Environment committee   was the subsidies to the oil and gas industry and the federal efforts to address climate change—and how in fact that was reconciled. We discussed the petition, and the response to the petition, on page 3 of chapter 5, “Environmental Petitions”. You can certainly find the petition

Environment committee  This is the last question. Based upon these lessons learned, what is the single focus—specific to accountability—that any climate change plan must include?

Environment committee  For given programs, we've looked at the money in detail, and that's in chapter 3. But for the overall envelope on climate change, we were looking at systems: Do they know, do they have the systems to know, and are they credible and functioning systems? We concluded the systems

Environment committee  Before we go to Ms. Leach's testimony, were you not able to find any place in government where an assessment of the overall strategy for climate change had been made, with subsidies on the one hand and subsidizing on the other?

Environment committee  I would just put this question here. Back in the fall of 2005, there was a major conference, a Kyoto conference in Montreal. Did you audit how much money the government has spent on conferences related to climate change, especially the Kyoto conference in Montreal?

Environment committee  Treasury Board must be able to answer your question. On our side, we can send back to the committee some of the figures we have on how much money was given to other foundations with respect to climate change. We have that information in the office.

Environment committee  The decision not to look at what was going on internationally and not to do some kind of comparison was made on purpose, because the bulk of the work was to cover federal programs and federal management of the climate change file. At the time, we couldn't cover anything broader

Environment committee  The main reason we looked at SDTC was that it was really the only foundation that had—and still has—a clear focus on climate change. Also, a lot of money was given to that foundation to achieve greenhouse gas reductions. Those were the main reasons why we decided to go with SDTC.

Environment committee  When we were doing our audit we found a variety of sources of information that date back to the 1990s. When the government started the national process for consulting on how to deal with climate change, information came forward from industry and other participants. Natural

Environment committee  There are at least three that have to do with climate change or the environment in general. We chose the one that was supposed to help develop a technology innovation demonstration project. We concluded that the foundation was relatively well managed, and had a good

Environment committee  I repeat, it is not my job to set the government's priorities. I understand that climate change is a priority for the federal government. I have reported on the progress made so far.

Environment committee  Are you not concerned about the fact that climate change is not one of the government's five priorities?

Environment committee  I think the results achieved so far are disturbing. If climate change remains a priority for Canada, it is disturbing that we do not have a much more aggressive and rigorous approach in order to move from slowing down emissions to actually reducing green house gas emissions

Environment committee  We often talk about the cost of inaction. It is true that inaction does involve a cost. However, in the course of our work, we saw no studies that provided any information on the cost of adaptation and the consequences of climate change, for example. This information

Environment committee  Do you think we can deal with climate change on our own, or must we be part of a bigger effort? Should there be international cooperation through treaties such as the Kyoto Protocol?