Public Accounts Committee on May 1st, 2008

[The Chair, Liberal, Shawn Murphy]

That wasn't my question at all. Who is providing the leadership? Who is responsible and is going to provide the leadership on this particular issue?

[Daphne Meredith]

We are; Public Works is.

[The Chair, Liberal, Shawn Murphy]

And who at Public Works is going to be prepared to come back here in two years' time—because this has been going on for 13 years—and deal with the issues that haven't been dealt with in 13 years and all the commitments and agreements that have been made and never fulfilled?

[Daphne Meredith]

We'd be very happy to report on our leadership on this issue.

Mr. Chair, with respect, I'd have to say that it's not an area where we haven't made progress. We've made enormous progress. A 26% reduction in GHG emissions in our federal buildings over 14 years, I would argue, is significant progress. I would also argue that in terms of fleets we've made huge progress, and we're recognized internationally as leaders in the area of green procurement. So we have a lot to be proud of, and I wouldn't want that message to be lost.

[The Chair, Liberal, Shawn Murphy]

Ms. Meredith, I've read the report. It's very, very negative, and I will say that if it's your department that over the last 13 years has been providing the leadership, they really have not provided the leadership I would expect as a Canadian taxpayer from my government on this particular issue.

Anyway, I've probably used up enough time. We're going to go to the second round.

Mr. McGuinty, for five minutes it's back to you.

[David McGuinty, Liberal, Ottawa South, ON]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

Mr. Shugart, very quickly—in 30 seconds or less—I want to get this clear. In 2002 our government created the federal house in order initiative. In 2007, you said, it was sunsetted, because effectively it was a five-year funding envelope and it sunsetted.

I understand that the federal house in order initiative called upon departments to agree to collectively reduce emissions from their buildings and vehicles by 31% from 1990 levels by 2010. I recall it because I think I had a hand in a previous life in crafting that standard. By 2002 the departments had reduced their emissions by 24%.

Along comes March 2007, and the government winds up or kills it—whatever—along with a whole series of other programs, such as the commercial buildings retrofit program, for example, which was meeting with huge success in the commercial sector.

Just very quickly, do you have any evidence you could table with us here today that was presented to the government side to justify winding up this program? Was it based on evidence?

[Ian Shugart]

With respect to the data, my understanding is that the last year for which we had data on the reductions was 2005...2003-04 was the last year of the data. I do not know today what further progress has been made en route to that target.

With respect to the decisions about programming by government, those of course were decisions made by ministers in terms of the overall fiscal plan and programming.

[David McGuinty, Liberal, Ottawa South, ON]

In closing on this small issue, were you asked or did you present to the minister or to cabinet evidence to rationalize why those programs, or one, at least, or two—and I can give you a list of 10 otherwise, but the house in order initiative was working well—or any evidence to substantiate the decision taken by the government not to continue funding it?

[Ian Shugart]

Mr. Chairman, officials would have advised ministers, whether on Treasury Board or on other cabinet committees, about the evidence available. And as normally happens, ministers would have made those decisions. Much of that, I'm assuming, Mr. Chair, would be cabinet confidences.

[David McGuinty, Liberal, Ottawa South, ON]

So there are no documents or evidence you can share with Canadians or table with this committee so that we can get a better understanding of the evidentiary process the government would have followed to make a rational decision?

[Ian Shugart]

I would have to verify the nature of the documentation and whether it is in the public domain or not.

[David McGuinty, Liberal, Ottawa South, ON]

This is to all the witnesses.

In 1992 Brian Mulroney went to Rio and did the right thing. He signed on to the Agenda 21, he signed on to an earth declaration, he signed on to and ratified the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, and he signed on to the international forestry convention.

One of the things this compelled this country to do, under Mr. Mulroney—and he did the right thing—was to make a decision that sustainable development, of which green procurement is a subset, would land in the Prime Minister's office. That's why we created the National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy, which used to report to the Prime Minister but now functionally reports to the Minister of the Environment, under the new government.

Mr. Godfrey's bill, if I can come back to this and get a reaction from you, is now calling upon the country to make a shift. We would create a cabinet committee on sustainable development. It would have to devise a national sustainable development strategy—not departmental, not 28 of them, but a national SD strategy.

It would have within it targets: for the short term, one to three years; for the medium term, five to ten years; for the long term, twenty-five years. It would have a firm implementation strategy for meeting each target, which would include, for example, caps on emissions, economic instruments to be used, penalties to be paid, an ecosystem-based management approach, and so on and so forth.

And it actually goes further, because it would then require that the Clerk of the Privy Council, who signs the performance contracts and negotiates them confidentially with each deputy minister, would now hold the deputy minister accountable for performance on sustainable development, including green procurement.

So for those of us who golf—and I don't, but I've driven by golf courses and heard people yelling at the golf ball to sit down on the green—we want this to sit down on the green. It needs to be centred somewhere, so that the situation isn't “everybody's job is nobody's job”.

Could you give us an understanding, if this were actually put at PCO—with an under-secretary of cabinet, for example, responsible for steering, not rowing—would that not help us overcome some of these horizontal challenges we have and these siloed changes we have?

[The Chair, Liberal, Shawn Murphy]

David, that's it.

Do you have a point of order, Mr. Williams?

[John Williams, Conservative, Edmonton—St. Albert, AB]

If his time is up, that's okay. I just thought that was more a political question than a question to the bureaucracy, and therefore I would ask you to rule it out of order.

[The Chair, Liberal, Shawn Murphy]

It was a long question, Mr. Williams. It's not out of order.

I'll ask the witness to answer the question.

[Ian Shugart]

Mr. Chairman, I will answer the part of the question that I can within my limits, if I may.

There are two points I could make.

In the report of the commissioner with respect to sustainable development strategies, the recommendation is made for a comprehensive report by October of this year on the issue of the coordination of SD strategies, including the issues of what I might call organization and governance. The Department of the Environment is doing that, and we are on track. We are doing the analysis, we're working with the other departments, and we will complete that report in the time recommended.

The issues of coordination and governance and how targets are set—the benchmarks that are used and so on—are included in that report as per the recommendation of the commissioner. So from the point of view of some of the analysis as officials, we are engaged in that right now.

As my second point, I would say a little more generally that the issues of target-setting and accountability reflected in the bill being studied now really do go to the heart of what we've been answering questions about this afternoon. And of course it will ultimately be the prerogative, in the case of the bill, of Parliament, and in terms of organization of the government, by our conventions, of the Prime Minister.

There are certain things that, even before that, we are moving on. Under any scenario, I think there will have to be a connection made between the real work of departments, the geographic circumstances, the nature of their business, the trade-offs that are always inherent in making infrastructure investments as opposed to program investments, and so on. We will have to work those out.

At the back end, the reporting to Parliament, we recognize that the objective analysis that would hold all of us to account, regardless of what the specific targets are and how they are derived, is something that, through the continuous improvement in the departmental performance reports, is a vehicle we recognize right now we have to make better use of.

I fully recognize, speaking to the member through you, Chair, that I have not answered the question fully. We are limited in how far we can go in answering that question.

[The Chair, Liberal, Shawn Murphy]

Just before we go to Mr. Fitzpatrick, I want to clarify a matter.

There was a question asked about federal house in order initiative. You are going to provide materials to the committee through the clerk. Of course, we're not expecting any cabinet memos or cabinet confidences or advice to cabinet ministers, but if you have any material on the cancellation of that program, you will provide that to the clerk.

[Ian Shugart]

I will verify the veracity of my answer, Chairman, and we will examine whether there are documents that could be shared with the committee, as you say.

[The Chair, Liberal, Shawn Murphy]

And you'll get back to the clerk.

Mr. Fitzpatrick.

[Brian Fitzpatrick, Conservative, Prince Albert, SK]

Thank you, Chair.

Philosophically, I guess, I'm not a person who believes in ordering and commanding results. That's an approach that government attempts to do quite often, and quite often it leads to a lot of talk and not a whole lot of action. We could even look at the Kyoto treaty itself as evidence of that. We sign on to something, we say we're going to reduce something by 20%, and we find out we're 35% or 40% over. We're all scratching our heads wondering where the plan was and why nothing got done. We feel that if we make a decree or a declaration, everything should automatically happen.

I think most successful leaders and successful organizations today would be highly critical of that approach. Take Dr. Deming and the people who founded the whole total quality management system and the concepts of continuous improvement. They would say that's not an approach that works. You can't decree targets. You have to manage a system and get those results. It takes things like good systems, good management, teamwork, commitment to a process to get on with things, and so on.

Really, what I'm concerned about today is whether in our departments we have actually.... I know that we had ten years during which we had lots of talk and no action.

Madam Meredith, are we making real and concrete progress in reducing our environmental footprint and the waste and mismanagement that goes on in the departments?

[Daphne Meredith]

Mr. Chair, I think we really are making progress. I mentioned some of it earlier. I can cite other examples just from my own department. We're helped by what's happening out there in industry and how different organizations are taking advantage of new technology.

One thing we have signed onto in our department is the BOMA Go Green Plus initiative, which is a way of measuring how buildings perform, how they're operating, what kind of lighting they're using, whether they're efficient enough in all of their operations. We've commissioned one of these BOMA Go Green Plus assessments for all of our 367 crown-owned office buildings of Public Works--

[Brian Fitzpatrick, Conservative, Prince Albert, SK]

If I walked into a department as, let's say, an expert on management, I would consciously look for and would really want to see--you can come up with all the measurements you want and targets and everything else--a living, breathing culture that's committed to good environmental stewardship. I would want to see a department consciously trying to do that. We could have a whole bunch of government people ordering and micromanaging the whole process, but I'd be a lot happier to know, if I walked into a department, that this kind of living, breathing culture was alive there.

If I went into any one of the government departments, would I find that kind of living culture--right from the deputy minister down to the front-line people?

[Daphne Meredith]

I think you'd find it increasingly so.

In our department, as an example, we committed to reducing the number of printers by 50% over the three-year period 2006 to 2009. For the printers we do purchase, we make sure they're green and are meeting an Energy Star standard. The printers, after they finish their useful life, go back--

[Brian Fitzpatrick, Conservative, Prince Albert, SK]

Thank you very much.

I have one other comment. The last thing I'd want to see in this town would be another government department created to try to monitor everybody else. We have something like 400,000 people in this town already engaged in government. Surely to God, nobody could justify and argue that it would be improving the environmental footprint in the country to create another government bureaucracy, with cars, buildings, airplanes flying people around the country, and so on. I would have a whole lot of difficulty trying to figure out how that would move the yardsticks in the right direction. There are enough people already.

Do you feel, Madam Meredith, that there are enough resources in your department to provide the leadership and to get this job done, or do we need another government department?

[Daphne Meredith]

I think we've already made progress, and I think we have what we need to make more.