Evidence of meeting #17 for Environment and Sustainable Development in the 41st Parliament, 1st session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was enforcement.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Conservative
Stephen Woodworth Conservative Kitchener Centre, ON
Regarding the minor ones, can you give me an example of a minor one, where a warning was issued and you found there was no follow-up?
Principal, Sustainable Development Strategies, Audits and Studies, Office of the Auditor General of Canada
Yes. I have several examples in my package, if you'll bear with me for a second.
Principal, Sustainable Development Strategies, Audits and Studies, Office of the Auditor General of Canada
Yes. I'm not sure if—
Conservative
Principal, Sustainable Development Strategies, Audits and Studies, Office of the Auditor General of Canada
Yes, we have one example where there was a spill of PCBs in the Maritimes. The company itself reported the incident in February 2007. In May 2007, three months later, the department decided an investigation was warranted. In November of that year, nine months later, the decision was made to take no enforcement action because by that time the evidence would have disappeared.
Conservative
Principal, Sustainable Development Strategies, Audits and Studies, Office of the Auditor General of Canada
The entity reported that the spill had been cleaned up. Nobody verified that in fact it was.
Conservative
Principal, Sustainable Development Strategies, Audits and Studies, Office of the Auditor General of Canada
There was a warning letter sent in February 2007.
Conservative
Stephen Woodworth Conservative Kitchener Centre, ON
You said that by the time the period elapsed, the evidence wouldn't have existed. Can I conclude anything other than that the spill was cleaned up?
Principal, Sustainable Development Strategies, Audits and Studies, Office of the Auditor General of Canada
I'm not sure what you might conclude.
December 13th, 2011 / 12:35 p.m.
Conservative
Principal, Sustainable Development Strategies, Audits and Studies, Office of the Auditor General of Canada
Because the department did not follow up to verify that the spill had been cleaned up.
Conservative
Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development, Office of the Auditor General of Canada
If I could help, there could be two possible scenarios. The good scenario is that the entity responsible for the spill cleaned it up. Nobody checked. The other one is that the evidence was washed away. It sank into the soil, went into the groundwater, so no one knows.
Conservative
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Mark Warawa
The time has expired, unfortunately.
Ms. Duncan, you have seven minutes.
Liberal
Kirsty Duncan Liberal Etobicoke North, ON
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I'd like to thank you all for your tremendous work in your comprehensive report, for the time you took and your effort and attention to detail.
I believe effective enforcement is essential if environmental legislation is to be complied with. I think there has been criticism from academia, civil society, and the media regarding perhaps the government's unwillingness to crack down on environmental offences. Results matter, rather than just commitment.
I'm wondering what the publicly available information regarding inspections, investigations, prosecutions, and convictions tells us about how the environment is being protected and how damage to the environment is being minimized.
Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development, Office of the Auditor General of Canada
Thank you for the question.
I would say, first of all, that we have access powers through the Auditor General Act, so I can't speak on what's publicly available. What I could say is that in the two chapters in which we looked at enforcement-related matters, we identified similar weaknesses among the three different departments. So there were similar weaknesses in Transport Canada, Environment Canada, and the NEB, and these were long-standing. This committee identified 13 years ago many of the issues we've raised today. Transport Canada did its own analysis five years ago.
Among those issues is that inspectors will go out and find a problem, or they'll take note of a problem that a company has mentioned, but then there is no follow-up. For NEB, there was no follow-up in 93% of the cases where a deficiency was found; for Transport Canada, 73% of the time there was no follow-up; and Environment Canada did better with a little over 50%.
But if you don't follow up, you don't know if the problem has been fixed. You literally just do not know whether all the effort and resources that have gone into doing the inspection have solved the problem or not. When you find a problem, you want to know if it's been fixed. That was one issue.
There are others, including gaps in training, gaps in laboratory capacity, and gaps in doing coherent risk assessment. Being able to evaluate where the biggest risks are is particularly important now with shrinking budgets. You can't regulate thousands and thousands of different enterprises to find out what the biggest risks are. We found weaknesses in all three entities in the risk assessment.
Liberal
Kirsty Duncan Liberal Etobicoke North, ON
What would you say are the biggest risks that we need to address?
Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development, Office of the Auditor General of Canada
It wouldn't be for us to identify what those risks are. But we looked at the systems that the three entities have in order to evaluate those risks. We've said, for example, that Transport Canada doesn't have a coherent risk assessment strategy at a national level. That literally means that a truck carrying a dangerous product from the Maritimes would potentially have a different risk weighting when it got to British Columbia, even if it's carrying exactly the same dangerous or toxic substance. We need to have some coherence in how the risks are actually assessed, and then we could know if that the biggest risk is going to be in that particular area with that particular operator, or based on that history of violations in the past. If that information is not compiled and readily accessible to senior management, they're essentially off and guessing in the dark where they're going to be putting scarce resources.
Liberal
Kirsty Duncan Liberal Etobicoke North, ON
Thank you.
Do you feel that all enforcement departments have enough money, employees, and the necessary tools to do regular enforcement?
Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development, Office of the Auditor General of Canada
I would say that's a policy issue.
And just to underscore the honourable member's previous question, the government in 2007 increased the resources to Environment Canada for its enforcement branch. But I think it's up to the committee and members of Parliament to ask the departments about resource issues. It's a policy-related issue that we avoid. But I think it's something the honourable member may want to pose to the deputy, or to others in the three departments.
Liberal
Kirsty Duncan Liberal Etobicoke North, ON
I appreciate that.
Do you feel that Canadians are getting value for their money, and are the environment and the health and safety of Canadians being suitably protected?