Health committee  Madam Chair, the study about how the transfers work is largely in the first chapter. What we said is that when there are conditions it's the responsibility of the federal government to ensure those conditions are being met and, if they're not being met, that they're taking action

Health committee  Thank you, Madam Chair. We've had a chance to skim that report. I believe it was just released yesterday. I have a sense of the Health Council, and of course, we follow its work quite closely in terms of our audit work. The reason we did this audit goes back to those three heal

Health committee  Madam Chair, our mandate is restricted to the federal level, therefore we did not look at what the provincial governments are doing in that area. I would add that really in these two different studies we were talking, in the first chapter, of course, about arrangements much broa

Health committee  Yes. According to the officials we discussed this with, very much, this model is something that dates back to the 1990s. The Social Union Framework Agreement included many of these principles, that it was no longer accountability of governments to governments as much as, increas

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

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

Public Accounts committee  No. Thank you, Chair.

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  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

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.

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. 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  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,