Environment Committee on Nov. 18th, 2020

[Raj Saini, Liberal, Kitchener Centre, ON]

Thank you, Chair, and congratulations again on your selection as the chair of this committee.

I want to thank Mr. Hayes and Ms. Hogan and the rest of the team for coming here today.

One of the themes that has emerged through this meeting has been the sustainable development goals. I would like to focus on one because this one I think checks off a lot of boxes that would be very effective in helping the government and the country meet their climate goals. Of particular interest to me is goal 12.3, which deals with food loss and waste and calls on nations to commit to reducing their food waste by 50% by 2030.

I know that you are going to be doing a report mid next year looking at the 2030 agenda for sustainable development. Are you currently thinking about this area at all? Is this an interest of the auditor, to look at this aspect of the sustainable development goals?

[Andrew Hayes]

I would say that, yes, it is an area of interest for us. The audit that we are planning to report in spring 2021 is about the implementation of the sustainable development goals.

I might pass it over to Kim Leach, who is the principal responsible for that audit, to maybe expand on that.

[Kimberley Leach]

Very quickly on that subject, we are doing an audit on protecting Canada's food supply. That will be part of our suite of COVID audits and is targeted for tabling in the fall of 2021. In that audit we are looking at the sustainable development goals and the targets you have referred to.

[Raj Saini, Liberal, Kitchener Centre, ON]

The other follow-up question I have is this. If you are going to be doing that, are you collecting data and how are you collecting that data?

[Andrew Hayes]

Kim, would you like to take that?

[Kimberley Leach]

Sure.

In the food supply audit, we have identified five different programs that the government has implemented as a result of the pandemic suite of spending. We're looking at the extent to which those programs...how they are designed, how they are delivering their programs, the results of these programs and whether they are achieving their results. For example, some of them are designed to get food to vulnerable populations, so we're looking at the extent to which.... We're talking with StatsCan, which collects information on food supply and its supply to vulnerable populations. They have disaggregated data to some extent.

Yes, we are looking at various aspects of the food supply system.

[Raj Saini, Liberal, Kitchener Centre, ON]

Going forward, you said you are going to be looking at five areas, basically. As we get closer to 2030 there are going to be certain areas where we are ahead and there might be certain areas where we're facing challenges.

Will you be doing further audits on specific SDGs, or will these audits always be on the broader thematic of SDGs?

[Andrew Hayes]

As we mentioned, we are incorporating the SDGs and the targets that are supporting them in our audits across the office, so we will most likely be including many SDGs that are doing well and many SDGs that may be in need of improvement in our country.

[Raj Saini, Liberal, Kitchener Centre, ON]

One of the things that has emerged at the United Nations in terms of food loss is to be setting standards where things can be measured, either food loss indexes or food waste indexes.

I am wondering, is there any thought to.... I'm thankful you're doing the audit because I think this is a topic that could really be helpful in multiple areas of our society, but is there any way you are thinking about developing a standard that can be measured going forward?

[Andrew Hayes]

That would be the responsibility of the departments. We would evaluate how they set those standards and whether or not they took into consideration all of the relevant factors in reaching their decisions.

[Raj Saini, Liberal, Kitchener Centre, ON]

Do you think that's a good idea, to have a standard, so there can be a possible measurement as you're accumulating data? One of the problems in this area is that data collection is very weak, not necessarily in Canada but worldwide. There is a very difficult way of quantifying exactly how much food is wasted and how much is lost.

Would you recommend that the government come up with standards and a way of collecting that data to make sure we have some parameters to measure by?

[Andrew Hayes]

We are always in favour of supporting better measures and better methods to collect information to be able to measure progress. It becomes very difficult to report on progress achieved when the measures or the targets that are set are not specific, measurable, attainable, results-based or time-oriented. We do encourage departments and agencies to set standards.

[The Chair, Liberal, Francis Scarpaleggia]

Thank you very much.

We'll move now to Mr. Redekopp, for five minutes.

[Brad Redekopp, Conservative, Saskatoon West, SK]

Thank you to the witnesses for coming today.

Congratulations to the new chair.

I want to follow up on Mr. Godin's last question.

Mr. Hayes, could you please provide a written response to his question, as we ran out of time to get the answer? If you could provide that to the committee, that would be great.

[Andrew Hayes]

We'd be happy to.

[Brad Redekopp, Conservative, Saskatoon West, SK]

Thank you.

Auditor General, I'd like to ask you a question about program auditing.

My background is in business, and I was a professional accountant. Of course I was used to preparing and auditing financial statements in a business environment. Program auditing is obviously different, as you're looking at more than just money. You're looking at the effectiveness of programming, etc.

In the estimates there are many cross-departmental programs or horizontal items. Basically, Finance Canada and the Treasury Board earmark money to one department, like Environment Canada, for example, for planting trees, and then the environment department transfers that money to Natural Resources to deliver the program. It's basically a financial shell game that allows ministers to abandon responsibility for money and programming in their departments.

Two weeks ago at this committee Minister Wilkinson said, “As you will know, most of the tree-planting activity [is] a natural resources-related function”. The minister's mandate letter from the Prime Minister says that the Minister of the Environment is “to operationalize the plan to plant two billion incremental trees over the next 10 years”.

When ministers such as Minister Wilkinson refuse to take responsibility for programs they are mandated with and responsible for under the voted estimates, do you find, from a program auditing perspective, that these types of programs are destined to fail?

[Karen Hogan]

The government is definitely moving in a direction where there is a lot of cross-organizational push for programs to be delivered in such a fashion. I think the challenge from an audit perspective is that this just adds some complexities, as you can likely appreciate, to an audit. Personally, I don't believe that it would result in a program failure. It just means that it takes more coordination and collaboration amongst parties, and when it comes time to audit, it means we need to scope in additional departments and make sure that our roles and responsibilities are clear and that accountability is there.

I just see it as an opportunity, and it's an area that I would like to see us focus in on. Our audits need to be aligned with how the government organizes itself to deliver programs, so I would like to see us spend a little more time doing that, as well as perhaps doing some collaborative work between ourselves and the territories so that we can see the federal-provincial-territorial link to some programs. It's definitely something that's on my horizon during my mandate.

[Brad Redekopp, Conservative, Saskatoon West, SK]

Yes, I can understand how that would make life much more difficult for you.

Does it frustrate you, as the Auditor General, when the Liberals make promises—for example, to better our environment—when they clearly don't have a plan to properly measure, monitor and report on these programs?

[Karen Hogan]

As we've mentioned, it's always a good recommendation to make sure that, when you launch a program, you've thought about how you're going to measure its successes. When we see that missing in a program design, we take the opportunity to recommend that. You achieve what you measure, so every good plan should have some good performance indicators and good measurements to make sure that you know when you're achieving your intended result.

[Brad Redekopp, Conservative, Saskatoon West, SK]

Thank you.

This is for the environment commissioner.

You appeared at this committee in March and reported that the government is “not adequately prepared” for some of its commitments on the environment. In particular, I believe you said that it had “no implementation plan with a system to measure, monitor and report on progress nationally.” The government announced new targets in September's throne speech for planting trees and for the protection of terrestrial and aquatic areas.

If it cannot, in your words, “measure, monitor and report”, what is your expectation for these programs to succeed?

[Andrew Hayes]

That would be exactly what we would go in to audit. We would use the criteria the government has set for itself, the expectations it set, and we would hold it to those very criteria. We would report on the progress that it reaches. We would, obviously, base our reports on exactly what we see in doing our work.

[Brad Redekopp, Conservative, Saskatoon West, SK]

How can you audit a program when there are poor measurements and poor reporting—poor monitoring?

[Andrew Hayes]

In those cases, we generally report to Parliament the weaknesses in the measurements and reporting. We bring that forward and we make recommendations for improvement.

[Brad Redekopp, Conservative, Saskatoon West, SK]

In the case of a project like the tree planting, what are some examples of best practices for measurements that could be used?

[Andrew Hayes]

I'm not actually familiar with the best practices. That would be something that we would look at when we are designing our audit. We would look at other jurisdictions and the way that they do the measurements and reporting.