If you carefully read the commissioner's work over the years, I think you'll find he didn't say that no one took them seriously. Some departments put some real effort into these things. They put in good management practices. They put in timely reviews within the three-year process. They did a lot of good things.
What happened, though, was that there was a disaggregation process. They weren't feeding into anything. They weren't contributing to a federal sustainable development strategy. This is the big difference. With this act, the departmental sustainable development strategies will be contributing to a Canadian sustainable development strategy, and the expectations will be higher. It will be harder for public servants to avoid doing the heavy lifting.
Rather than dumbing down the strategies to the lowest possible denominator, the standards set by the leading departments will have to be addressed. The government, the secretariat, and the cabinet will be looking to each of these strategies to make a strong contribution to the national strategy. You'll get a very different dynamic from the one that existed without the chapeau, without the separate strategies fitting into something. It will become multidimensional rather than unidimensional and departmental only.