I'd like to respond at this time to Mr. Harvey's comments. When we talk about the independence of a commissioner of the environment, we're talking about that person's independence in terms of political party affiliation or ties to the Auditor General. The fact is that the commissioner's office is funded entirely through the Office of the Auditor General. The Commissioner of the Environment must report through the Auditor General.
I think we've evolved beyond that point today.
I think the fundamental difference between the two offices is well contained in the Auditor General Act. I think it can be summarized quite simply: that in the act, the Auditor General, whose functions are described in subsection 7(2), really deals with classical audit functions. They're retrospective: they look backwards to see that accounts have been properly maintained, essential records have been maintained, that money has been expended for the right purposes, that it's been expended for economy and efficiency and effectiveness.
Then there's a little throwaway line about sustainable development, but this is the perspective of classic auditing: value-for-money, backward-looking, strict accounting.
When you come to the section on the Commissioner of the Environment and to the description of what sustainable development is, it is, if anything, future-looking. In fact, it deals with things we did not anticipate. It challenges, in fact, traditional concepts of effectiveness and efficiency, because it says that many things you thought were effective were wildly inefficient. You treated the atmosphere as a free receptacle for greenhouse gases. That's not in the end a very good form of accounting, as it turns out, if you take into account the future.
The description of sustainable development itself says it reports “on the progress of category 1 departments towards sustainable development”; it doesn't report “back” on how they've done it; it's where they are going. Will this lead in a direction?
What is sustainable development? It's a “continually evolving concept based on the integration of social, economic and environmental concerns”, which is achieved by a variety of things: integrating the economy and the environment—
None of that is in the traditional function description of the Auditor General. We're talking about the future health of Canadians, about ecosystems. Nowhere, for example, does the act mention I think, in the Auditor General's classic description, how we're doing meeting our international obligations, yet it's spelled out specifically under the definition of sustainable development and what the commissioner is responsible for.
And “promoting equity”; I don't think equity features as a traditional audit function. It may be under effectiveness or efficiency.
Then there are integrated approaches to planning and decision-making.
There's “preventing pollution”. That's a futuristic thing: how do we stop this happening again in the future?
The final one is “respect for nature and the needs of future generations”.
So I think we've seen that they're radically different mandates, and that's why we can speak of a kind of support by the commissioner for the whole concept of environmental and sustainable development itself. It is different from a traditional concept, that we want clean auditing on past records.
Therefore, I think the time has come to sever the two, and I think there are powerful reasons. As Mr. McGuinty has pointed out, as we become better at understanding this evolving concept of sustainable development, we need to have an independent officer who is not constrained by traditional audit functions or whose reports will not get lost in describing traditional audit functions. They are really worlds apart.