What we've tried to do, first of all, is to not go beyond the scope of a private member's bill. That's why we removed the reference to a new independent office, simply because that would create a new budget, which would require expenditures, which we couldn't do. What we've also tried to do is work very closely with the commissioner so he's not responsible for anything in this bill, and with his predecessor, to understand where we've gone wrong previously, and also to understand how we can avoid the kind of vagueness to which you refer, which has been everybody's frustration.
You will want to confirm this when Mr. Thompson's up to bat, but the general advice we got was, first of all, you have to force the responsibility for developing these plans and being held accountable for their monitoring in the first instance to the agencies and the government itself, but you need to take it, as this bill does, to a whole other level. That's why we've proposed this cabinet secretariat, which would provide that coordinating function that has been absent.
Right now, and again you'll want to ask Mr. Thompson this, the current plan has individual departments putting things forward in a fairly haphazard fashion--I think that would be a generous way of describing it. Nobody at the top is responsible for pulling all this together or being held accountable for why they're not getting anywhere. There's no incentive for producing a really good sustainability plan; nothing there would reward a deputy minister who did a great job.
The first principle was not to have passive resistance by government departments--I think I'm being a bit harsh here to the current notion of sustainable development plans--but to say no, we have to have a cabinet committee, a cabinet secretariat that organizes this activity and is responsible for reporting every three years and making sure the individual departments report in a coherent fashion to them every three years and then have all of that, in turn, monitored by the commissioner.
This is an attempt to meet the criticism of why it didn't work the previous time. Again, Mr. Bigras was very forceful in pointing out how easy it is to pass legislation that people ignore, which is really not good, so how can we create a line of responsibility and a set of principles that are tough enough and accountability mechanisms that will force people to do this? They haven't been doing it to date.