Thanks, Chair.
Thank you, Mr. Keenan and Ms. Weber, for being here.
Mr. Keenan, I want to go back to a couple of things and correct the record about the indicators initiative you mentioned. I don't think you addressed this, but it's important for folks to know.
When Minister Martin was Minister of Finance, he asked the Prime Minister's national round table to devise a small suite of indicators so he could use them in budget-making speeches to tell Canadians the fuller truth about the state of our well-being. I don't think it's quite correct for you to suggest in your remarks that the government has renewed funding for all those indicators. We know, for example, that the indicator dealing with either wetlands or forest cover, which was being pursued in cooperation with our space agency, had its funding reduced significantly.
I also want to ask you a really interesting question--maybe not interesting to you, but interesting to me.
Mr. Mulroney signed the original agreements in 1992 in Rio and created the National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy. It was supposed to be our principal institutional response to the Rio declaration and the agreements we signed there. Mr. Mulroney had the wisdom to create a body that was based in his office. It was the Prime Minister's round table based out of PCO.
Since the arrival of the Conservatives, they have demoted this organization and it now reports directly only to the Minister of the Environment. They changed its enabling legislation without debate. I think that's a terrible mistake, just as I'm deeply worried about what you're presenting here--that this national sustainable development strategy is going to be enforced and developed by Environment Canada. My recollection is that Environment Canada is the second- or third-least funded department in the federal government.
By situating this strategy inside Environment Canada you're making it the “enviro-cop” of the federal government. Sustainable development is not supposed to be about the marginalization of these issues into an environment department. We saw the government do that already with the Prime Minister's round table, and then it cut eight of its 26 positions just last week.
Environment Canada has very limited capacity in policy, very little economic modelling capacity, very little econometric history, and very little reach and influence on Finance Canada and the Treasury Board. How do you see this new office, based in Environment Canada, with seemingly revolving ministers of the environment over three and five years, as being capable of influencing the entire federal government, with its $257 billion worth of spending? Why shouldn't this organization be based where it properly should have been with the round table at PCO, where its responsibility is to steer and not so much to row?