Evidence of meeting #14 for Environment and Sustainable Development in the 40th Parliament, 2nd Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was federal.

A recording is available from Parliament.

On the agenda

MPs speaking

Also speaking

Scott Vaughan  Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development, Office of the Auditor General of Canada
Richard Arseneault  Principal, Office of the Auditor General of Canada
Paul Morse  Principal, Sustainable Development Strategies, Audits and Studies, Office of the Auditor General of Canada

10:25 a.m.

Conservative

Peter Braid Conservative Kitchener—Waterloo, ON

Do you have any sense about how long that process may take, or the steps involved?

10:25 a.m.

Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development, Office of the Auditor General of Canada

Scott Vaughan

As one of the honourable members said, they've made a commitment now for seven, coming up to eight years. We understand from Health Canada that they will soon make an announcement on moving the process forward, but it wouldn't be for me to say when that would actually take place.

10:25 a.m.

Conservative

Peter Braid Conservative Kitchener—Waterloo, ON

Moving now to the air quality health index, I have a final question here. I want to confirm that you see good progress being made with respect to the short-term goal to have coverage for cities over 100,000 by 2011. Is that the case?

10:25 a.m.

Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development, Office of the Auditor General of Canada

Scott Vaughan

Yes, absolutely.

10:25 a.m.

Conservative

Peter Braid Conservative Kitchener—Waterloo, ON

And you are continuing to monitor that closely.

10:25 a.m.

Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development, Office of the Auditor General of Canada

Scott Vaughan

No. We finished this audit itself. We always go back and look at whether we would follow up, but we wouldn't monitor a program after we've issued an audit. But we may go back to look at this as a future follow-up on it.

10:25 a.m.

Conservative

Peter Braid Conservative Kitchener—Waterloo, ON

Thank you.

10:25 a.m.

Conservative

The Chair Conservative James Bezan

Thank you, Mr. Braid. Your time has expired.

We do have a notice of motion on our agenda. I'd like to save 15 minutes at the end of the meeting for this, so for our third round I want to go to a four-minute round, if that's okay with committee members.

With that, for four minutes, Mr. McGuinty on this final round.

10:25 a.m.

Liberal

David McGuinty Liberal Ottawa South, ON

It is Mr. Scarpaleggia.

10:25 a.m.

Liberal

Francis Scarpaleggia Liberal Lac-Saint-Louis, QC

I welcome you, Commissioner. Or you should be welcoming me, I guess, since I came in a bit late today.

I have a quick question about water on commercial passenger aircraft. A couple of years ago I read that Health Canada had responsibility for monitoring the quality of this water, but when I brought it up with a pilot friend of mine, he said there was really no need because they use bottled water in every instance.

I am unclear as to why there's a federal role in this, and whether there is a real need for a federal role. Are they all using bottled water? Whenever I'm on a plane I always get bottled water poured out of a big bottle, so I'm interested in your comments on that.

I also read in your report that there were problems in obtaining the cooperation of the airlines in terms of negotiating some kind of standard or monitoring procedure. I am hoping you can elaborate on this issue.

10:30 a.m.

Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development, Office of the Auditor General of Canada

Scott Vaughan

As for the water served on aircraft, my understanding is that things like coffee and tea would come from a tank. These tanks are occasionally flushed out. My brother is a pilot on an airline. Sometimes they're flushed and sometimes they're not. There have been inspections in which they found traces of E. coli as well as other microbacterial residue. Also, people will use tap water in washrooms even though there's a sign saying non-potable water. So those are two examples: the tanks for coffee and tea, and water used where it shouldn't be.

10:30 a.m.

Liberal

Francis Scarpaleggia Liberal Lac-Saint-Louis, QC

Even though it says not to drink the water in the washroom, people still do it. I'm wondering at what point the federal responsibility ends. If people don't follow signs, then I wonder if there's a federal responsibility. You said in your report that it's a slow process to negotiate with the airlines on the water quality in the tanks for coffee and tea.

10:30 a.m.

Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development, Office of the Auditor General of Canada

Scott Vaughan

The reason the inspection program ceased in the mid-nineties was that there was a new policy of a cost recovery. It was uncertain whether inspections would be paid for by the airlines or the government. The negotiations went back and forth. My understanding now is that inspection costs are borne by the federal government.

10:30 a.m.

Liberal

Francis Scarpaleggia Liberal Lac-Saint-Louis, QC

Are the inspections going ahead as they should at this moment? Have the problems been resolved?

10:30 a.m.

Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development, Office of the Auditor General of Canada

Scott Vaughan

We said that there was a gap in 2005. There is now a system in place. The system is based on inspections, and the problem looks like it's resolved for the major carriers, the 13 largest carriers in Canada.

10:30 a.m.

Liberal

Francis Scarpaleggia Liberal Lac-Saint-Louis, QC

How frequent are the inspections? We saw that only 6% of plants for bottled water were being inspected, and that they were rather infrequent. Is there a follow-up? Is there a standard for the frequency of inspections that should take place under this new system where the federal government bears the cost?

10:30 a.m.

Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development, Office of the Auditor General of Canada

Scott Vaughan

We don't have that information. I'm glad you asked the question. I think it may be a question that would be useful to pose to the Canadian Food Inspection Agency. It would depend on their ranking of risk. For the airlines themselves, there are four major airports at which the inspections take place. They're done on a regular basis.

For the bottled water part of the report, during the course of the 2007-08 audit, there were 78 inspections in all provinces in Canada. There were no major problems that would actually change the level of risk for bottled water.

10:30 a.m.

Liberal

Francis Scarpaleggia Liberal Lac-Saint-Louis, QC

Thank you.

10:30 a.m.

Conservative

The Chair Conservative James Bezan

Ms. Duncan.

10:30 a.m.

NDP

Linda Duncan NDP Edmonton Strathcona, AB

About three-quarters of an hour ago, there was a discussion about setting risk based on certain population levels. I want to put on the record that I am extremely upset about that. We dealt with that issue in Alberta. We had the federal and provincial governments at the table dealing with new standards in air emission management for coal-fired power. We finally got both governments to realize that you can't set these risks based on big cities, because in most cases the major pollutants are falling out on the real communities. We had a problem with doing health evaluations, with getting both federal-provincial health authorities to do health risk assessments, because they simply say it's not valid and they can't do it. We have a situation now in the tar sands. Benzine is one of the most critical pollutants the federal government is supposed to be regulating, but they're not even monitoring benzine from the tar sands, despite the fact that there are a lot of aboriginal communities living downwind.

I wonder if you could speak to that. You spoke to it earlier when there was a question about risk assessments based on 100,000 population and over. It basically violates the environmental justice principle that no one community is supposed to be unduly subjected to environmental impacts.

10:35 a.m.

Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development, Office of the Auditor General of Canada

Scott Vaughan

This is a fundamental question that would be useful to pose to the government. It would be useful to get a clear sense of whether there's a coherent strategy in place. Is there a coherent method for assigning levels of risk? Is there an effective system of inspection and monitoring, against which previously assigned risk levels are periodically checked?

Risk exposure affects all people, no matter where they live—large communities, isolated rural areas, the north, marine and coastal areas. Human health risk potentially affects all Canadians.

10:35 a.m.

NDP

Linda Duncan NDP Edmonton Strathcona, AB

Mr. Vaughan, there is an additional aspect to that, and that is the fact that the federal government has been progressively pulling out of doing air emissions monitoring. While they've done this work on the air index, in my jurisdiction in Alberta there are now gaps where there are serious industrial facilities and there is no monitoring. What Alberta has adopted is a policy of private, non-profit airshed monitoring groups. What is to be monitored is based on how much money that group can raise. In most cases, those non-profit airshed groups have industry and government people, and only in some cases do they have local community people, although they try to. It's a totally volunteer organization, and the monitoring that is done is totally based on the ability to raise funds.

So I think that raises a critical question. Where is the responsibility of the federal government in filling those gaps or making sure air emissions of concern to human health or broadly to the environment...? What is the role of the federal government in making sure it's not backing out of responsibility by allowing the reliance on non-government airshed monitors?

10:35 a.m.

Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development, Office of the Auditor General of Canada

Scott Vaughan

If I may, I have just two quick responses. Thanks for the question

First of all, we tabled a report in February that was giving examples of the federal government's approach to controlling air emissions generally. They were certainly not comprehensive. There were selected approaches from different menus of options.

Then the second one: we looked in this report only at the air quality health index. We didn't look at general trends and others. There are other indices, as Mr. Morse noted, and it isn't necessarily that one would replace the other, but it's not something we looked at. We looked specifically at the air quality health index for this report.

10:35 a.m.

NDP

Linda Duncan NDP Edmonton Strathcona, AB

Fine. I would suggest—and far be it from me to suggest what the next topic of the audits is—there's increasingly a need to look at the broader mandate of the federal government and whether or not, when it is reaching accommodation with other levels of government, it is creating a gap where the federal government still has a duty to be making sure the gap is filled.

I have one last quick question, and this may have been asked. Have you looked at whether or not Health Canada or Environment Canada actually monitor to see how quickly the provincial or territorial governments actually adopt and put into place the updated guidelines on drinking water?

10:35 a.m.

Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development, Office of the Auditor General of Canada

Scott Vaughan

What we look at is within the federal venue, so that's what we looked at within the audit. We have information on all the provinces, what their status is in terms of whether they've legislated parts or wholesale. I can provide that to the honourable member.