Public Accounts committee  Only to thank the committee, Mr. Chairman, for their courtesy and interest.

Public Accounts committee  That was an estimate. In the department there was a 100% increase in our capacity. We did increase from about four evaluators in 2004-05 to where we have 12 or 12.5 FTEs in evaluations today. So in that period of time we more than doubled our evaluation capacity. Going forward

Public Accounts committee  In some cases, where we provide a service that provinces need, provinces might be consulted in an evaluation. They may tell us that they don't find this to be helpful. They may say this is absolutely essential to their responsibility and to please keep it up. When we confront t

Public Accounts committee  Mr. Chairman, I offered it as an example of the type of question that might come up in an evaluation that could be relevant to performance. It should be the case that when a program is developed and adopted, at the outset, the appropriate federal and provincial analysis is done

Public Accounts committee  Mr. Chairman, if I may, I would add that one of the responsibilities I have as a deputy minister is to give full support to the evaluation group. Nothing motivates a team of public servants more than knowing their work matters and they have a platform for making a contribution.

Public Accounts committee  I will be brief Mr. Chairman. Perhaps it would be useful to describe the internal process of a department such as Environment Canada. There is an evaluation committee that I chair. Each year, within our planning process, an evaluation group drafts the plan for the coming year. Th

Public Accounts committee  That may be somewhat too positive a conclusion. Each department makes its decisions differently. We acknowledge rather early in the process that quality improvement would be very useful. In order to guarantee manager participation in the programs, we felt it would be useful to ha

Public Accounts committee  I could, Mr. Chairman. I would say that there are benefits to policy-making if an evaluation shows that a program is not performing well in some of its objectives. That is relevant for ourselves and for central agencies in the process of determining whether a program is renewed

Public Accounts committee  Mr. Chairman, if I could just add and maybe connect the committee's preoccupation on—

Public Accounts committee  Primarily, Chair, it's because the Auditor General in her report refers to the challenge that audit staff and officials within departments have recognized in completing the policy set out by the board. So I anticipated that this is an issue that is germane to this whole debate, a

Public Accounts committee  Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I want to add my comment right at the outset that we at Environment Canada concur with the Auditor General regarding the valuable contribution that effectiveness evaluations can bring to decision-making, and we support the recommendations she has made.

Environment committee  Yes, Chair, we certainly do that in the department, although I would say the nature of the evaluation depends very much on the subject matter. In fact, all across the government, there is a requirement to evaluate the environmental costs and benefits of actions by government. W

Environment committee  The mechanism of posting in any particular geographic location shouldn't be taken as a proxy or a representative coverage of any particular area of the environment where enforcement action is going to be required. I think the action that the enforcement branch and the prosecution

Environment committee  I would say that we have not gotten that far. There have been substantial funds dedicated to consultation in the regulatory process. But with respect to the clean energy dialogue specifically, we haven't gotten that far.

Environment committee  I'll invite Cynthia to comment on that.