Environment Committee on Feb. 8th, 2007

[Sheila Fraser]

I think we have that information. I can get it to you. Most countries don't specifically have a commissioner as we do in Canada, but their office of the Auditor General looks after environmental auditing.

[Paul Crête, Bloc, Montmagny—L'Islet—Kamouraska—Rivière-du-Loup, QC]

In paragraph 9, you stated:

[...] the issue is about expectations that are being placed on us that we cannot fulfil.

If the government made you responsible for an evaluation which wouldn't normally be considered part of your auditing role, but which would not be a requirement under other legislation, would you agree to that? For example, what if you were called upon to do environmental auditing, but were asked to focus on a specific area. Could you do that sort of work? And if you could, have you thought about the recommendations? In other words, do we need an environment ombudsman?

[Sheila Fraser]

Obviously, when we've seen bills calling on us to do something which is incompatible with our role and our standards, we have worked with the bills' sponsors in an attempt to amend them to make them consistent with what we are in a position to do. In addition to this, we have suggested they find other organizations which may be able to carry out this role.

The round table was the organization referred to in Bill C-288 which would take on responsibility for these activities.

Obviously, should government or Parliament decide to create another officer of Parliament or another organization to play the role we cannot play, we would not be in a position to comment on this.

[Paul Crête, Bloc, Montmagny—L'Islet—Kamouraska—Rivière-du-Loup, QC]

Do you feel that there is a role which is currently not being carried out by anyone?

[Sheila Fraser]

Based on the bills which have been brought to our attention—and that's why I have raised this issue with the committee—there seems to be a discrepancy between expectations being placed upon us and what we are actually in a position to do, and people are not aware of this. We considered that the onus was on committee members to determine whether indeed there is a discrepancy and to decide whether this discrepancy should be examined by this committee.

[Paul Crête, Bloc, Montmagny—L'Islet—Kamouraska—Rivière-du-Loup, QC]

Thank you very much, Ms. Fraser.

[The Chair, Conservative, Bob Mills]

Just for members' information, everybody did get a copy of the summary from the working group on environmental auditing. It gives you a bit of background on what's happening in some of those 50-plus other auditing groups.

Tim is still working on a little more information for us, as that was brought up last time. So we will have more information on that for you.

Mr. Cullen.

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

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you to the Auditor General for being here today.

It's been said and needs to be said again that you have done exemplary work over the years. Congratulations on that.

There seem to be two fundamental criticisms or concerns that you raised on the notion of moving the Commissioner of the Environment out. One is around effectiveness—the ability to effect change within government policy and performance. The second is around straying into policy. You've talked about expectations that have been raised.

On the expectations question, I remain confused, because I don't know why that would matter, why you would care or why the Commissioner of the Environment would care that an NGO or a member of Parliament incorrectly interpreted the mandate of the Commissioner of the Environment.

I remember reading Mr. Rodriguez's bill, Bill C-288, the first time, and there was a note in it about who would assess the government's policies. My first thought was “We have to strike that out, because it doesn't work.”

So there will always be expectations. Some will be right and some will be wrong. But I will not use that as a motivation to direct my deliberations on this.

On policy, you said that auditors can't audit themselves. It's a very important principle. If the Government of Canada has a legally binding commitment to do a certain thing—let's take the Kyoto Protocol as an example--and the government then puts forward a plan that, by their own admission, will fall short of that commitment, is there any room for an auditor to comment on that?

[Sheila Fraser]

Yes. Can I just answer both parts of the question?

On the issue of the expectations, yes, there was Bill C-288, but there's also Bill C-377, which again comes back asking the commissioner to do policy analysis and provide advice to government. So we interpreted that to mean there were expectations of parliamentarians that we could not meet, and said this is something the committee might want to raise.

If the committee believes that this is easily addressed and there is no expectation gap, then that's fine. I interpreted these draft bills differently in thinking that people expected more from our office and from the office of the commissioner than we can do under our legislation and under the standards that guide our work.

You are correct to say that when there is a legally binding agreement or when there is a policy or a law from government, we can quite legitimately ask what the plan is to address this, and what kinds of measures you have put in place to ensure that you meet those targets. If government itself is saying that we're not going to meet them, it is quite legitimate for us to report that. That is what we did this past fall, in fact. We said that the measures are not in place—

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

And that's wrong.

[Sheila Fraser]

—and it's going the wrong way, and something needs to be done if we are to meet this commitment.

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

I can remember specific conversations like this at this committee, with the former commissioner. The government had made commitments for fiscal reform, to change the way we tax in Canada in order to encourage more environmental initiatives. The previous government had made numerous commitments to that, yet when the finance department was asked for those commitments, they weren't forthcoming. They said we just simply won't do it.

What's strange for me, as a person not familiar with government and auditing practices, is that someone would just refuse an auditor's clear recommendation.

I suppose what I'm getting at is that the line between auditing and looking backwards exclusively under traditional practices, and looking forward and saying your actions don't meet your legally binding commitments—which seems to stray almost into policy--doesn't seem as clearly defined as one would hope it would be in an ideal world. There are moments when you say to government, as the auditor, “Your future actions and your policies are not matching your commitments, and you must change course or change your commitments”.

[Sheila Fraser]

I would just like to add, Mr. Chair, that in order to make the statement that your actions are not meeting your commitments, we would have to base that on an evaluation done by government. We would not conduct that evaluation ourselves. We could say government does not know if it's going to meet it; government doesn't have a plan in place to meet this commitment; or government has done an evaluation, and the evaluation says they won't meet it. We, ourselves, as an audit office, would not do that evaluation.

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

If the government came forward and said—again, I'll take the environment because it's the most pertinent, obviously—that we plan to reduce pollution by 100 megatonnes, and then presented a plan that would, by its own admission, reduce it by much less than that, a commissioner of the environment would comment on that, I would assume.

[Sheila Fraser]

The Commissioner of the Environment could say, “The government has said they would do this, and the plan only gets them this”, but that would be as far as—We can only report, if you will, the facts.

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

And you would leave the conclusion to members of Parliament to say either change your commitment or change your plans, because you're out of line.

[Sheila Fraser]

That's right.

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

The question of effectiveness--you raised this before, and I'm very confounded by the idea. You said that the office of the commissioner's recommendations had not been taken up enough, and you used the number 20%, I believe. Where did that number come from?

[Sheila Fraser]

That is our own internal tracking with departments as to how much progress they have had.

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

What was that based on? Is that since the commissioner has existed, or—?

[Sheila Fraser]

We look at recommendations four years after the fact. We would expect that after four years, the recommendations would have been put in place.

As I mentioned, I think that in this review we want to do, we have to understand why that is the case and go to the departments. I think the next report we will be coming out with, for which we actually go back and re-audit, will give us a much better sense of how recommendations are actually being put into place for more rigorous follow-up.

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

Can you provide the report that led you to the 20% figure? I think it's important for us to understand your own assessments of effectiveness, and in connection to what types of policy decisions we're trying to make here at the committee.

If the argument is made that the Commissioner of the Environment's office must remain here because it will be more effective than it would be externally, then under true auditing practices there must be a basis for that assessment, on which you would come to that conclusion.

[Sheila Fraser]

With respect to the issue of effectiveness, one of the measures we use is implementation of recommendations, and we are trying to increase that across all of our work. The internal review that we talked about was to look more specifically at whether there are specific issues related to the way we have been doing our audits and, for example, follow-ups. We haven't done a lot of follow-ups, and that I think has been a very useful tool with many others to come back to parliamentarians and say we reported this to you so many years ago. So maybe one of the things that we want to do is to do follow-ups more frequently. This is a personal impression, but I don't think that should be the basis for deciding to move it in or out. I really think that this is about trying to improve our audit practice.

You were indicating there was no expectation gap. If that's the case, and people don't want policy advice and don't want that, then the discussions probably end.

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

It's not so much that there probably isn't an expectations gap, it just doesn't matter. If members of Parliament write bills or non-government organizations create expectations that aren't fitting the mandate, then that's our own fault.

So let me just talk in a moment about the notion of effectiveness. I'm trying to imagine, because the idea is that you'll release reports and at every quarter a part of your report will be on the environment.

[Sheila Fraser]

That was a proposal for consultation with members. There has been no final decision on that.