Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I will respond to those two questions from Mr. Bigras.
In terms of the green ribbon panel, certainly when the panel provides its report to Mrs. Fraser, she's going to spend some time studying it, I suspect, with people on the executive committee. She fully intends to make it public, sir, with an action plan to respond to whatever recommendations it may contain. At that time, I'm sure that when it's made public obviously it will come to all members of Parliament and more specifically this committee.
The panel was asked to look at how well we are implementing the mandate we have, as opposed to seeing what other kind of mandate we might have. That's the primary focus of the panel's work. They may well have heard other things as well, which they might put in the report; I don't know. They were basically asked whether the commissioner has carried out the mandate given to him or to her over the past decade as well as they might, so that's what we'll find in the report.
In terms of how we see SDSs, as we point out in the opening statement and in the chapter, they were put in play a decade ago to really help departments--to coerce departments, if I can put it that way--to green their operations. They were expected to consider environmental protection alongside economic prosperity and major social issues such as health as they did a couple of things: as they carried out and managed programs of the day, and more particularly as they looked ahead to consider programs and proposals for programs of the future.
Now, in terms of changing management's behaviour in the way these SDSs were designed to do, we can't see any evidence that management's behaviour has been changed. That's the point we're making in the chapter, and that's what we think needs to be re-examined.
In terms of evaluation of programs coming through, you may be referring, Mr. Bigras, to strategic environmental assessments and that sort of thing. We didn't really get into that in this chapter, but if you can hold on until February, we have a major follow-up chapter in February that deals with just that.