Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I guess I'll start off by giving a little bit of a summary of one thing that I don't know if you can really answer. The one question I have is whether we are sometimes looking at the leaves and not seeing the forest. There are other environmental problems out there too. There are other ways of tackling this.
Canada is responsible for about 3% of the world's carbon dioxide emissions. When China, Russia, or places like that get rolling, what's 3% in the overall world scheme? I sometimes wonder if maybe we're looking too close to home or maybe not concentrating, because this is not a zero-sum game. Technology exports to help China clean up a coal problem or something like that might be a better way to tackle some of this. I'm just blue-skying here, or even looking at....
As the Minister of Environment pointed out, there are other environmental problems. I mean, 3% out of the whole world's carbon dioxide emissions, even if you accept absolutely everything.... There is the open question of what it would do, and that's something that's not seen. I know that's not something addressed in the audit per se, but it's a broader question that the policy people have to deal with.
I didn't peruse the report in detail, but I did try to read as much of it as I possibly could, and skimmed through it. What I would like you to comment further on and what struck me continually as I read the report was that there was a lack of information, it was difficult to assess, it required knowledge to assess, there was the cost of goals, etc. While Mr. Allen dealt with that by talking about governance and control, the overall question I have is while the governance may be one portion of it, how much data collection is there that's accurate, and how much analysis that is totally broad is there between the departments? Does it vary greatly? I don't know if I'm expressing myself well.
I ask this because in order to make an accurate decision as policy-makers, or to make accurate assessments of its working, you actually need very detailed data. You need the economics. You need the science. It's very complicated.
In your opinion, were the departments collecting the data sufficiently? Did they have enough data? Was it just management of data that was a problem, or was the problem the underlying lack of data that they had in total to make the judgments? Because it's one thing if they just have the data and misused it; it's another thing if they didn't have the resources to get it. Could you make a judgment? If it's the same all across the board, just say it's the same across the board. If different departments did better, I'd appreciate if you woud lay out your opinion on which departments performed better and which departments performed worse.
Is that clear?