Environment committee  Our partners would be the cities of Burlington and Hamilton, the Province of Ontario, and the Hamilton Port Authority, and I guess U.S. Steel is there, helping in kind.

Environment committee  Maybe I'll start with the second part of the question, and then I'll turn to Patricia to talk about dissolved phosphorus. Right now, through the Great Lakes nutrient initiative, we're doing a fair bit of research in the Great Lakes into the causes of the problem we're seeing with algae.

Environment committee  Thank you, Chair. Thank you, committee members, for inviting us here today. We are pleased to be here to kick off your study on the Great Lakes water quality, and in particular, to talk about specific locations of environmental concern. As you mentioned, l am joined by my colleague, Michael Goffin, who is the regional director general of our Ontario office, and Dr.

Environment committee  I think the point Mr. Prosper made is that we get the budgets and we try to set priorities and meet our objectives within those budgets. We try to do things more efficiently, if we can find ways to do things more efficiently. We have a series of departmental objectives. We go through our report on plans and look at our planned spending and how we plan to achieve our objectives.

Environment committee  Yes.

Environment committee  At the federal level, yes, it is.

Environment committee  The draft strategy was published last February and was out for a 120-day consultation period. We sent copies to this committee and others and to national aboriginal organizations, environmental NGOs, and a wide range of provincial and territorial governments. Over the course of the consultation period, we received, I think, probably in the tens of thousands of website visits.

Environment committee  Tony can add more, but for example, the commissioner did ask us for more precision in some of the targets we use. We got this comment from him in June, and we went back over the summer with our partner departments and worked on targets to see where we could add more detail to those targets, more precision.

Environment committee  I would certainly agree that we have moved forward a lot. We have improved the reporting on sustainable development strategies throughout the federal government in a unified way that was not done prior to the federal sustainable strategy. It's hard to compare across countries, but we're certainly one of the leading countries internationally in providing that kind of information.

Environment committee  Thank you, Chair. We're pleased to be here today to speak to the committee on the programs raised in the commissioner's report. I'm joined by my colleague, Bob McLean, who's the executive director of the Canadian Wildlife Service, and I also have another colleague, Tony Young, who's the director general of the sustainability directorate at Environment Canada.