog and delay, but there still is a backlog.