Environment committee  That would be a question for parliamentarians to make a decision on as opposed to the commissioner.

Environment committee  I think it's a generally accepted—I was going to say philosophy, but that's not the right word; I'm thinking in French. It's generally accepted that most people would like to have confidence in the regulator.

Environment committee  I didn't audit that, so it's difficult for me to respond to that.

Environment committee  I 100% agree, and I believe the NEB would agree with that as well. They're aware that their tracking system, their computer system, is outdated. In a couple of instances, they have already indicated that they would try to resolve that issue. It is absolutely something that the NEB would agree with and that I would agree with.

Environment committee  I can tell you that I worked in the mining sector for several years, and safety is a big question. It is not one thing. Walking out my front door can be safe some days, and other days walking out my front door is not safe. Safety is about culture. Safety is about how people act amongst each other.

Environment committee  In most cases, yes.

Environment committee  I would say that when PMRA re-evaluates the pesticides, we know that in 95% of the cases additional measures are required to protect human health or the environment. Because we still have a backlog of over 80 pesticides that have not been re-evaluated in a timely manner, we would have to say that there is a risk to human health and/or the environment, based on those two pieces of information.

Environment committee  Conditional registrations were used for PMRA to get confirmatory information. They needed additional information, but they felt they had enough information to conditionally register, so temporarily register. They wanted additional information. I would say it created a bit of confusion on the part of the public, the conditional registrations.

Environment committee  No.

Environment committee  What we looked at were all the approval conditions from a period, I believe, of about 14 years. The population was about 1,049 pipeline conditions. We have in the Office of the Auditor General...a statistical genius is what I want to call him. I don't know exactly what his title is, but he can come in and tell us whether or not we're picking random samples, statistically significant samples, etc.

Environment committee  In some cases, yes, the tracking system was part of the problem. In other cases, though, it wasn't just the tracking system. The tracking system was part of the reason why they couldn't give us the information they needed to, but in some cases you could not say it was the tracking system.

Environment committee  Yes. In fact, the way somebody once put it, while the NEB can't track it very well, the companies are actually probably doing a great job. Remember as well, though, that the companies would submit information to the NEB, and possibly because of the tracking system, they didn't always know if they were compliant or not; the NEB didn't get back to them in certain situations.

Environment committee  Madam Chair, thank you so much for inviting us. I was just saying to Mr. Cullen that we have done a lot of audits in the last 20 years and we have a lot of expertise that will hopefully help the committee, so please feel completely free to call upon us at any time. Our job is to serve parliamentarians.

Environment committee  I was just going to add that in one of my upcoming reports—and I believe it'll be tabled in May, although I'm doing so many I can't track if it's May or October—we're looking at the issue of adverse weather and whether Canada is ready for it, and the issue of the national building codes will be addressed at least partially in that chapter.

Environment committee  We haven't seen it yet.