That's quite a broad question.
Over the past five years, we've been looking at whether or not departments have been implementing the cabinet directive to review environmental impacts of all policies, programs, and projects that are put forward to ministers and to cabinet. The cabinet directive says that each one of these policies and programs is supposed to be vetted for environmental impacts, both positive and negative, and that this information is supposed to be brought forward to the minister and/or to cabinet.
Generally what we've found over the five or six years that we've been looking.... Basically we have 26 agencies that are responsible for doing this, and we've chopped it up and looked at four to six agencies per year. Overall, what we found is that the cabinet directive is better followed when the proposal goes to cabinet, and in that case I'm going to generalize and say that about 40% of the time that a proposal goes to cabinet, a strategic environmental assessment has been done. Very little information goes to a minister, when there is a minister, about either positive or negative impacts. There can be positive environmental impacts as well, and the minister should be aware of that. Very rarely do proposals get vetted for their environmental impacts, either positive or negative, when they go to the minister.
This is just one piece of the federal sustainable development strategy. That strategy and the new act have much broader scope than just looking at environmental effects, but our audits have been on that one piece of the old federal sustainable development strategy. It said clearly that all the departments were going to improve their use of the cabinet directive, so we looked at that slice, not at the whole thing.