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.
11:35 a.m.
Commissioner, Office of the Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development
Everybody has to demand it as well. Ministers have to ask. The cabinet has to ask. PCO has to enforce it. There are a variety of ways that this could be done.
11:35 a.m.
Liberal
Mark Gerretsen Liberal Kingston and the Islands, ON
I'll talk to some of them.
I'm just going to switch to the pipelines for a second. You have noted one observation here that really stands out for me. I'm going to read it, because I think it's worth repeating. “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 We found that the board's tracking systems were outdated and inefficient.”
This is what the board is for. How many audits have you done?
11:35 a.m.
Commissioner, Office of the Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development
Do you mean how many have I personally done?
11:35 a.m.
Commissioner, Office of the Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development
I'm in the second year of my mandate, and these three are the first ones I've commissioned.
11:35 a.m.
Liberal
Mark Gerretsen Liberal Kingston and the Islands, ON
On a scale of one to 10, how alarming is that to you?
I'm trying to get a sense of that. That seems like a pretty big deal to me. That's what the board is there to do.
11:35 a.m.
Commissioner, Office of the Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development
I'm appointed by the Auditor General, who provides me with advice. His reaction was that the NEB was not doing its job.
11:35 a.m.
Liberal
Mark Gerretsen Liberal Kingston and the Islands, ON
I think I still have just over two minutes. I'll turn the rest over to Mr. Amos.
11:35 a.m.
Liberal
William Amos Liberal Pontiac, QC
Thank you.
That's a great line of questioning by my colleague. I appreciate the suggestion that we bring the cabinet directive on strategic and environmental assessments to a broader level around environmental assessment performances. It's a well-known fact that several mandate letters suggest we're going to go in that direction.
Just to quickly bring you back for a couple of further comments around special reviews and the PMRA. Your report examined the agency's approach to these special reviews. Can we just quickly confirm the period of the behaviour over which your audit took place?
We're a new government, so we're trying to evaluate if this was behaviour that took place in the last five years, eight years, 10 years.
11:40 a.m.
Commissioner, Office of the Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development
It was the last five years.
11:40 a.m.
Liberal
William Amos Liberal Pontiac, QC
Okay, so we're walking into an opportunity to fix the situation.
You noted in your report that it took court proceedings to get the PMRA to initiate 23 special reviews in 2013 of the active ingredients used in hundreds of pesticides that are banned in Europe for a variety of health and environmental reasons.
I wonder if you could comment on the fact that, as you noted, 15 of the 23 special reviews were previously requested in 2006 and wrongly denied. That was your assessment.
11:40 a.m.
Commissioner, Office of the Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development
That's a very technical question. I'm going to pass it over to Andrew.
11:40 a.m.
Andrew Ferguson Principal, Office of the Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development
I think there was some confusion within the agency as to whether they're cyclical reviews. The 15-year reviews would be an adequate substitute for a special review.
Many of the pesticides they decided not to conduct special reviews on were either planned to be or in the process of being subjected to that thorough a 15-year cyclical review. The courts ruled that this review did not substitute for a special review and the order was to proceed with special reviews, which are more narrowly focused on specific issues than the broader review.
11:40 a.m.
Liberal
William Amos Liberal Pontiac, QC
Thanks.
Are there any broad comments around the need to establish a culture of precaution within the PMRA?
11:40 a.m.
Commissioner, Office of the Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development
Again, it's difficult for me to comment when we don't audit. I guess generally, the precautionary principle probably needs to be infused throughout the culture everywhere.
11:40 a.m.
Liberal
11:40 a.m.
Conservative
Jim Eglinski Conservative Yellowhead, AB
Thank you.
I'd like to go back to the National Energy Board and tracking compliance. I was quite interested in your comments about the 50% done and the 50% not done. We could criticize or we could have some questions.
First, of the 50% they did track, and during your audit, was there any clear picture of companies not complying with the policies and procedures as they went ahead with their projects?
Second, following through the discussion of everybody needing more people in their departments, can part of the assumption be, because they only got 50% done, they are having a hard time in that department recruiting personnel with the expertise to do that type work in the field? Government is always competing against industry, and industry is always paying larger amounts of money for those people. I'm wondering if that was indicated in part of your review, if you saw some trends that way.
11:40 a.m.
Commissioner, Office of the Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development
I can answer the second one quite easily. I might need you to repeat the first part.
We noted in our audit that human capacity was an issue for the NEB. They're having difficulty attracting, recruiting, and retaining specialized staff. They are located in Calgary, they are competing with the private sector, and that makes it quite difficult.
We've made recommendations that they may need to negotiate special dispensation with Treasury Board to be able to compete more equally with the competition. Right now, the competition is probably not that high and they probably can recruit and retain. But when the commodity cycle is different, they have a much bigger problem.
Could you repeat your first question?
11:40 a.m.
Conservative
Jim Eglinski Conservative Yellowhead, AB
Of the cases the NEB reviewed through its process, and had time to do, did you look at any of those files that it reviewed or inspected, regulatory or whatever? Were there any indications—of the ones that it did do, the 50%—that there was a clear violation by industry out there? Or was industry following good practices in safety and following and complying with the regulatory procedure?
11:40 a.m.
Commissioner, Office of the Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development
It was quite clear that industry was complying. The fall-down was that companies would send in documents to say how they were going to comply with a deficiency, and they would hear nothing. They wouldn't know whether things were good, whether everything was A-okay, or whether they were still not in compliance. They were waiting for the NEB to get back to them so that they would know. But it was pretty clear to us in the audit that the companies were doing their jobs. It was the NEB that wasn't properly tracking it and getting back to them.
11:45 a.m.
Conservative
Jim Eglinski Conservative Yellowhead, AB
What were the companies doing, waiting or continuing on in the process?
11:45 a.m.
Commissioner, Office of the Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development
They were continuing on. They were just operating.
11:45 a.m.
Liberal
11:45 a.m.
Commissioner, Office of the Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development
Just to be clear, we didn't audit the companies. We were only auditing the regulator.
