Environment committee  Thank you. I think, to answer your question, there are opportunities with proposed section 10.1 of the act, which is the directive power that is being given to the Treasury Board. In terms of one of the comments the commissioner made in her opening statement, there might be some value in looking at expanding it to allow the Minister of the Environment and Climate Change to also issue directives to achieve exactly the sorts of things you're talking about.

Environment committee  I think that, as the commissioner suggested, this might be a question the Treasury Board Secretariat might be best positioned to answer. What we are required to do is evaluate and examine the contributions that the departmental sustainable development strategies will make to the achievement of the goals of the federal strategy.

Environment committee  Our powers to access information come from the Auditor General Act. It's a broadly worded access provision. The Auditor General's position is that this statutory provision gives us access to everything we should have for our audit purposes, including cabinet confidences. Traditionally, orders in council have dealt with our access to certain kinds of cabinet confidences, and that has generally been sufficient for our audit purposes.

Environment committee  We encountered a situation where we were asking for information that wasn't covered by a list that was in previous orders in council.

Environment committee  They did have a timeline. The plan that we saw was in draft. At the point where we saw it, it was being approved by the minister at the very end of our examination phase of the audit. At this point in time, I think that's a question best asked of the department.

Environment committee  Thank you. The list that we have on pages 9 and 10 reflects the specific subsidies that are not considered to be benchmark tax subsidies. We show that there are six of them that have been phased out, as mentioned in the budget announcement, and it happened between 2011 and 2015.

Environment committee  That's right. I was just going to say exactly that, it would be a deduction that they would be allowed.

Environment committee  We have been engaged with Finance Canada since last July over information. We've had various discussions throughout the audit. The most recent request, which followed the order in council in May, came in a formal context last Friday. We sent a letter on Friday.

Environment committee  Throughout the audit we had both a formal request for information and informal discussions to understand the information that Finance was not able to provide to us. That information was characterized as cabinet confidence. At a relatively early stage in our audit examination, we found out that we would not be getting that information.

Environment committee  That's the way the information was characterized in response to us.