As you know, departments are required to produce sustainable development strategies every three years. When we established the position of Commissioner of the Environment, we also created the obligation for departments to tell us how they will go about greening their operations, their decision-making. In the case of Finance Canada,
what are their business lines? Well, there is the tax system, which is key in terms of business lines for CRA.
Furthermore, in the context of the federal budget, two major challenges are facing the country. We asked the department to explain to us its sustainable development strategy, in other words how it was going to go about “greening” these aspects. Clearly, we had nevertheless noted certain commitments that did offer good potential. The department had made a commitment to analyze the Canadian tax system in order to see where improvements in this regard might be made. We unfortunately observed, as you have just stated, that the department was dragging its feet. Those words still hold true today. That is what we saw at the time, and that is what we would say again today. Mr. Thompson had 10 minutes to provide this information this morning.
We made recommendations to the department. In our view, the department was not doing what it had committed to do. It had committed to carrying out this analysis of its sustainable development strategy for parliamentarians. We also noted that its in-house capability in the area of environmental analysis was deficient. We asked questions about this because we had seen a certain number of unsatisfactory analyses. We had made recommendations to the department. The department more or less ignored what we had said. It stated that it would continue to do what it was doing because it had not received any clear signal from its political masters with regard to what their wishes were. And this is the situation we are faced with today.