Thank you.
Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for coming.
Mr. Fadden, I'd like to go back to a couple of comments you made about the purpose of the department. You are, I understand, the only department with enabling legislation that speaks directly to the concept of sustainable development. It is part of the preamble sections of the act that creates your department, and as such I always assumed NRCan was supposed to be almost a demonstration project for other line departments.
I appreciated your comments about the interdepartmental differences and challenges you face, as well as the multi-stakeholder competing challenges you face with some of the decisions you mentioned earlier, for example, continuing energy megaprojects, the B.C. moratorium, the pipeline, climate change. And I note, just in passing, that in your identification of future unprecedented opportunities for growth there is no reference to nuclear.
But I want to go to the heart of something that has been troubling me and that might help us, as a committee, understand where we should focus our priorities, our energy, and our limited resources. I don't know how the government intends to proceed with respect to the Kyoto Protocol. I don't think any of us really know at this stage. It is a new government, and in fairness, it's probably trying to figure out what it wants to do. The Minister of the Environment is attending a meeting in Bonn in just over a week. As a member of Parliament, I don't know who's in charge of the climate change file. Is it your minister? Is it the Minister of the Environment? Is it the Prime Minister? Is it cabinet collectively?
Our government had a cabinet committee for sustainable development, four or five ministers coming together to try to reflect the notion of sustainable development and its implementation. That's no longer the case. That may be rebooted, I don't know.
But the question I have for you that would be interesting for us I think to decide where we should focus is along the following lines. We have a North American energy working group. We've had it for several years now. I've tracked its work very closely. The Prime Minister was in Mexico with the American President and the Mexican President recently. They spoke about energy security, energy markets, but they didn't utter the words “greenhouse gases” once, not in official communiqués, not in speeches, not in questions taken from reporters.
What is the situation right now with respect to the new government, your department, and the Kyoto Protocol? And you mentioned a North American accord on greenhouse gases. What is the lay of the land right now? Where are we going and who's in charge?