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.