Environment Committee on Oct. 3rd, 2006

[Maurice Vellacott, Conservative, Saskatoon—Wanuskewin, SK]

Okay.

The IISD, the International Institute for Sustainable Development, spent taxpayers' money to do a bunch of round tables on hot air.

Did you do any queries with respect to that in your audit?

[Johanne Gélinas]

No.

[Maurice Vellacott, Conservative, Saskatoon—Wanuskewin, SK]

So this falls entirely outside...?

[Johanne Gélinas]

It was not part of the design.

[Richard Arseneault]

It was not what we were looking for.

[Johanne Gélinas]

We asked three basic questions, and we had discussions with members of Parliament here way back then. We wanted to know if we were on the right path to achieving the Kyoto target, if we had work to do to get prepared for adaptation, and if the file was managed well and was well organized.

When you do an audit you set up your questions up front and you work toward concluding against those questions. You don't change the purpose of your audit in the course of what is going on in the environment.

Those were the three questions, and we came with the responses to those questions.

[Maurice Vellacott, Conservative, Saskatoon—Wanuskewin, SK]

You have no way of knowing how helpful some of these rounds were, whether it was literally hot air, whether it was of any benefit to the reductions for Kyoto, whether it had any impact at all? We have no way of knowing?

[Johanne Gélinas]

Based on the information we got, there was no willingness to buy hot air anywhere, so we didn't look at something that was not in the plan. We are auditing commitments made by the government. There was not a commitment to buy hot air, so we didn't audit that.

[Maurice Vellacott, Conservative, Saskatoon—Wanuskewin, SK]

It was taxpayers' money, though.

[Johanne Gélinas]

We have looked at where the money went, and we have come back to you. It's still the reality that a year from now, if there's no system put in place, nobody will be able to come and tell you how much money was spent and how much result has been achieved.

So this is a problem that was there way back then and is still here today, as we speak.

[Richard Arseneault]

For given programs, we've looked at the money in detail, and that's in chapter 3. But for the overall envelope on climate change, we were looking at systems: Do they know, do they have the systems to know, and are they credible and functioning systems?

We concluded the systems were not there yet. That's what we found.

[Maurice Vellacott, Conservative, Saskatoon—Wanuskewin, SK]

I guess my point is simply that this is taxpayers' money, valuable money that is being spent with the so-called pursuit or intent of these objectives, and we have no way of knowing what--

[Johanne Gélinas]

Mr. Chair, I have to respond to that.

We have to be careful. We have looked at programs, and the government is able to talk about how much money was spent and what results were achieved.

The issue here is, broadly, how the federal government can gather the information, consolidate the information, and report back to Canadians about how their money has been spent. And money will be spent again a year, two years from now. Canadians still won't be able to have the answer to your question if you come back with that question two years from now if the system is not put in place. You may want to ask Treasury Board where it's at in terms of building that system, because you won't be able to answer that question in the near future.

[Maurice Vellacott, Conservative, Saskatoon—Wanuskewin, SK]

Our audits are incomplete then, to some degree, if we don't get answers to our questions.

[Richard Arseneault]

That's not the question we were asking.

First of all, to try to get to the bottom of this through an audit would probably take having the whole Office of the Auditor General work on this for ten years. That's not what we were aiming to do. We were trying to find out what progress was being achieved on commitments, and that's what we're reporting.

In some cases we look at the dollars in detail, when we're looking at specific programs. We could not look at all of the money. What we wanted to know is whether the government has the system in place to know itself how it's doing, and the answer was no. When you look at individual programs, we get an answer, but it's a difficult thing to get that answer.

That's what we found.

[The Vice-Chair, Liberal, Mario Silva]

Thank you very much.

Mr. Cullen.

[Nathan Cullen, NDP, Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

It seems there's an opportunity here. You talked about lessons learned and not losing those lessons, regarding my colleague's question about the ability to track the money and track the effectiveness. It seems it would be worth the committee's time to at least consider having you back once the government's new plan is in place—not as an assessment of the policy, but more as an assessment of the government's tracking ability.

I think the great threat we face is to repeat failures: lots of announcements, but not an accountable framework to track the money, as Mr. Vellacott suggested.

I'm wondering about a comment from before. Is NRCan not committed to coming to Parliament with a national energy plan of some sort by the end of this year?

[Johanne Gélinas]

The Minister of Natural Resources made that commitment before this committee last June.

[Nathan Cullen, NDP, Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC]

Was that part of your assessment or audit in any way? Or was this just out there as a commitment that was made?

[Johanne Gélinas]

In the course of the audit, we were told there was sort of an energy framework in the making, as it was also for wind power energy.

[Nathan Cullen, NDP, Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC]

Okay.

In terms of the assessment you folks engaged in, while the government was sometimes spending money—or at the very least promising to spend money--on green power and alternative fuels, at the same time it was sending subsidies to projects that contributed to greenhouse gas emissions, such as Mr. Jean's area of the tar sands. How was that reconciled within the government's own planning—that on the one hand we're spending tax money to lower greenhouse gas emissions and on the other hand we're spending tax money to encourage greenhouse gas emissions?

[Johanne Gélinas]

I don't know how much time I have. If I can, I will take one minute to ask my colleague, Kim, to tell you a bit about the petition we got on the subsidies in the oil and gas sector.

We haven't done work to reconcile and look at the two. It just happened that we received a petition dealing with that at the same time we were doing the audit. If you want to know more about how the government reconciles the spending and the subsidies, you will have to ask the Department of Finance to come back again, because they have committed to look more at those different tax systems to see how they impact on environment.

[Nathan Cullen, NDP, Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC]

Before we go to Ms. Leach's testimony, were you not able to find any place in government where an assessment of the overall strategy for climate change had been made, with subsidies on the one hand and subsidizing on the other?

[Johanne Gélinas]

Not to my knowledge; it would have been under Richard.

[Richard Arseneault]

In actual fact, we are calling to integrate the energy and climate change. The two appear to be going in different directions. How do you reconcile that?