Environment Committee on March 23rd, 2010

[Linda Duncan, NDP, Edmonton Strathcona, AB]

I don't have any problem with that. My question remains.

[Michael Keenan]

It does.

[Linda Duncan, NDP, Edmonton Strathcona, AB]

It says that it's to “provide a legal framework”. So is the department in the process of promulgating the regulations?

[Michael Keenan]

Our view in developing this is that the act itself gives us a very clear legal framework, and we have been proceeding to working across the government to establish a system of planning on goals, targets, and implementation strategies, and of tracking our results-based progress.

Our approach in the sustainable development office has been to drive a pretty systemic change across the system, using principles of instrument choice to make regulations only where we think we need them in order to get this done. So far, our assessment is that we do not need to define regulations to get this done.

We're working with Treasury Board in establishing the guidelines departments have to follow in terms of how they report in the expenditure management system. This is enough of a...I'm not sure whether hammer is the right word, but it's creating the environment for getting the change we need.

If we get to a point—

[Linda Duncan, NDP, Edmonton Strathcona, AB]

Can I just...? This is simple. I don't need you to elaborate on that any more. I actually want to follow up on a point you just made, which Mr. Bigras had raised.

Given that you state, “It links sustainable development planning and reporting to key planning and decision-making...particularly, the Expenditure Management System”, I can't find anywhere in your sustainable development future consultation paper where you have specifically targeted something for the Treasury Board or the Department of Finance to do.

Now, you can correct me, if I'm wrong.

[Michael Keenan]

That's an interesting point. I would say it may not be jumping off the page, but where we talk about linking sustainable development to core planning, on pages 5 and 6, underneath that there is.... We have asked, and Treasury Board has responded positively, in terms of working through a very specific mandated linkage between the goals and targets and implementation strategies, which are in the tables, and the RPPs and the DPRs that departments have to complete every year as part of the expenditure management system.

So I guess we didn't mention it—that's a fair point—but it is happening on the ground.

[Linda Duncan, NDP, Edmonton Strathcona, AB]

It does say that it will target specific departments to do things.

I noticed on page 23 of your consultation paper, concerning aboriginal safe drinking water, you again reiterate that the government will deliver legislation sometime. That was actually promised in the throne speech of 2009.

I'm surprised that you don't have a target date so that it can be measurable and accountable. I just wanted to point out that it doesn't really seem to give a clear target date, although that promise was made a couple of years over.

I wanted to follow up on the question my colleague Monsieur Bigras raised about the infrastructure program, which specifically exempted infrastructure projects under Building Canada from environmental assessment and the Navigable Waters Protection Act.

How do you rationalize that under the federal sustainable development strategy?

[Michael Keenan]

Let me respond to the aboriginal question. I'd like to go back to check. It may be possible that we've missed a date. If that's the case, we'll ensure that it's—

[Linda Duncan, NDP, Edmonton Strathcona, AB]

Consider that my input to your draft. It would be helpful to have an actual date.

[Michael Keenan]

There's an important distinction that we've been trying to make in our minds and in our communications of this. We're proposing a management system that we believe will be a significant improvement over the former management system for sustainable development. We're not proposing to supplant or replace all of the decision-making the government does; we're proposing to bring more transparency to it.

I'll use an example. You mentioned the change in the environmental assessment procedures for infrastructure projects. We're not trying to replace that decision, any decision taken on any budget, or any other decision. What we're trying to do in the strategy is provide great transparency as to what they do in terms of activities and what they do in terms of results with respect to the environment.

[Linda Duncan, NDP, Edmonton Strathcona, AB]

Let me give you another example, just to make clear where I would expect real targets can be set up so that you can measure whether the government has actually delivered. Another one is under Public Works, on page 9, concerning greening government operations, where the suggestion is that there will be action taken towards green government.

The Obama government, in its last budget—not this one—targeted that 75% of federal government buildings will be energy retrofitted in two years. I don't see any kind of real targets here or target dates whereby you could measure whether the government is actually delivering. It remains incredibly vague to me. I would have thought that, given that you have these guideline documents on how you might do it, it's much more helpful to measure whether the government is actually moving in a certain direction.

Concerning aboriginal safe drinking water, the government gave an end date: they said they would table that legislation last year. That's an example of how you hold the government accountable. Then they can say, here are the reasons that we couldn't deliver on that target date. But when you have no target date whatsoever, it becomes pretty amorphous, and it doesn't look as though it's a real commitment to a deliverable.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, James Bezan]

Your time has expired.

If you wish to respond, I'd ask that you make a very brief response.

[Michael Keenan]

Very briefly, your point about targets is a good one. Page 18 or somewhere near in the document describes the standard for targets in the future, which is that they're time-bound, they're specific, and they're measurable. That is an ideal to which we would like to move the entire system.

I'll turn to my colleague to respond briefly concerning greening government operations.

[Caroline Weber, Assistant Deputy Minister, Corporate Services, Policy and Communications Branch, Department of Public Works and Government Services]

Thank you very much for the question.

We are working across the Government of Canada to talk about both targets and measurement because we haven't done anything like this before in concert, in a unified way, that applied to so many departments at once in the same way, and we don't have the underlying systems to then report on a common indicator. We are in progress and we're hoping to have something ready for the final strategy. We are having those conversations.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, James Bezan]

Thank you.

Mr. Warawa, you can finish off the seven-minute round.

[Mark Warawa, Conservative, Langley, BC]

Thank you, Chair.

Thank you, Mr. Keenan and Ms. Weber, for being here.

I find this a very interesting discussion, actually. I had the pleasure of working with my colleague--a Liberal colleague, but a colleague--who had a passion for the environment. That was Mr. John Godfrey. There was the initial proposal that he had--his private member's bill, the Federal Sustainable Development Act--and then over the months, a couple of years ago, we came up with a position where it was amended, the committee dealt with it, and we had unanimous support around this table.

How quickly those two years have gone by. Now we are faced with continuing on that good work. We have each received this consultation paper, which I found very helpful, and I am sure we are all happy to be able to provide some input.

Page 1 makes it very clear that the goals in here are aspirational, but they also provide a long-term focus. On page 1 of this consultation paper, reference is made to the OECD study. It says:An OECD study has found that, where governments have attempted to move too quickly and on too many simultaneous fronts to achieve sustainable development, governance systems have become overloaded and paralyzed, and little progress has been made.

You referred to that study on pages 4 and 5 of your speech.

I don't think the problem with the Liberals was that they tried to do too much in too little time. I think it was quite the opposite. The commissioner at the time said there was a lack of leadership, but those days have changed. It was the decade of darkness, as it was referred to. Anyway, we have moved on, and here we are working together on sustainable development.

Sustainable development in this reference paper is also referred to as “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”. That is good.

You also refer to Minister Ambrose. I've had the pleasure of working with Minister Ambrose, Minister Baird, and now Minister Prentice, all of them very capable and committed people. I think Mr. McGuinty referred to the number of ministers. My understanding is that during those years when not much happened, there were five Liberal ministers; we have had three in the time I've been able to represent the government as a parliamentary secretary. They have been years of getting a lot of things done, and again we have before us this discussion paper.

My question refers to a statement Minister Ambrose made just after we became government in 2006. She said that she would be looking at a range of options, including legislation around national sustainable development and reviewing global best practices as Canada makes further progress toward putting sustainability at the heart of the government's activities.

Can you tell us how the government has kept that promise?

[Michael Keenan]

I'd be happy to. Thank you for the question.

In terms of going back to the quote from the Minister of the Environment that you just went through, the proposed system, we believe, delivers on that commitment and that vision going back a couple of years in each of the three key changes.

For example, the change had mentioned about linking the sustainable development into the expenditure management system. If you go to the OECD, if you go to the best practices on sustainable development, the International Institute for Sustainable Development's 19-country survey, they keep coming back to this key touchstone that if sustainable development is going to change decision-making, it has to be mainstreamed into the decision-making system. Bringing sustainable development into the expenditure management system does exactly that, and that is one where I think there's a strong resonance between the best practice globally and a key change here that reflects where the minister was trying to go at the time.

On the second—I was not working in the Department of the Environment at the time—I've heard that part of the problem was that the minister at the time was sitting with 32 reports. If you looked at one against the other, they didn't make any sense. They weren't consistent. They didn't add up to any coherent picture. I think that reflects, again, one of the key best practices you see in sustainable development, that across a government, across a society, you need something that puts together different activities of different departments into a coherent picture.

This moving to a whole-of-government approach, where we establish all-of-government targets and then organize the activities across different departments, it doesn't matter where they are, by the targets and by the result that the government is trying to achieve and has held itself accountable to would be a second key evolution and a second key improvement that reflects the minister's desire to make changes that align to best practice.

The third—again, a common theme—is you need a system that gives you that “plan, do, check, improve” audit cycle, something that can track progress, and that progress, or lack thereof, can be part of the feedback loop for taking action and adjusting. The three-year cycles for planning and reporting on progress that are part of this strategy, and quite frankly are in the legislation, are key to driving that almost three-year cycle of ongoing improvement.

The commitment to move towards results-based indicators of progress as opposed to activity-based is a fundamental one. If you read through the reports that have been part of the former system, sometimes they're indicators of progress. Where a public servant went to a conference and presented a paper, that's a good activity, but that's not progress in terms of environmental sustainability...and shifting away from those kinds of indicators to ones about the environment improving in a local or a national context.

I think those three key features, which align to best practices you see in the OECD and other organizations that have looked rigorously at sustainable development, are delivering a change that I believe—I can't speak for the minister—delivers on the promise of what she was trying to commit the government to in 2006.

[The Chair, Conservative, James Bezan]

Thank you.

Your time has expired.

[Mark Warawa, Conservative, Langley, BC]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, James Bezan]

I know it goes fast when you're having fun.

So we'll go to the five-minute round.

Mr. Scarpaleggia, please.

[Francis Scarpaleggia, Liberal, Lac-Saint-Louis, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Obviously, we support this initiative because it was this very committee that examined Mr. Godfrey's bill and recommended that it be adopted.

This afternoon, we are having a discussion of a very high conceptual nature. We are talking about initiatives that are good in and of themselves, about goals and about aligning the activities of each department. However, can you explain further to me how in concrete terms the system will work?

Each department will submit sustainable development plans to your office. However, what happens if a department's goals are not aligned with, or maybe even run counter to, those of other departments?

Would you contact your minister and would he speak to the Minister of Natural Resources to advise him that his sustainable development plan does not work because it clashes with your department's plan, or that of the Department of Fisheries and Oceans?

Explain to me how this will actually work on a day-to-day basis.

[Michael Keenan]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

The honourable member has described, I believe in a very clear way, one of the key challenges of the former system, which was that each department wrote its own plan, so each plan had its own set of objectives and its own framework. They didn't actually necessarily go together, and you couldn't get a picture.

On a very practical level, one of the key changes is that the starting point in this new system, as required by the legislation that this committee was instrumental in producing, is not a departmental plan but an entire federal government plan. Our office works with all the departments to understand what they're doing, what they're trying to do, and put that into a coherent picture of overarching goals of government-wide targets and of implementation activities to deliver on that.

[Francis Scarpaleggia, Liberal, Lac-Saint-Louis, QC]

With all due respect, I have to interrupt you. My time is limited.

The fact is that you receive recommendations, but the departments' proposals, goals and targets have to come from somewhere. You're not the one coming up with projects for every department. You receive a document from a department, along with recommendations, and if these are not aligned with the goals of other departments, you speak to your deputy minister who in turn speaks to an assistant or to the minister and tells them to contact a particular minister because his objectives do not jibe with the federal government's vision of sustainable development. It is possible that things could come to a bureaucratic impasse.

[Michael Keenan]

You're absolutely right. This strategy does not replace government decision-making. The targets and the implementation strategies are not established only by departments, they actually have to be established through decision-making processes. So a memorandum to cabinet goes to cabinet and is approved, and the programming then has to be submitted to Treasury Board for approval. By bringing all of this integrated picture of sustainable development together, it brings that information to the decision-making, first of all.

Secondly, there are gaps. Even if you look at this table, there are some areas where the government currently doesn't have a target but is working towards one. I believe the strategy makes that more transparent. As my colleague was mentioning, their good work on greening government operations, I would submit, has been accelerated and is given more force by the fact that we're publishing documents to all Canadians showing that we do not yet have targets but are working towards them.

[Francis Scarpaleggia, Liberal, Lac-Saint-Louis, QC]

I quite understand. Every year, or every three years, you will draft a report indicating whether or not the government has met its own objectives. Will you report to the House of Commons, or to the Senate? We will see about the Senate a little later. One bill focuses on the Senate. So then, you will submit a report every year to the House of Commons and point out that while the government has set a specific goal, it has only been 60%, 40% or 80% successful in meeting that goal. Am I correct?