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.

On the agenda

MPs speaking

Also speaking

Julie Gelfand  Commissioner, Office of the Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development
Andrew Ferguson  Principal, Office of the Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development
Paul Glover  Associate Deputy Minister, Department of Health
Jeff Labonté  Director General, Energy Safety and Security Branch, Energy Sector, Department of Natural Resources
Josée Touchette  Chief Operating Officer, National Energy Board
Greg Meredith  Assistant Deputy Minister, Strategic Policy Branch, Department of Agriculture and Agri-Food
Jérôme Moisan  Director General , Strategic Policy, Planning, and Research Branch, Department of Canadian Heritage
Yves Giroux  Assistant Commissioner, Strategy and Integration Branch, Canada Revenue Agency
Tom Rosser  Senior Assistant Deputy Minister, Strategic Policy, Department of Fisheries and Oceans
Robert Steedman  Chief Environment Officer, National Energy Board

12:30 p.m.

NDP

Nathan Cullen NDP Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC

What I'm surprised by is that in this most crucial aspect.... The conditions are crucial; they're integral. They are what the government and the regulator hold up to give the public assurances. So when the auditor comes by to say you're tracking those integral conditions and you folks have to go and find manual tracking, your systems are outdated; they're inadequate. You're reviewing something that poses such an obvious and inherent risk when it fails—not just in Kalamazoo, but the Nexen spill of two summers ago.

My question is simply this. Do you have confidence that you will be able to 100% track all of the conditions that are being applied, and by when?

12:30 p.m.

Chief Operating Officer, National Energy Board

Josée Touchette

Yes, I do.

Our corrective action plan stipulates that it's by December 2016, I believe. If you look at our table that we posted yesterday and those 2,869 conditions, we go way beyond what the commissioner had looked at, which was a little over a thousand conditions for major projects. We've looked at everything and you will see that they are being tracked.

12:30 p.m.

Liberal

The Chair Liberal Deb Schulte

Thank you.

Next is Mr. Gerretsen.

12:30 p.m.

Liberal

Mark Gerretsen Liberal Kingston and the Islands, ON

Thank you very much.

I'll give Madame Touchette a breather for a second, but I'll be back.

To Mr. Glover, one of the last comments that you made about pesticide—and I understand that the regulatory agency is self-funded—was that the fees had not been updated since 1997. Are the fees a flat rate? They're obviously not indexed because they haven't been increased.

What's the rationale for the fact that they haven't been increased? I'll start with that.

12:30 p.m.

Associate Deputy Minister, Department of Health

Paul Glover

Thank you very much for the question.

In essence, there are a number of fee lines for different activities. They would be broken down based on what the party is looking for, whether it's the introduction of a new pesticide, a change in it, and so on. There is a range of fees, all with different fees associated with that activity, so that's—

12:30 p.m.

Liberal

Mark Gerretsen Liberal Kingston and the Islands, ON

But they haven't been updated.

12:30 p.m.

Associate Deputy Minister, Department of Health

Paul Glover

They have not been updated.

They are not indexed, so they have remained stagnant, and that is obviously one of the issues.

12:30 p.m.

Liberal

Mark Gerretsen Liberal Kingston and the Islands, ON

I can only assume that more is being charged for pesticides now than in 1997, so the value of that fee being charged is not what it was in 1997.

In your updating process, which I understand you're going through now, will you be looking at a model that indexes to at least inflation on an ongoing basis, so that you don't run into this problem 20 years from now?

12:35 p.m.

Associate Deputy Minister, Department of Health

Paul Glover

The answer to the question, very briefly, is yes. There will be a built-in escalator.

12:35 p.m.

Liberal

Mark Gerretsen Liberal Kingston and the Islands, ON

Thank you.

Now I will go back to the Energy Board. If I understand correctly, you said that you agree with the auditor's findings and you recognize that there had been problems; you knew that the problems existed.

When did you start making the corrective measures? You're talking about it now as though it's ongoing. I'm getting the sense that it was fairly recent.

12:35 p.m.

Chief Operating Officer, National Energy Board

Josée Touchette

Absolutely, so—

12:35 p.m.

Liberal

Mark Gerretsen Liberal Kingston and the Islands, ON

Was it after the auditor's report?

12:35 p.m.

Chief Operating Officer, National Energy Board

Josée Touchette

The chair came in about 18 months ago—I joined six months later—and the auditors began their work, I believe in February. I arrived in January.

In a way, it was good fortune, because—

12:35 p.m.

Liberal

Mark Gerretsen Liberal Kingston and the Islands, ON

It all happened at the same time.

12:35 p.m.

Chief Operating Officer, National Energy Board

Josée Touchette

—you had somebody saying here are the problems and you can focus your resources on those issues.

12:35 p.m.

Liberal

Mark Gerretsen Liberal Kingston and the Islands, ON

I'm glad to hear that you weren't around and knew that this was a problem, and then all of a sudden the auditor came in and you said maybe you should do something about it.

It sounds as though it was all happening at the same time.

12:35 p.m.

Chief Operating Officer, National Energy Board

Josée Touchette

That's right.

12:35 p.m.

Liberal

Mark Gerretsen Liberal Kingston and the Islands, ON

Can we talk about the culture in the agency? I'm hearing that you're having a hard time retaining employment. That's not unique to the energy board. It's a government problem, generally speaking. I was in the municipal sector for a long time, and we ran into that problem all the time, where planners in the city would end up getting snatched up by private developers or development companies.

Why is this different, or why is it more severe at the energy board compared with other agencies?

12:35 p.m.

Chief Operating Officer, National Energy Board

Josée Touchette

Actually this is very interesting, because I don't think it's quite as severe as it may have come across.

It is true that in 2008 we had issues in the order of a 29% rate of attrition for our engineers. However, the private sector found the same thing. We have taken some very specific and very aggressive measures, and the attrition rates are now in the order of 5%, which is kind of across the board.

What's interesting is that a recent study by Hays, who are a specialist recruitment firm in Canada, found that a third of the companies were saying they are facing the same recruitment challenges even in an environment like this one, where layoffs are occurring.

You talk about culture. I want to point out that, for seven years in a row, we have been named one of the top 100 employers in Canada, so I think there are some things we're—

12:35 p.m.

Liberal

Mark Gerretsen Liberal Kingston and the Islands, ON

Maybe it's a stepping stone for businesses to train people, because by the sounds of it, people weren't staying there. At least that was the case if you had a 27% attrition rate previously.

12:35 p.m.

Chief Operating Officer, National Energy Board

Josée Touchette

That was in 2008, which was a peak year in the industry, so we weren't the only ones facing that.

I think we have to be careful when we look at those numbers, because our attrition rates are at par with the rest of the public service.

12:35 p.m.

Liberal

Mark Gerretsen Liberal Kingston and the Islands, ON

If the attrition rates are so much better now—they are a lot lower—why are we seeing this scenario where so much of this work has gone undone? Proper checks and balances weren't in place.

It seems like a very easy thing. You have companies submitting their proposals or whatever they might be, and you're just not getting back to them. You're not tracking that stuff. How does that happen? Is that not one of the most fundamental parts of what you do?

12:35 p.m.

Chief Operating Officer, National Energy Board

Josée Touchette

My assessment, when I came in, was that the IM/IT infrastructure was completely lacking. You had systems that didn't talk to each other. You had very handraulic processes—

12:35 p.m.

Liberal

Mark Gerretsen Liberal Kingston and the Islands, ON

I have five seconds left. If you were to come back in a year from now, how confident are you that you would have a much better story to tell us?

12:35 p.m.

Chief Operating Officer, National Energy Board

Josée Touchette

I am extremely confident.