I think that when sustainable development is put into the environment department, it's ghettoized, and it becomes an environmental strategy and not a true sustainable development strategy. While I too recognize that the environment department will continue to push for looking at it from an environmental perspective, I think that if the Department of Finance, Treasury Board and/or PCO required an environmental assessment of decisions to add to the socio-economic assessment of decisions, it would be followed. I think they have more of a stick, and I think the Minister of Environment and Climate Change Canada just doesn't have that same kind of leverage that the central agencies have.
I know you recommended that as a committee, and that is why we personally would support that. We've seen it in other countries where that occurs, and then it becomes just part of everyday life. Ultimately, you would hope that we don't need a department of environment because all of us are thinking about these decisions from the social, economic, and environmental perspective all the time, and then it's sort of redundant because we're all thinking that way. But we're not quite there yet, so we do need an advocate for that. But to really make it mainstream, you would put it in a central agency.