Evidence of meeting #2 for Environment and Sustainable Development in the 42nd Parliament, 1st session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was going.
A recording is available from Parliament.
NDP
Nathan Cullen NDP Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC
To have her in twice, unless there's some nuance about it.... The way I read it, I could have been reading your proposal wrong.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Deb Schulte
Why don't you let me quickly explain what we had in mind, and then you can go from there.
What we had in mind is on Thursday, two days from now, we're going to have the commissioner in to give her overall mandate. She's going to have Environment and Climate Change Canada, Parks Canada, and the Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency come in to talk to us. That's what we're going to have. For that whole day, the whole meeting is for her and those three—
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Deb Schulte
It's not the report. It's not her audit. She's talking about her department.
NDP
Nathan Cullen NDP Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC
Okay, is it like an intro to the environment commissioner?
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Deb Schulte
It's like a one-on-one. You see, some of you have more experience than others around the table, and a lot of us are new. We thought it would be helpful, before we start deciding, to hear from her what her issues are with the department, what they are doing, and what way they're going. It's a 101 basically, and then we're having the agency and the departments come and talk to us.
Tuesday is when I propose to have her back. In essence, those departments she did the audit on would also be present so that if we had questions we'd be able to talk to them, too.
NDP
Nathan Cullen NDP Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC
That's normal and I think it's good, because she's going to have critiques of certain departments, and officials are going to want to tell us why she's wrong.
NDP
Nathan Cullen NDP Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC
On the 101 piece, I'm going to respectfully disagree about the idea of having her twice. It's not complicated. The commissioner is a part of the Auditor General's office. She has a brief on it.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Deb Schulte
She's not the main piece. She's going to come in and do a quick presentation, and then the departments are going to talk to us about what they're dealing with.
NDP
Nathan Cullen NDP Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC
That's the first one. So she will say hello as if she were a department, and then CEAA will say hello.
NDP
Nathan Cullen NDP Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC
I rarely want to dive in. This is why I like subcommittees; you can actually start to move around the little pieces to determine what's what. I'm running out of time here, but I've made a commitment to have us discuss the idea of this motion before the minister decides on a nuclear facility, and the clock is ticking.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Deb Schulte
Okay. I said we'd have a discussion for 20 minutes, and we're now at 20 minutes. Let me just make sure I get a couple of things done.
Normally we have a subcommittee for agenda and procedure but we're early and we haven't...so I'm just trying to get going, and then we'll have that little committee meeting and work from there. We may spin off into subcommittees as well, but we're not there yet.
Can I get agreement on the Thursday agenda from the committee? I also need to ask, can we have more than 10 minutes?
Right now we have 10 minutes for Environment Canada. They would like to come but they have more to share with us. They'd like about 20 minutes to talk to us, to present.
Conservative
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Deb Schulte
Just Environment and Climate Change Canada want to come, and they have a 20-minute presentation to give us.
