Evidence of meeting #20 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 infrastructure.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Conservative
Principal, Sustainable Development Strategies, Audits and Studies, Office of the Auditor General of Canada
Yes, in some, but not all.
Conservative
Ed Fast Conservative Abbotsford, BC
My big concern here is that municipalities are incredibly sensitive to intrusion in their area of competence when it comes to infrastructure. The fact that there are federal monies involved shouldn't change that. These are still local priorities. To establish a system of reporting and accountability all the way up to the federal government that imposes significant additional cost on the municipalities will be rebuffed quite strongly.
Liberal
NDP
Fin Donnelly NDP Port Moody—Coquitlam, BC
Infrastructure Canada decided not to proceed with detailed assessments regarding the environmental implications of certain projects, which caused them to miss environmental risks.
Commissioner Gelfand, although you felt that a more detailed assessment was necessary based on evidence from the preliminary scan, Infrastructure Canada did not. Is this a matter of opinion?
Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development, Office of the Auditor General of Canada
Are you talking about the strategic environmental assessments, and the funds? I believe that's what you're talking about.
Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development, Office of the Auditor General of Canada
It's the detailed assessments on the strategic environmental assessment?
Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development, Office of the Auditor General of Canada
I haven't had that question so I haven't studied that as hard.
You may know that one of the things that I keep reporting on every year is how well each department is doing something that a cabinet directive has asked it to do, which is to do a strategic environmental assessment of all the decisions that are made that go to ministers or that go to cabinet. When we were looking at the infrastructure funding and the funds they set up, we wanted to find out whether or not they followed that cabinet directive on strategic environmental assessment.
The results are...? I can't remember.
I think they did in three of them, but not in one.
Is that correct?
Principal, Sustainable Development Strategies, Audits and Studies, Office of the Auditor General of Canada
Yes, they had proceeded to the preliminary strategic environmental assessment, but had not proceeded to a more detailed strategic environmental assessment.
Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development, Office of the Auditor General of Canada
And we do make that call as we go department by department. We've been doing that for the last three or four years, and we will continue to do that until we've finished all 26 departments.
NDP
Fin Donnelly NDP Port Moody—Coquitlam, BC
Of the three reports—in the very few seconds I have—what was the most eye-opening?
Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development, Office of the Auditor General of Canada
The most eye-opening?
NDP
Fin Donnelly NDP Port Moody—Coquitlam, BC
Yes, which did you find was a striking conclusion? You have numerous recommendations. You have a lot of observations. What stood out for you and your findings in these three reports that you think Canadians would be surprised about or that government would be most happy to hear that Canadians didn't realize?
Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development, Office of the Auditor General of Canada
I don't think that Canadians realize that cosmetics are not tested before they're put on the marketplace, and I don't think Canadians know that if they have a safety incident, they should call Health Canada. I had one in my twenties. Every female I talk to has had a problem with a mascara. Call Health Canada. That's number one.
Number two is that we need to consider the changing climate. When we're building new infrastructure, we need to build back better. Once we have had a disaster, we need to build back better. Severe weather is costing Canadians a lot of money. That's taxpayers; that's all of us. When we build climate-resilient infrastructure, we build climate-resilient communities. They can get back in gear faster. Their economies can come back. We need to be thinking about that.
Those are some of the main messages that I wanted to pass on as a result of the audits that we did: build back better, build climate-resilient infrastructure because we are going to have more severe weather, and we need to be able to bounce back quicker. How do we do that?
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Deb Schulte
That's it. We're good.
I think we could go at this all day. I think there's lots of real meat in the report. Unfortunately, I can't. I do have a liaison committee meeting at 1 o'clock, so I can't stay, and we have some committee business to do.
Before I let you go, I did put on the table a thought that we should consider having you come back. We need to make a motion to do that. I don't know if you've given some thought to that, whether you think that's something the committee could or should do.
Mr. Fast, what do you think?
Conservative
Ed Fast Conservative Abbotsford, BC
I would be pleased to support that. I'll tell you why. In reading through the reports, they are comprehensive, they contain so much information. We're only able to deal with one aspect of the report. I think most of us around this table have just been able to....
Conservative
Ed Fast Conservative Abbotsford, BC
Exactly. I would love to see us dedicate at least one more full meeting to this so that we can delve into some of the other areas that we didn't get a chance to.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Deb Schulte
That's actually not what I was thinking, but it's something we could consider. We'll have all the departments here. We could suggest that they implement the recommendations and that they have some plans. There was some recognition of a plan that's already been presented. I would like to have us come back to look at where we've gotten after the departments have had a chance to get into the meat of the matter and maybe try to bring forward some changes.
Go ahead, Ms. Gelfand.
Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development, Office of the Auditor General of Canada
My recommendation is to think about what the public accounts committee does. The public accounts committee requires that the departments provide it with an action plan. They don't have to give me an action plan; they have to give Parliament an action plan. From that action plan, you could ask for follow-up.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Deb Schulte
Okay. If we put on the agenda now that we would like that to come back, then everybody involved would know that we're going to be looking for it to come back here. Is that fair? You'll have to clear your schedules.
So there are two aspects. One is that we will formally put on the record that we want to have them come back to committee—not just that they're going to be coming back. We want to carve out some time to dig a bit deeper into that.
You've also brought another suggestion, which is that we go into another session and dig deeper. That's what I thought I heard.
Conservative
Ed Fast Conservative Abbotsford, BC
Yes. I did understand you were talking about a one-year report back to us. I obviously support that.
This report was comprehensive. It covered three main subject areas. We didn't have a lot of time. We've not given a lot of time. Even this meeting is basically a half-hour short. Since my community and region of the Fraser Valley have significant flood risks, and given the fact that this deals with flood mitigation, I would love to delve into it.
We didn't get into the consumer products aspect or much into the chemicals management plan, which we discussed earlier, but this has a different twist to it.
It might be worthwhile for us, when we have an opportunity, perhaps in the fall, to carve out one meeting to do that.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Deb Schulte
As in the early days when we had the first fall report, we used it somewhat to inform the direction we decided to go with the committee on some aspects. I think you're saying that we should probably consider that again. We know that we have a full agenda for this period until the fall, and we still have two elements on our agenda. We have to wrap up our study on protected areas. We're well under way with CEPA. We have some climate change technologies that we need to look at.
As we start to assess those, we could maybe start to open up the rest of our plan for the fall and bring this back.