Environment Committee on Nov. 20th, 2007

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

I admire your confidence, only because after four plans, twelve years, ten audits, and a major disappointment again, it's not as if the government is not aware. I'm very disturbed about the accountability or lack of accountability measures that exist.

In order to consider the consequences-- we'll stay with climate change for a moment--of continuing to make mistakes in terms of Canada's record, the implications for a region like mine, northwestern British Columbia, and any low-lying area, the far north, our country in general as a northern region, are significant and serious. I find it remarkable, and maybe you could answer this. that I can find no incidents of any deputy minister, assistant deputy minister, ever being held to account for the failure that has been claimed to be at the centre of the government's initiative in protecting Canada's environment. I don't know how government can claim accountability and how actually you're able to have this kind...I know it's functionally possible but culturally impossible, based on this regime's and the previous regime's performance. I just don't see any evidence for it.

[Ron Thompson]

Mr. Chairman, Mr. Cullen, I haven't been able to find and we haven't been able to find any sanctions for bad performance or rewards for good performance, quite frankly. We mentioned that during the in camera briefing a couple of weeks ago, and I'll say it again on the public record today. And that's a real problem.

However, I've been auditing in this government for 30 years in this office, and I've seen some amazing things done when people's feet are held to the fire and when the situation demands it. Where there's a will, there's a way, I would suggest, Mr. Cullen. There has never been a better time, in our view, for the government of the day to take a look at environmental protection. It's the number one issue in the country. There is plenty of time between now and the next time the sustainable development strategy process kicks in, which is two years down the road, to get it right or at least to start to get it right. There has never been a better time to get at this.

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

What seems curious to me--and this follows up on my colleague's point--is the perception of a conflict of interest...in order for the government that's choosing to hand this to the very ministry that has so botched this up, with no apparent sanctions, as you say, for bad behaviour or reward for good.

It seems to me there is an opportunity for members of Parliament to finally get involved deeply in this and to provide some of the lessons and sanctions. If there are other lessons in other departments, if it's pay bonuses or the lack thereof, or it's reprimands or public accounting, I don't particularly care what it takes; if government issues orders, which they rarely do, that are progressive enough to handle the issue, and they're still not carried out, if we could only match the amount of rhetoric and announcements to actual performance....

Every minister of the environment, going back five or six, has claimed that this is a central piece of their tenet, and consistently, the only consistency across individuals and parties has been the failure on this front: Health Canada failure; CIDA failure; Immigration; Department of Fisheries and Ocean, for goodness' sake; Indian Affairs; Justice. Overall, unsatisfactory and failing.

I don't know what my colleague's impression is, but I am not feeling the confidence today in reading the report again of handing this simply to Environment Canada, for all their best intentions, and feeling that we can walk away from this file. If this has so many implications, as you say, in terms of protecting Canada's environment, whether it's climate change or other issues, I don't think it's proper for us to allow the Privy Council to simply decide to keep it in-house.

[Ron Thompson]

One of the reasons I am confident, or I guess a little bit confident, Mr. Cullen, is the hearing we're having today. I have to tell you, in my experience with the federal government, if there's one thing that bureaucrats listen to it's the committees of the House. It seems to me this committee is in a pretty darned good spot now that we have this report on the table, now that we have Environment Canada agreeing to carry out this review and to look at the things we're suggesting should be looked at.

I would suggest that if you would be willing to do it, if you'd want to do it, this committee could put a lot of backbone into Environment Canada and it could really almost be a make or break to the success of this review.

So I think there is a genuine interest in doing things better, and I think this committee can help that process along immeasurably.

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

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Bob Mills]

We'll go to Mr. Warawa.

[Mark Warawa, Conservative, Langley, BC]

Thank you, Chair.

In the spirit of giving as many people as possible an opportunity to question the commissioner--and I thank him for being here--I will be sharing my time with Mr. Watson. So please stop me after five minutes. I thank the Bloc for doing the same.

I just want to confirm that the government has committed to conduct a sustainable development strategy review. We will be reporting back in October 2008.

You're happy with that, is that correct?

[Ron Thompson]

Mr. Chairman, yes, sir, I am. I'm delighted that the.... I think it will take a year to do a meaningful review. The fact that the results will be available in October 2008 is, I think, good timing. The only thing I think we need to flesh out—not we, but the government department that is doing it—is how to conduct the review. What is the work plan? What are the objectives? What are the deliverables? That's something I would suggest this committee could play a hand in to encourage Environment Canada to get on with it.

[Mark Warawa, Conservative, Langley, BC]

In your report, you say there's a decade of problems.

Looking at past reports, for instance in 1998, the report said that, “Almost all departments failed to establish the clear and measurable targets”, and that, “The lack of benchmarks needs to be dealt with quickly.” The commissioner said he was “disappointed that many departments did not challenge themselves to look at what really needs to be changed....The status quo is not acceptable any more.” That was in the Commissioner of the Environment's report in 1998.

In 1999, it says, “[The Commissioner] is concerned that federal departments have not layed the groundwork needed to reliably achieve the sustainable development goals they set for themselves in 1997”, and, “[T]he Report also points to a lack of co-ordination among departments”. The commissioner said, “There continues to be a substantial gap between talk and action on the federal government's environment and sustainable development agenda”.

Every year there was a similar critique.

Now we're coming up to 2002. It says, “The federal government has yet to provide a clear picture of what a sustainable Canada would look like 20 years from now”, and, “The federal government's sustainable development strategies...after five years and two generations of strategies, they still fall short”.

In 2005 the report said that, “The federal government has failed to provide departments with the direction they need to co-ordinate their sustainable” development strategies, and that, “An overall federal sustainable development strategy...though long-promised, has not yet been produced.” When it comes to protecting the environment, bold announcements are made, then often forgotten as soon as the confetti hits the ground. The federal government seems to have trouble crossing the finish line.

This has been a similar theme over the last decade. You've elaborated on that. It's a challenge to this committee to get involved. It's been a critique of a decade of problems. I appreciate that. This government is listening clearly to your recommendations. We've agreed with your recommendations, and we've committed to do the review. Less than a year from now, we'll have that.

How am I doing for time?

[The Chair, Conservative, Bob Mills]

You have one and a half minutes.

[Mark Warawa, Conservative, Langley, BC]

I will very quickly go over addressing the different departments. You've said...well, I don't have time to get into that. I want to quickly go to petitions.

Petitions, you said, were a success. I read through it and found that in some cases, there was an individual or an organization that had numerous petitions. Mr. David Boyd, who is well respected in the environmental field and is an expert from UBC, I believe, had about five or six petitions. The David Suzuki Foundation had, I think, about four or five petitions. An organization in British Columbia that was concerned about the Deltaport development had three petitions. Among the 46 petitions you've had, it is often a group or individuals who are experts in the field making repeated petitions.

How can we encourage the general population to take advantage of this? It's not your typical petition that is entered into and read in Parliament. How do you see us promoting the petition process so that the average Canadian out there sees this as a tool to communicate with the ministers and get appropriate answers?

[Ron Thompson]

Mr. Chairman, Mr. Warawa, this is a very good question. We just don't think that this process is really very well known. I suspect that one of the reasons it isn't, perhaps, is that we maybe haven't done our job as well as we might have. I think our website isn't the easiest to use, and we're looking at how to change that. We're looking at trying to talk a little bit more about the petitions process when we are out giving speeches and writing articles, to make the Canadian people aware that it exists.

So I think in terms of raising awareness of the process, we can do a lot. What we're doing right now is developing a plan in order to do just that. We want to wait for a little while, because I have a funny feeling that the green ribbon panel is going to look at that too, and they may make recommendations, I don't know. So we want to think about what they might be saying and then put forward a plan to make the petitions process better known to the Canadian people.

Now, in addition to making it better known, I think we can do a better job of giving more precise and useful guidance both to petitioners and to departments that are trying to craft petition responses on behalf of ministers. We have some guidance. We think it should be stronger and sharper, and we're working at doing that too. I would think in probably two or two and a half months we'll be in a position to have a better approach to the administration of petitions ourselves, which hopefully should go a long way to making the Canadian people more aware of it and making the process work a little bit more smoothly.

[The Chair, Conservative, Bob Mills]

Mr. Watson, you have three and a half minutes.

[Jeff Watson, Conservative, Essex, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you to Mr. Thompson and his colleagues for their invaluable work for this committee...an ongoing tradition of environment commissioners highlighting ten years of failed policies by the Liberal government on the environment. These are all directly attributable to them.

In light of Mr. Godfrey's opening statement, where he wants to leave on the public record that the most recent SDS is attributable to this government, you state that it's the deputy ministers policy committee on the environment and sustainability--I'm going to quote from page 30, paragraph 1.20--that was the responsible committee during the preparation of the 2007-2009 strategies.

Is that correct? That's the committee that led the spadework for this strategy?

[Ron Thompson]

Yes.

[Jeff Watson, Conservative, Essex, ON]

Was it the previous government that established that committee to do the spadework on the SDS?

[Andrew Ferguson, Principal, Office of the Auditor General of Canada]

I think it was actually the current government that established the most recent committee. Our point here was mainly that these committees have transitioned and changed so frequently as to obscure what their mandate is vis-à-vis the strategy process.

[Jeff Watson, Conservative, Essex, ON]

I'm asking about the initial committee that was established to lay the groundwork for the current SDS.

[Andrew Ferguson]

I think it would have been a previous government, yes.

[Jeff Watson, Conservative, Essex, ON]

Thank you very much.

So the current leader of the opposition, the then Liberal environment minister, initiated this process that led to the faulty content that we have here today. The timing of it, I think, is also important. You had some criticism about the timing established by the committee for reporting being set into mid-2006.

Why was the timing of issuing a report coming out of this committee so important?

[Andrew Ferguson]

In our previous audit, we had recommended that the government move ahead with providing guidance to the 32 departments responsible for producing sustainable development strategies, and that guidance was made available publicly in July, approximately five months before the most recent strategies were due to be tabled.

[A voice]

That's pretty late.

[Jeff Watson, Conservative, Essex, ON]

So that's why it's important, as we're looking forward to a review, that we have enough time to ensure that it's done robustly. And the timing is important too, so that it can be integrated deep into the very departments themselves, so that we're guaranteeing our success, rather than pre-empting with one particular party's view on a bill, pre-empting that kind of spadework. I think that's the essence of why we need this type of review.

Is that why you recommended it, rather than legislation up front?

[Ron Thompson]

Well, if I may, Mr. Chairman, I think the review is a sensible thing to do at the beginning of all of this. Doing it in a year is good timing. It allows the results to then be put into play for the next round with a year to spare. That's plenty of time to get at least some of the architecture in place to make this work the way it was intended. Now, whether more is needed after the review, sir, I don't know. It would depend on what the review discloses. But that would be the reason for looking at the timing.

[The Chair, Conservative, Bob Mills]

Thank you, Mr. Watson.