Environment committee  Let me go back in time a little. Following a study in 1994-1995 to establish the position of Commissioner, a report from the then environment committee recommended there be an independent Commissioner mandated to carry out assessments, and make comments on government policies and

Environment committee  Yes, that would be the case. In the course of this review, we are going to look at how best to report the environmental and sustainable development issues. We have not come to a firm decision going forward on that, and we would certainly welcome any views of the committee. We

Environment committee  I would also, if I may, very much like to discuss with you the gap that some people have indicated seems to exist between the expectations of the commissioner's role and the current mandate in the Auditor General Act, to understand whether that gap exists for parliamentarians as

Environment committee  Thank you very much, Mr. Chair and members of the committee. As I mentioned, I wish to inform you, as a matter of courtesy, of an announcement that we will be making later today. First of all, I wish to advise you that the current Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable

Environment committee  Mr. Chair, I would perhaps have to clarify that the only reason I asked to meet the committee is that I would like to inform you of an announcement that we will be making later this afternoon. It is simply a matter of courtesy. It has absolutely nothing to do with reporting strat

Public Accounts committee  Yes, but a decrease in grievances is not a sufficient performance measure for a program. We explain it much more, actually, within the fact that we would have expected more performance measures around the quality of the program than simply that.

Public Accounts committee  Fundamentally, if you look at this abstraction of the current bidders and all the rest of it, I think in any bidding process potential suppliers have to be given accurate data. Do we know if there are potential suppliers who didn't even bid because of the incorrect data? That rai

Public Accounts committee  I maintain our conclusion that this was not a fair and equitable process, but as I said earlier, I think there are many factors that have to be considered when deciding whether to go for a new bid or not. Mr. Marshall indicated several of those. I think, honestly, it's up to the

Public Accounts committee  I know.

Public Accounts committee  Obviously there seems to be a place for different interpretations of this. Our interpretation is the same as the department's, which is the same as Mr. Atyeo's. Clearly, in the bid documents or in the documents around the contract, it says property management commission, and it h

Public Accounts committee  We'd just note that this is related to a CITT decision where PWGSC in evaluating the technical portion—and I'll ask Mr. Marshall to correct me if I'm not correct in this—had reduced that bid, had taken points away from that bid.

Public Accounts committee  It went back to the CITT. The CITT agreed that the department should not have done the comparison that they did, but did not reinstate those points because it was judged at that point that it would not have a consequence on the final outcome of the bid.

Public Accounts committee  So when Mr. Atyeo says that, it would be not only the question of price that could potentially change, but also those points on the technical merit, and it becomes, of course, very speculative as to what the outcome might actually have been.

Public Accounts committee  We picked the ten out of those that had property management services, which are about thirty or some a year, to see what was being charged to them, and we noted that they were being charged for property management services. So once we noted that, that was sort of the finding. The

Public Accounts committee  I find it hard to answer on the basis of this one particular contract. I think it's very clear that this contract was not managed in the way one would expect, afterwards. We point to such things as the reconciliations and the assurances that the billings were actually for the ser