Evidence of meeting #4 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 process.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Liberal
The Chair (Mrs. Deborah Schulte (King—Vaughan, Lib.)) Liberal Deb Schulte
Welcome, everybody, and thank you all very much for being here on time.
I welcome our four wonderful guests who are going to be speaking with us.
We have 10 minutes for the commissioner and her team. I'm going to them: Andrew Ferguson, Kimberley Leach, and Joe Martire.
We'll start with Ms. Gelfand.
Go ahead, please. Thank you.
Julie Gelfand Commissioner, Office of the Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development
Madam Chair, thank you so much for inviting us. I was just saying to Mr. Cullen that we have done a lot of audits in the last 20 years and we have a lot of expertise that will hopefully help the committee, so please feel completely free to call upon us at any time. Our job is to serve parliamentarians. We enjoy doing this and would like to be at your service in whatever way we can.
I'm pleased to be here today to present the findings of my fall 2015 reports, which were tabled in the House of Commons on January 26. I'm accompanied by Andrew, Kim, and Joe, and they were responsible for the actual reports.
The first audit we looked at examined how the Pest Management Regulatory Agency has managed selected aspects of its mandate. The agency is tasked with determining which pesticide products should be registered for use in Canada and under which conditions. There are currently 7,000 pesticides containing some 600 active ingredients available in the Canadian marketplace.
The agency is required to re-evaluate the safety of registered pesticides every 15 years. Ninety-five per cent of the agency's re-evaluations have resulted in additional precautions to protect human health or the environment.
During the period under audit, the agency completed some 14 re-evaluations per year. At the end of our audit, more than six times that number remained incomplete. With more re-evaluations due to start each year, the agency needs to quicken its pace to prevent unacceptable risks to people and the environment from the unsafe use of pesticide products.
I am also concerned that it took the agency an average of five years—and up to eleven years—to remove some pesticides from the market when it determined that they posed unacceptable risks for all uses.
The Pest Management Regulatory Agency may grant a conditional registration when it finds it needs more information to confirm its assessment of a product's value and of the risks to human health or the environment. During the time a pesticide is conditionally registered, it can be bought and used, and other products containing the same active ingredient may also be marketed.
We found that nine products remained conditionally registered for more than a decade. Eight of these belong to the neonicotinoid class of pesticides. These products continue to be used extensively in Canada despite widespread concern that they may pose a threat to bees, other pollinators, and broader ecosystems. We did note that the agency announced it will no longer grant conditional registrations starting June 1 of this year.
Our second audit examined the National Energy Board's oversight of federally regulated pipelines. The energy board sets the requirements that companies must satisfy to ensure the safe operation of some 73,000 kilometres of pipelines that are used to transport oil and gas to customers in Canada and abroad.
Our audit concluded that the board did not adequately track companies' implementation of pipeline approval conditions, and that it was not consistently following up on company deficiencies. We found that the board's tracking systems were outdated and inefficient.
We also concluded that the National Energy Board is facing ongoing challenges to recruit and retain specialists in pipeline integrity and regulatory compliance.
With the anticipated increase of pipeline capacity and the coming into force of the Pipeline Safety Act by June 2016, it is clear that the National Energy Board needs to do more to keep pace with the rapidly changing context in which it is operating.
Our final audit examined selected departments' progress in meeting the commitments made in their sustainable development strategies to strengthen their strategic environmental assessment practices.
Cabinet has required, since 1990, that 26 government departments and agencies carry out strategic environmental assessments of the proposed programs and policies they submit to ministers when implementation could have important positive or negative impacts on the environment.
In our 2015 audit we found that the current cabinet directive was applied to only five of the more than 1,700 proposals submitted to the ministers responsible for Agriculture Canada, the Canada Revenue Agency, Canadian Heritage, and the Department of Fisheries and Oceans.
This means, for example, that no information about potentially important environmental effects was provided to support the proposal for the 2015 Pan American and Parapan American Games. Similarly, the cabinet directive was not applied to the proposed transfer for the purposes of building a hospital on 60 acres of land of designated historical importance.
We also presented parliamentarians with our annual report on environmental petitions. These petitions are important mechanisms created by Parliament as a way for Canadians to get answers from federal ministers to their questions relating to the environment and sustainable development.
Our office received 15 environmental petitions on a range of topics, including the transport of hazardous substances and concerns about human and environmental health. In 97% of cases, departments and agencies provided their responses within the 120-day statutory deadline. Overall, these responses were complete and relevant.
Past petitions have prompted such action by federal departments as new environmental projects, follow-up on alleged violations, and changes or clarifications in policies and practices. I encourage all Canadians to use this important mechanism.
Finally, as you know, we provide Parliament with information that can be used by parliamentary committees when they conduct hearings on our reports or on audit-related topics. To help you in this capacity I've attached to my opening statement a list of questions you may wish to ask department officials should such hearings take place.
I hope you will find this information useful. It was another member of Parliament who indicated to me in the past that these questions were very helpful to them.
Madam Chair, that concludes my opening remarks. We are happy to answer any questions you may have.
Thank you.
Commissioner, Office of the Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development
No.
Conservative
Ed Fast Conservative Abbotsford, BC
Thank you.
Thank you, Commissioner, for appearing before us. The information you've provided was very helpful.
Can you, first of all, explain to us how you actually conduct these audits, especially as they relate to pipeline monitoring and making sure conditions are followed up on? Are you actually choosing specific pipeline projects, either on a spot-audit basis or otherwise, or did you just do a general review of the processes within the NEB to determine exactly how that takes place?
Commissioner, Office of the Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development
What we looked at were all the approval conditions from a period, I believe, of about 14 years. The population was about 1,049 pipeline conditions. We have in the Office of the Auditor General...a statistical genius is what I want to call him. I don't know exactly what his title is, but he can come in and tell us whether or not we're picking random samples, statistically significant samples, etc. He helped us design and pick a random sample of 49 conditions—randomly selected and considered as a representative sample. We then asked the National Energy Board to provide us with information on the status of those conditions.
Conservative
Ed Fast Conservative Abbotsford, BC
All right.
I'm looking at the actual conclusions that you set out in your report. One, of course, was that the board was not adequately tracking company implementation of pipeline approval conditions or consistently following up on deficiencies in company compliance.
Then there was a concern about the information management systems that were used for those purposes. Are those tracking systems, which you suggest were outdated and inefficient—we're not challenging that at all—directly related to the shortcomings of the tracking and follow-up on company deficiencies?
Commissioner, Office of the Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development
In some cases, yes, the tracking system was part of the problem. In other cases, though, it wasn't just the tracking system. The tracking system was part of the reason why they couldn't give us the information they needed to, but in some cases you could not say it was the tracking system. They were missing documents for 10 years. A study was supposed to be prepared for the NEB. When we asked about it, they didn't know about it. It was 10 years late. That wasn't because of the tracking system.
Some of it is related to the tracking system and some of it is not.
Conservative
Ed Fast Conservative Abbotsford, BC
The board was able to demonstrate, through a manual record search, that most of the conditions and the corrective actions that were required were actually followed up on. Is that correct?
Commissioner, Office of the Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development
Yes. In fact, the way somebody once put it, while the NEB can't track it very well, the companies are actually probably doing a great job.
Remember as well, though, that the companies would submit information to the NEB, and possibly because of the tracking system, they didn't always know if they were compliant or not; the NEB didn't get back to them in certain situations.
It's not a cut-and-dried “this is terrible and this is great”. It's a situation where half of the time everything was tracked well, where everything was done well, and half of the time it wasn't. In some cases it was simply that they didn't tick a box. In other cases, it went all the way to their not knowing they were missing a document that was due 10 years ago.
Conservative
Ed Fast Conservative Abbotsford, BC
You referenced manual records. I'm making the assumption, and I think it's correct, that the NEB needs to drag its data management process into the 21st century and make sure that we have modern technology available to help a limited number of staff do the tracking that's required.
Commissioner, Office of the Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development
I 100% agree, and I believe the NEB would agree with that as well. They're aware that their tracking system, their computer system, is outdated. In a couple of instances, they have already indicated that they would try to resolve that issue. It is absolutely something that the NEB would agree with and that I would agree with.
Conservative
Ed Fast Conservative Abbotsford, BC
Okay.
Can you actually say, from your audit, that pipeline safety was actually compromised as a result of some of the deficiencies you've identified?
Commissioner, Office of the Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development
I can tell you that I worked in the mining sector for several years, and safety is a big question. It is not one thing. Walking out my front door can be safe some days, and other days walking out my front door is not safe. Safety is about culture. Safety is about how people act amongst each other. Are you interdependent or dependent?
We cannot, in our audit, tell you.... We cannot claim, either way, safety or not safety based on our audit. Safety is a much bigger slice. Our audit cannot be conclusive on that.
Conservative
Ed Fast Conservative Abbotsford, BC
But you were able to conclude that the companies themselves appear, in most cases, to have been following up to address the conditions and the deficiencies that had been identified. Is that correct?
Commissioner, Office of the Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development
In most cases, yes.
Liberal
William Amos Liberal Pontiac, QC
Thank you.
Thank you, Ms. Gelfand, for a great presentation and for your entire team's diligence in pursuing the work that the commissioner pursues. I know it's very challenging, it's rigorous, and you guys are recognized across the world for doing this kind of work.
The audit of the PMRA is pretty damning. There's no way around that. The facts speak for themselves. It points to the fact that Canadians are at risk from pesticide use.
Would you say that's a fair statement?
Commissioner, Office of the Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development
I would say that when PMRA re-evaluates the pesticides, we know that in 95% of the cases additional measures are required to protect human health or the environment. Because we still have a backlog of over 80 pesticides that have not been re-evaluated in a timely manner, we would have to say that there is a risk to human health and/or the environment, based on those two pieces of information. There is some risk.
Liberal
William Amos Liberal Pontiac, QC
You acknowledge in your presentation that Health Canada, Minister Philpott, has made a decision announcing that it will stop issuing new conditional registrations. In your opinion, is that a positive development?
Commissioner, Office of the Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development
Conditional registrations were used for PMRA to get confirmatory information. They needed additional information, but they felt they had enough information to conditionally register, so temporarily register. They wanted additional information. I would say it created a bit of confusion on the part of the public, the conditional registrations. But I think it's too soon to tell whether it will be of benefit or not. There could be a negative to not having conditionals if we're approving pesticides before we have all the information we need.
The conditional registrations did create confusion, and created an opportunity for pesticides that hadn't received final okay to be in circulation and to be used for 10 or, the last time we audited, 20 years.
Liberal
William Amos Liberal Pontiac, QC
That's my understanding. It would be impossible for us to presume that PMRA would allow the full registration of products without having full information, in terms of seeing the removal of this conditional approach as being a potential danger. My sense is that this measure is a direct response to the audit that you conducted. Would you suggest this is the case?
Commissioner, Office of the Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development
I would agree. I know PMRA had been thinking about removing the conditionals for a little while, but we've audited this issue several times and each time we've found pesticides that have been conditionally registered, which is okay, but for two decades, for more than five years, for 10 years? How long do we keep a pesticide in this status, where we think it's okay but we're not 100% sure and we're still waiting for data? That probably increases the risk.