Natural Resources Committee on June 20th, 2006

[Christian Ouellet, Bloc, Brome—Missisquoi, QC]

Are all of those reports available?

[Johanne Gélinas]

Absolutely. Everything is done transparently and everything is made public.

[Christian Ouellet, Bloc, Brome—Missisquoi, QC]

Thank you. I am going to keep going, if you don't mind, because I still have some time left.

Let's come back to natural resources. I really appreciated what my colleague, Mr. Cullen, was saying earlier about natural resources, and about oil in particular. Clearly, there is research to be done on sustainable development.

Currently, we are being subjected to something else. You are somewhat familiar with the situation. Inevitably, with a change of government, everything that was done before is no good, and everything that is being done now is going to be better. I am sure you are finding this situation every bit as difficult as we are.

However, a lot of proposals have been made for a switch to ethanol. Have you done any studies specifically on ethanol, not just environmentally, but also in terms of sustainable development?

[Johanne Gélinas]

I am going to take a first stab at the answer. Yes, we have studied the ethanol issue. My colleague can give you more details about some of the work we have done.

Program development is another part of the work we have done. We will be tabling our report on the Ethanol Expansion Program in September. We are going to keep you in suspense, because those findings will not be released until September. However, John can give you some details on the work we have done.

[John Affleck]

As the commissioner pointed out, we're not really at liberty to release those findings, because we have yet to table that report in Parliament.

The ethanol expansion program at Natural Resources Canada was in fact one of the programs that we examined. Of the programs we examined, we looked specifically at what greenhouse gas emissions reductions they had achieved to date, what they had cost, and how the department monitors and reports on the results.

[Christian Ouellet, Bloc, Brome—Missisquoi, QC]

Are you going to also evaluate the effect on agriculture, and things like this, what the consequences will be?

[John Affleck]

No, that was not part of the scope of the piece of work that will be tabled in September.

[Johanne Gélinas]

Mr. Chairman, I mentioned in my presentation that we had received a petition dealing directly with that issue. Once again, we can get you the details. We call it a petition, but it has nothing to do with signatures. It is actually a request from members of the public about very specific issues. Unlike the Access to Information Act, they are not documents that the government discloses, they are answers to questions produced by the departments.

There is one that deals specifically with that issue. If the committee is interested in the subject, it would certainly be worthwhile to have a look at the questions and answers the government has provided.

[The Vice-Chair, Liberal, Lloyd St. Amand]

Thank you, Mr. Ouellet.

Ms. Bell.

[Catherine Bell, NDP, Vancouver Island North, BC]

Thank you.

Thank you for your very good presentation. It's difficult for me to ask questions because I think what you've said is that you can't answer a lot of things that we want to ask, for opinions and things like that. Also, the ones I'm interested in are the future work and your audit on climate change, which you can't report on.

But you can tell us that you've examined how the federal government is organized to deal with climate change. I'm wondering if you want to expand on that piece of it, for starters.

[Johanne Gélinas]

Absolutely.

I should say, though, just before we get on climate change, that it was difficult for us to figure out what areas of interest you had. We have given you some indication of the work that we have done--the Great Lakes, we have covered water and a lot of other things, mining areas, and other areas like that--where, if you have an interest, based on the audit work we have done, there's a lot we can tell you about.

Of course, climate change is really the flavour of the month, and everybody wants to know more about the upcoming report. But I can ask Richard to give you at least the architecture of that report without getting into the detail.

[Richard Arseneault]

On climate change we have a number of chapters.

The first chapter is about things like governance, how the government is organizing itself to deliver on climate change. Climate change is what we call a horizontal issue; it touches a number of departments, and not only a number of departments but a number of jurisdictions. But at the federal level, we've looked at how the federal government is organizing itself with Environment Canada, Natural Resources Canada, Transport Canada, Agriculture Canada, Industry Canada— all the players.

We've looked at it in the past and have said we have seen some progress. We're looking at it again, and since we looked at it last there have been new plans. In 2005 there were new climate change made-in-Canada plans. Now we're going to have a new one in the fall, likely. That's what we understand when we read the paper; we don't know for sure. We've looked at how they were implementing those plans and what kind of organization they had put in place to coordinate among themselves, because diverse players need to be involved. That's what we're going to be reporting on.

We also looked at what kind of data and analysis the government had used to come up with those targets we have to meet, the ones that were negotiated for Kyoto, and others that were made in Canada. We looked at what kind of analysis was behind them. We're going to report on that.

We looked at some instruments the government has used. For example, with the automotive sector they came up with a memorandum of understanding. We looked at how it was negotiated and what came out of it. We looked at emissions trading, a new tool the government has decided to use in its tool box to deal with climate change. We wanted to see how prepared they were to implement an emissions trading scheme of some sort. You're going to read about that in our chapter one.

We also looked in other chapters at the impact of climate change and what the government is doing to help Canadians adapt to the reality of climate change. That's another chapter, chapter two.

We looked in chapter three at programs at NRCan that my colleague just talked about. We also looked at sustainable government strategy commitments related to climate change, and other aspects as well. And we've looked at an environmental petition related to climate change, a program to buy green energy in the federal government that is led by three departments: NRCan, Environment Canada, and Public Works. We're going to report on that as well, as part of the commissioner's report on climate change.

[Johanne Gélinas]

Let me add that we also looked at SDTC, which is Sustainable Development Technology Canada. It has the mandate to deliver on technological projects that may help reduce greenhouse gas.

[A witness]

It is a foundation.

[Catherine Bell, NDP, Vancouver Island North, BC]

When will that be reported out?

[Johanne Gélinas]

It will be in the last week of September.

[Catherine Bell, NDP, Vancouver Island North, BC]

Okay, so it will be a couple of months.

You talked about a federal water policy and said it's in need of updating. Is there any sense of what's happening with the framework, which was developed and has not been released? Is it going to be released?

[Johanne Gélinas]

That might be a very interesting question for this committee to ask Environment Canada. If you have an interest in water, basically this is the framework or foundation to address water issues in this country. What my colleague was saying is that at the time of the audit we didn't know what the status of the water framework was. That might be something you want to look at in more detail in the fall.

I should say that we ourselves follow up on our own recommendations. We do it usually every two to three years, and in the meantime, when committees are ready to do some work to figure out to what extent those recommendations have been implemented by the department, it helps us a lot to have a good understanding of how much progress has been made in a particular area.

[John Reed]

I just want to add quickly that, as Richard said, we first looked at the status of the federal water policy in the Great Lakes, a piece of work, in 2001. At that time it was generally considered dead. The follow-up work that Richard did confirmed that they've undertaken many efforts to try to revitalize it, but it still hasn't amounted to much.

Last month, the policy research initiative of the PCO convened a large conference in Canada on fresh water policy. It was the culmination of two years of effort to try to revitalize this policy. But even there, the sentiment in the room was essentially that there's no action, no energy around the creation of a renewed water policy. I think many departments just don't know where to go, and they're waiting for some leadership.

NRCan, by the way, is pretty central to aspects of that policy, especially around groundwater mapping.

[The Vice-Chair, Liberal, Lloyd St. Amand]

Thank you, Mr. Reed.

Thank you, Ms. Bell.

Mr. Paradis, go ahead, please.

[Christian Paradis, Conservative, Mégantic—L'Érable, QC]

Madam Commissioner, I understand that you are in a better position to comment on what you audit than to give us your opinions. In your 2005 report, you said: “Commissioner finds federal government chronically unable to sustain its own environmental initiatives.”

Obviously, the bottom line is that sustainable development can only be achieved through responsible development. Can you explain to me, Madam Commissioner, why you said that? Those are facts that you audited at that time, and I would be very interested in hearing what you have to say about that.

[Johanne Gélinas]

First, I would like to take this opportunity to tell you that you are referring to what is called chapter 0 of the commissioner's report. That is where we analyze all of the findings, all of the chapters of the year's report. The common denominators emerge, and it is on that basis that the five of us analyze and identify the main thrusts of the report for the year in progress.

That is what brought me to say that in this case, the government has trouble supporting its own initiatives. Last year, we were able to see, in all of the areas we audited, that the government tends to fire up the engine enthusiastically, but the more time passes, the more things are forgotten and the more commitments are brushed aside. As a result, in view of the findings at the end of the day, we could only conclude that the government never managed to cross the finish line, was not saying that it had succeeded in reaching its goals in this or that way and was not telling us what results it had achieved. So it was an overall finding in relation to the entire report.

We tried for the first time to find the root causes or the origin of the problem. I am going to tell you from memory what our findings were. First, we found that there was a tendency to overcommit and underdeliver.

Second, we said there was a lack of leadership, both within departments and at the political level. The departments themselves told us that they were trying to find out what the government's priorities were and that they were not clear. So they are doing their best with what they have, without any guidelines, so to speak.

We also mentioned that there were turf wars between departments. They have an extremely hard time working together on issues known as horizontal issues.

Finally, we observed that there was a tendency to reinvent the wheel rather than build on solid foundations. One of the problems we identified was how hard it is for the government to objectively analyze its own performance and adjust accordingly to get back on track, if it was off track.

Those observations underpin the comment you quoted.

[Christian Paradis, Conservative, Mégantic—L'Érable, QC]

You mentioned overcommit and underdeliver. What exactly did you find? You may not have a specific answer for me, but I would like to hear your comments.

[Johanne Gélinas]

My colleagues may have some specific examples to give, but basically, the government makes commitments, and when we audit the departments to see whether they can follow through, we find that they do not always have the resources they need to deliver the goods. The departments have to juggle various problems and issues. They have to determine what the priorities are. If there are 25 priorities, ultimately there are really none. The department may have made a commitment on something that is not a priority, but that does not mean that the goods were delivered.

Do we have a concrete example?

[Neil Maxwell]

Certainly, Mr. Chair; I could add a very concrete example from last year's report.

When we looked at oceans management, and we looked to see how well the government had implemented the 1996 Oceans Act, our conclusion was quite a stark one. It was quite negative. I'll read a couple of lines from it:

Implementing the Oceans Act and subsequent oceans strategy has not been a government priority. After eight years, the promise of the Oceans Act is unfulfilled. Fisheries and Oceans Canada has fallen far short of meeting its commitments and its targets.

For example, we talked about the fact that integrated management plans have not been developed as yet, and only two marine protected areas had actually been designated. That gives an example. I chose that one simply because I know your committee has been interested in oceans management issues in prior testimony.

Thank you, Mr. Chair.