Environment Committee on Jan. 31st, 2007

[The Chair, Conservative, Bob Mills]

Welcome, again.

I think everybody understands what we're talking about today. We're talking about the proposed new reporting scheme that we're going to be looking at for the upcoming year on environmental reports, and also some of the criteria that we think should be considered in the hiring of a new environment commissioner.

If we could keep our comments to those two topic areas, we'll follow our normal procedure. I should warn the new members--we have a number of new members--that I have this wonderful little grey box. This grey box is extremely accurate and takes us to the ten minutes. I will give you a little bit of time to finish answering the question, but I'd really ask you to live by the time: ten minutes, ten minutes, ten minutes, ten minutes, and then we go to five-minute sessions.

I would ask Ms. Fraser to begin. We will then go to the Liberals first, whoever is their speaker.

Thank you.

[Sheila Fraser]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

I am pleased to be here to discuss these issues with members of the committee.

I would like today to provide clarification around three issues: first, the appointment of an interim Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development; second, the internal review of our environment and sustainable development audit practice; and, finally, the role of the Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development as defined in the Auditor General Act.

First, on the appointment of an interim commissioner, I take full responsibility for the decision to name an interim commissioner, and I made this decision after careful deliberation. I would like to assure the committee that my decision has absolutely nothing to do with the commissioner's 2006 report or with any other commissioner's report. As I stated yesterday, the Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development reports to Parliament on behalf of the Auditor General. Accordingly, I, along with other senior officials in my office, approve all audits and review all reports before they are made public. I consider all reports of the commissioner and her team to have been excellent work, and I stand behind all of them. The large team of auditors that is responsible for producing the commissioner's reports will continue to perform the same quality of work under Mr. Thompson's leadership as they have in the past.

As well, I wish to assure the committee that there was absolutely no pressure or interference from the government regarding this decision. As I'm sure members will understand, I cannot comment any further on this for a number of reasons, including privacy issues. And while I would imagine that some of you may find this frustrating, I simply cannot comment further.

The second issue concerns internal review. Our role is to provide parliamentarians with fact-based, independent information that can assist them in holding the government to account for its management. We attempt to measure our effectiveness in a number of ways — by surveys of MPs, and by several performance indicators. From time to time, we assess our performance and introduce changes that we believe will strengthen our audit practice. We have done this in our financial and performance audit practices to good effect. That is the objective of the internal review of our environment and sustainable development practice I mentioned yesterday.

Our environment and sustainable development practice is a very significant and important one within our Office. I believe that we have done very valuable work, but there are always opportunities to improve. Certain indicators for example show that our environment and sustainable development audits may not have as much impact as other work in the Office in improving government management. We need to understand if that is the case and, if so, how we can improve. The review is not intended in any way to diminish the work we currently do, but rather to strengthen it.

As I mentioned earlier, our role is to provide objective, fact-based information to parliamentarians to assist them in holding government to account. To preserve our credibility, we must remain independent of government and not stray into policy issues.

We cannot, as an audit office, comment on policy choice, nor dictate to government what policies they should adopt. That is the role of government and parliament. I believe that we have carried out the mandate given to us in 1995 faithfully — we have not crossed that line into policy. However, there is some indication that some people would like the Commissioner to go further. Comments by some environmentalists and more recently the introduction of Bill C-288 showed that there may be a gap between what is expected from the Commissioner and what the legislation states. In its original form, Bill C-288 would have required us to act as a policy advisor to the government of the day and to evaluate programs. This is inconsistent with our role as auditors and it is not a role we can fulfill in our Office.

These examples led me to believe that I should bring this issue forward to this committee as only you can determine if it merits further consideration.

Mr. Chair, my office has been conducting environmental audits for more than 20 years, and we will continue to do so, in keeping with our audit mandate. We view the 1995 modification to our act as a very important addition to our mandate.

I believe that the environment and sustainable development work of my office is important and is valuable. Our objective in conducting an internal review is certainly not to diminish it. Our objective is to strengthen this practice and to ensure that our environmental audit work best serves parliamentarians.

That concludes my opening statement, Mr. Chair. I would be pleased to take any questions from committee members. Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Bob Mills]

Thank you very much.

I would just remind members to try to focus on the issues that have been presented to us. In other words, we had a process where the environment commissioner reported once a year, and it's proposed that the environment commissioner report with the Auditor General's report. The second item, of course, is any guidance we can give in hiring the new environment commissioner.

I'll begin with Mr. McGuinty, please.

[David McGuinty, Liberal, Ottawa South, ON]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, again, Ms. Fraser, for appearing today, and thank you for appearing yesterday.

I'd like to pick up on your opening comment, if I could, just to explore your own clarification about yesterday. You can imagine there are an awful lot of shell-shocked Canadians. Madame Gélinas has been I think judged to be one of the best Commissioners of the Environment and Sustainable Development that the country might have aspired to, held in the highest of regard I think by all parties, and, I'm assuming from your own comments, by yourself.

I think she has demonstrated a very even-handed approach to the delicate charge she has, responsibilities. In a sense, she's lived beyond the expectations of the original conception of the commissioner's office, which we as a government introduced a decade ago, and she has really held successive governments' feet to the fire, so to speak, our previous government and this government, and I think did quite a knockout job.

It was very, very kind of you to come yesterday and give us a heads-up, as you described it, with respect to what you were going to be announcing in the afternoon, but I do want to explore a little bit only because Canadians are confused. They'd like a better answer, perhaps, or a better idea of what has transpired here, and it does relate directly to the appointment of the interim Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development.

In your own press release that was issued yesterday there was talk about Madame Gélinas leaving, if I recall the words—you'll forgive me, I don't have the press release in front of me—“to pursue other opportunities”. Five or six hours later, most of us received a second press release, from Madame Gélinas herself, indicating that in fact she was surprised that she was, I guess, effectively terminated and that this was being made public sooner than she had expected it to be, and that negotiations or discussions had gone on for some time between herself and your office, and so on and so forth.

Could you help us understand, given the media reports that our chair cited just moments ago, some of the discrepancies between both your press releases and also perhaps some of the comments that are now public that were in the four-page document presented to this committee yesterday about the performance of the commissioner? Help us, please, understand what has transpired here so that we can work together to move to improve the functioning of that office and its structure and the role it ought to be playing, and perhaps an accentuated role that it ought to be playing going forward.

[Sheila Fraser]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

As I indicated in my opening statement, I will not comment on Ms. Gélinas' departure from her position as Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development. I would be glad to discuss any of the other issues that I have brought forward, but there are a number of reasons why I cannot give the kinds of answers that I think the member would like to hear. Unfortunately, I just can't do that.

[David McGuinty, Liberal, Ottawa South, ON]

Could I then ask, Mr. Chair, with all of the délicatesse, as my colleague from the Bloc put it yesterday, are Canadians right to conclude that there's a difference here in view, or a difference in denouement rollout here in terms of what has happened? I do have constituents calling me and asking, “This is a very important post. What's the problem here? Was it inter-professional? Why would there be two different public versions about what has transpired?” It's a pretty important issue for Canadians. There's a great mystery.

You have a very, very strong reputation, Ms. Fraser, in Canadian society, one that I strongly support. Madame Gélinas has a very strong reputation in Canadian society, has done, I think you would agree, and most of us would, a knockout job in her role, in a difficult role.

So I put it to you again. It would be important to illuminate in some way how there could be such a difference publicly. Without getting into, obviously, the details of whatever might be internal to your office, can you help us understand here in practical terms what has happened?

[Sheila Fraser]

The only thing that I would like to clarify, as I said in my opening statement, is that there seems to be, certainly in certain quarters, people trying to attribute this to the audit report that was produced in the fall of 2006 on climate change. This situation has absolutely nothing to do with that.

As I mentioned in the statement, the reports that are tabled by the commissioner go through the same process as any other audit of the office, which means that the senior management and executive are involved in the choice of the audits. So the fact that we were doing that audit was a decision of the executive of the Office of the Auditor General. I review all of the reports. I am briefed on them. I actually participate in helping the commissioner with her forward remarks. So that report, while it was tabled as a report of the commissioner, is a report of the Office of the Auditor General. We stand behind that.

I would just like to clarify that it has absolutely nothing to do with that, and I really cannot go further than that.

[David McGuinty, Liberal, Ottawa South, ON]

Ms. Fraser, are you in a position to help us understand, then, for example, the document that you tabled here yesterday, which is now a public document pursuant to the motion put forward by my colleague in the NDP? I don't have it in front of me, but I do recall that I think it was fairly categorical in a statement that the commissioner's reporting or performance was not up to standard, given the performance and other indicators that you are using in the AG's office. I'm just trying to, again, assess. Is that what transpired, or today's bullet point seven, and I'm not sure if there's an inconsistency—again, I'm in your hands here—where you say, “we assess our performance and introduce changes that we believe will strengthen our audit practice”?

You've gone on to say that the reports thus far of any commissioner for the environment, I'm assuming, going back to the creation of the post, are not at play, so to speak. I'm having a hard time reconciling yesterday and today.

[Sheila Fraser]

What I said yesterday, and I will quote, is that “In the course of our analysis”—and this was over frequency and timing of reports, and I'll come back to that in a minute:

...we also noted that performance audits on environmental and sustainable development issues do not appear to have the same impact as our other performance audit work. This conclusion is based on an assessment of our effectiveness, as measured by performance indicators that have been established for the Office such as how many of our recommendations are implemented.

Then I said:

This, I believe, is very unfortunate, because our work on environmental and sustainable development issues is very important to us--and, I believe, to Parliament and Canadians.

This is not a reflection on the commissioner. It is a reflection on the effectiveness overall. For example, one of the key measures we have for our work in the office is, do our audits contribute to improving the management within government? We use as an indicator of that the degree to which recommendations are implemented. The work on environment and sustainable development has consistently, over 12 years, had a much lower rate of implementation than our other work.

Now, I think we have to question ourselves, is that measure an appropriate one? If so, why is it lower? There can be a number of reasons. Our recommendations may be part of the problem, but we need to understand that, because at the end of the day we have several roles. Obviously one is to provide information to parliamentarians as they go through and consider policy legislation, but another one is to improve management in government over very important issues, such as environment and sustainable development issues. One would expect that when we do work, for example, on pesticides and have recommendations to government on how to improve that management, they should be implemented. So that's where this review is headed. We have done the same work in other areas in the office and have modified our practices, and hopefully we'll see our practice improve because of that.

[The Chair, Conservative, Bob Mills]

Mr. Regan, you have about a minute and a half. You will get a second round, so one question, please.

[Geoff Regan, Liberal, Halifax West, NS]

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

I was recently in Mali—and I mentioned this yesterday to the Auditor General. We were there as a delegation of Canadian parliamentarians supporting democratic development in countries such as Benin, Burkina Faso, and Mali. Of course, as the Auditor General knows, Mali has actually adopted our concept of an auditor general and they're developing that in their own country.

My point in saying that is how proud I am of the fact that this institution, which in my view has been even-handed and very important in holding governments to account, including the one that I was part of.... Canadians have great pride in that institution. It's very important that we recognize that to start off with, and we all admire that.

I want to come back for a second, because I think Canadians may want to understand a little better what's going on and what happened yesterday. I had the impression from our meeting yesterday that Madame Gélinas was leaving voluntarily. Maybe that wasn't the impression that was intended to be given, but that was the impression I got—it's my mistake, perhaps—but then it seems that she didn't go voluntarily. I guess the question is, and I don't know if you can answer it or not, can you tell us whether she was in fact dismissed?

[Sheila Fraser]

Ms. Gélinas continues to be an employee of the Office of the Auditor General.

[Geoff Regan, Liberal, Halifax West, NS]

Okay. So did she leave her position as Commissioner of the Environment voluntarily?

[Sheila Fraser]

I would prefer not to get into that discussion.

[The Chair, Conservative, Bob Mills]

Thank you, Mr. Regan.

Let us go on to Mr. Bigras, please.

[Bernard Bigras, Bloc, Rosemont—La Petite-Patrie, QC]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

Ms. Fraser, welcome to the committee. I'm reading the notes for your address and your statement of this afternoon, and I'd like to hear you comment in more detail on what's written on page 2 of your statement:

As I mentioned earlier, our role is to provide objective, fact-based information to parliamentarians to assist them in holding government to account. To preserve our credibility, we must remain independent of government and not stray into policy issues.

Has the government made any approach whatever to you that would lead you to suspect that Ms. Gélinas, or any other commissioner before her, infringed that duty of independence?

[Sheila Fraser]

Absolutely not. Moreover, in paragraph 10, I say I believe we've faithfully carried out the mandate given to us and that we have not strayed from it.

As I mentioned, every report that comes out of the office is approved by senior management, including myself. If I had ever found that we had gone too far in the report, it would not have been published. The issue I'm raising here is more for the future and concerns pressures that you sometimes see or expectations of certain persons who would like the Office to play a much more active role as policy advisor, by evaluating programs. That role is not compatible with the role of auditor.

So I'm asking the committee whether this is an issue that is perceived and whether it's an issue that deserves more in-depth study. If you say that is absolutely not the case and that you're entirely satisfied with the present role, that confirms for me that parliamentarians are satisfied.

[Bernard Bigras, Bloc, Rosemont—La Petite-Patrie, QC]

I understand what you're saying, and I understand your answer very well, but the question is this: have you or one of your advisors previously received a call from a representative of the government to the effect that Ms. Gélinas' reports or subsequent comments went beyond the independence that you expected from a member of the staff of your office?

[Sheila Fraser]

Honestly, as far as I know, no. I must say that sometimes we're generally accused, as the Office of the Auditor General, of going beyond our mandate. For my part, I don't believe we've crossed the line. I'm not aware that such a call was made concerning Ms. Gélinas or the previous commissioner, Mr. Emmett.

[Bernard Bigras, Bloc, Rosemont—La Petite-Patrie, QC]

At the end of paragraph 10, you refer to Bill C-288, a bill that, incidentally, was discussed in committee, where it received the support of all the opposition committee members, but was rejected by the government. You say: “In its original form, Bill C-288 would have required us to act as a policy advisor to the government of the day and to evaluate programs.”

My question is still the same: did the government or one of its representatives contact you to tell you that, in his view, one consequence of Bill C-288 would be that you would be acting as a policy advisor to the government of the day?

[Sheila Fraser]

We have not been contacted by the government at all. It was we who, in seeing the initial bill, wrote to the committee to tell it that this was an inappropriate role for us and one that would ultimately have caused harm to the Office of the Auditor General. We worked with the member to amend the bill to give it a form consistent with our present mandate.

[Bernard Bigras, Bloc, Rosemont—La Petite-Patrie, QC]

Okay. I have another question. I would ask you simply to reassure me, if I may put it that way, because, if the Commissioner of the Environment is an environmental watchdog, I believe the committee must also play that role. We therefore have a common interest: that desire, that possibility, that review of environmental audit practices as a result of which the report of the Commissioner of the Environment could be integrated into the Auditor General's report.

If I understand correctly, that's what you're proposing.

[Sheila Fraser]

That's one of the options we considered. Allow me to explain the strategy, because a lot of information was conveyed without me ever explaining to you what it was about.

It all started with a request from the Standing Committee on Public Accounts that we review the due dates of our reports. We noted that, when we tabled our report in late November, Parliament had very few sitting days left to hold hearings. After considering the House's calendar, we decided to bring the presentation of our November report forward and to present it in October.

In reviewing all that, we began to question the Commissioner's way of reporting. We wondered whether we should table one report a year or whether we should report more frequently. Indeed, perhaps it would be useful for the committee if we tabled reports two or three times a year, rather than only once a year.

It is interesting to note that this possibility, that the Auditor General table report more than once a year, was raised during the discussions of the amendments to the bill in 1995. There was even some question of tabling reports on the environment and sustainable development more frequently during the year. That's where the idea came from. The idea wasn't to abolish the Commissioner's report, but rather to determine whether it would be advantageous to table reports more frequently.

Another question was also raised: would it be advantageous for the Commissioner to table his report at the same time as that of the Auditor General? Could we have a little more visibility? Because, apart from the last report, the Commissioner's report has had very little visibility in recent years. That, quite honestly, is what the suggestions were.

Mr. Chair, I want to say that, if the committee states that it absolutely does not want to change anything and that it wishes us to continue as we've done in the past, tabling one commissioner's report a year, we will maintain that practice.

[Bernard Bigras, Bloc, Rosemont—La Petite-Patrie, QC]

Aren't there any consequences or dangers in including the Commissioner's report in the general audit report? Wouldn't that bury this entire environmental audit in a broader audit? The wish of committee members is that the audit be as independent as possible, precisely so that the report of the Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development enjoys some visibility.

So wouldn't more independence be preferable, rather than burying these results among broader indicators? Ultimately, what the public expects — and this is the priority for citizens — is to know more about what goes on in government in the environmental field.

[Sheila Fraser]

Mr. Chair, I'm definitely not an expert in communications, but our communications staff conducted a study comparing the reports that are tabled by the other officers of Parliament concerning quite unique subjects, official languages, privacy and others.

The Commissioner's report attracts a lot more attention than those other reports, but not as much as ours, simply because we cover a broader range of subjects. In addition, we interest the parliamentary press gallery, whereas the Commissioner's report is considered a report on the environment. It interests and attracts journalists specialized in that field to a greater degree.

That's why we wondered whether we would try that, to see if we would have a broader audience of journalists at an in camera meeting. I'll give you some examples: when the Commissioner's last report was tabled in September, there were about 25 journalists; there are more than 100 journalists when the Auditor General's reports are tabled.

There is indeed a danger, that an audit may attract more attention, but, in so doing, perhaps we can increase visibility.

That's an element that we're proposing, but, if you say that you absolutely don't want that, we'll respect the wish of Parliament.