Environment Committee on June 7th, 2007

[Mike Allen, Conservative, Tobique—Mactaquac, NB]

Is it because it's a surplus from 2006-07?

[Basia Ruta]

No. It's the Department of Finance. It's the Minister of Finance who is accountable for this particular initiative, as I understand it. But it's not within Environment Canada.

[Mike Allen, Conservative, Tobique—Mactaquac, NB]

Okay. So this $1.519 billion is in the Department of Finance's budget.

[Basia Ruta]

As I understand, it is subject to Parliament approving this, and that's with the Budget Implementation Act.

[Mike Allen, Conservative, Tobique—Mactaquac, NB]

Okay. Let me move on to my next question.

Picking up on Mr. Harvey's comment that we don't know about the $6.3 billion, the report also states: “There is no government-wide consolidated monitoring and reporting of spending and performance information on climate change activities.” I assume you are responsible for the comptrollership of the Department of the Environment. Is that true?

[Basia Ruta]

Correct.

[Mike Allen, Conservative, Tobique—Mactaquac, NB]

Can you tell me what specific actions you are taking in your department to address and contribute to government-wide monitoring and reporting?

[Basia Ruta]

I mentioned earlier, Mr. Chair, the horizontal management accountability results framework. That's not just an initiative that's internal; that's within my area of accountability. On a prospective basis, it is to coordinate with all of the other departments that are contributing to the clean air climate change agenda we spoke about to have a horizontal frame with a secretariat that supports the ongoing challenge of that work. This secretariat should feed into a coordinating committee of deputy ministers, who would then be accountable to their ministers and central agencies and Treasury Board.

Through the departmental performance reports or the Canada performance report or others, the view is that there will be a mechanism to report to Parliament on the results we're achieving and also the dollars being spent vis-à-vis the objectives.

[Mike Allen, Conservative, Tobique—Mactaquac, NB]

So we have all these buckets of money in various departments to meet our climate change agenda. We'll take our chemical substance plan--let's say, $300 million. That's an Environment Canada budget line item. Correct?

[Basia Ruta]

Partly. It's not just for us.

[Mike Allen, Conservative, Tobique—Mactaquac, NB]

Okay. So you're going to have a little bucket of these dollars there, and during the year you're going to put this aside.... I assume you're going to put the systems in place to collect the actual dollars against that bucket. How often are you going to be reporting this in this horizontal framework?

[Basia Ruta]

The chemicals action plan isn't actually part of the climate change horizontal management framework. That is different.

But as my colleague mentioned, I think there are checks and balances imposed on any organization. We are required to produce a results management accountability framework and to report on that in terms of the results we are achieving over time.

As part of the objectives of this government in revamping the expenditure management system, our understanding is that this will be a lot more formalized, in having program evaluations deal with a lot of the programming on a cyclical basis. Certainly some of these big measures typically also undergo some coordinated reviews.

[Mike Allen, Conservative, Tobique—Mactaquac, NB]

Mr. Chair, do I still have a little bit of time?

[The Chair, Conservative, Bob Mills]

You have half a minute.

[Mike Allen, Conservative, Tobique—Mactaquac, NB]

With respect to New Brunswick, the coal plant at Belledune is one of the things they've been talking about. It already has the existing scrubbing technology. Looking at zero emission technology for this funding, has anything been worked out with the province with respect to reporting on what they're going to do at Belledune?

[Michael Martin]

Mr. Chair, I think that has been identified by the province as an issue for funding under the trust fund. Of course, any such facility will also be impacted by the regulatory regime. If there is adaptation of the facility required, these funds may well serve to support that goal.

[The Chair, Conservative, Bob Mills]

Mr. Cullen.

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

The environment's obviously taken on a new-found importance in the last number of months politically, but also just in the interest of Canadians. How big a ministry is the Ministry of the Environment compared to other federal ministries? Is it small, big, medium, in terms of expenditures or total budget?

[Basia Ruta]

Within the main estimates and our total funding, we are about $1 billion; however, with some year-end transactions, it may be more.

Also, Environment Canada has received accountability now for the Toronto waterfront revitalization initiative, so when you see the estimates next round, they'll be increased by quite a bit.

So we're within the top 25. The Comptroller General would refer to this department as being in the first tier, but certainly not at the scale of DND. We're about 6,500 employees, if that helps.

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

Yes, it does.

The reason I'm curious about this is that I was speaking with the Auditor General this morning, and some others, about the role that Environment Canada is meant to take on with the challenges that Canada and the world are facing. I think sometimes it bears an objective view as to what the expectations of a ministry are from the public and from government. Correlate that to the funding sources, in comparison with those for Public Works, let's say, which has an enormous budget and many, many staff, which almost no on knows about in the general public. For Environment, I think that oftentimes the expectations might be oversold as to what authority and power and capacity the department has.

I want to get back to the criteria of how money is spent and how choices are made, because there's a whole suite of options available for reducing greenhouse gases--too many to name some days. I'm trying to understand if the government actually applies--and this was a struggle I had with the previous government, as well--these criteria to say that the best bang for the buck is to do operation X instead of Y.

You mentioned earlier, Ms. Ruta, that there's something looking to the future, but there hasn't been anything to this point. Did I understand you right?

[Basia Ruta]

Perhaps I'll make one correction, and then I'll defer, particularly on some of the new initiatives, to my colleague Mr. Martin.

I mentioned on a prospective basic, yes, but as the answer to another question. Under the previous government, and then under this government, there was a review of all climate change initiatives, as we talked about. It was in the order of $2 billion. Some of these programs and initiatives were confirmed, reconfirmed, retrofitted; a number of them were terminated, and the money then reallocated towards different initiatives.

In terms of—

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

Can I interrupt you there just for a clarification? I'm curious about something.

There was no drastic up or down in the environment budget given in the last two or three budgets. You've been at some sort of level of constancy within a few million dollars or tens of millions. There hasn't been a dramatic ramp-up or dramatic cut in Environment Canada spending. Is that fair to say?

[Basia Ruta]

Again, there are a number of initiatives that are big-ticket, if you like, that are embedded in the Budget Implementation Act. That's still subject to parliamentary approval.

In terms of how that rates with previous years, one of the members mentioned—now, again, this question probably would be best suited for Department of Finance officials—that they are often multi-year in outlay. Periodically, there is a look to see whether or not some of these programs need to be changed or redefined.

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

Back to the criteria question, I can remember one of this government's first initiatives was around the transit pass subsidy to transit riders. It was then later deemed that the cost per tonne was in the $2,000 range. It was seen as an extraordinarily expensive way to go about it, if your main intention was to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. This was a way to do it, but it was an expensive way to do it.

My question is, as the government is making decisions--and I have some serious concerns about the ecoTrust, but I'll leave that aside--about where to allocate those resources, clearly cost-effectiveness must be one of the leading criteria, and I'm mystified as to why that's not more prominent.

[Michael Martin]

Mr. Chair, I think it is important to define metrics around any program area, any policy initiative. The investments the government has made, as I said at the outset, are intended to complement the regulatory regime and are intended to drive behavioural and, particularly, technological change.

I think you can do the math to use a cost per tonne as a metric, and that would provide you with one source of information. You would need to evaluate that over the timeline. You would need to consider what the program goal was. So in terms of performance and performance evaluation, I think it would be important to articulate a series of performance metrics for any particular initiative that is both quantitative and qualitative.

As Ms. Ruta said, we are in the process of developing a horizontal management accountability and reporting framework for the Government of Canada clean air and climate change initiatives. Through that work we are going to develop a logic model, and we will continue to work on performance indicators to help ensure that ministers and others can make good decisions on the most appropriate investment, keeping in mind the specific policy goal.

In the case of the one you mentioned, encouraging Canadians to make more effective use of public transit is an important public policy goal.