Environment committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair, for the opportunity to make a few opening remarks. I'll try to be very brief. I also wanted to say that I'm very happy to be here, as Environment Canada's chief financial officer, to respond to questions on the department's main estimates. That said, I can

Environment committee  Thank you very much for the question. I'd like to make a couple of points just to provide some context. We're a largely science-based organization. Something like 60% or 65% of our resources are based on that. In terms of our strategic outcomes, science deals with a lot of that.

Environment committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. I'll reiterate what I mentioned before. On its own, climate change is not something that you can deal with. It's an impact, if you like, based on a lot of other activities that we do. So in terms of how we organized our program activity architecture last ye

Environment committee  Again I would say it's for the government to establish priorities, and as a public servant I'm here to follow them.

Environment committee  I think our minister was here a couple of weeks ago providing the next steps. As I understand, over the next little while, 2006-07, it's really a matter of looking and consulting in a number of areas with stakeholders to be able to come up with a much more rigid environmental age

Environment committee  As I mentioned in my opening statement--I'll ask Mr. Hani Mokhtar to provide further details. I'd say that we're broadly similar. There's a real particularity with the environment budget. Personally, as chief financial officer, I'm hoping we can stabilize in future years. Our o

Environment committee  Thank you very much for your question. On a point of information, I can answer questions concerning the activities and operations of our department, but not questions about the portfolio. I was under the impression that the questions would really pertain to our department. I ca

Environment committee  Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I would like to point out that if you ever need additional information here at the table, we would be happy to provide it. As to your question concerning page 45 and the agency, concerning whether we have already spent the money in connection with the cr

Environment committee  Yes. The budget is approximately $5,183,000.

Environment committee  Yes.

Environment committee  Thank you.

Environment committee  Thank you for this. As I was trying to mention before, if you'd actually looked at the public accounts, you'd have seen that we've spent pretty much a billion dollars a year. Our main estimates focused primarily on a lot of the ongoing expenditures over time, but we do have a lo

Environment committee  Thank you very much for this question. It's somewhat technical, but as you know, the previous government was in a position to assess all climate change programs. This review enabled us to determine to what extent the programs would go forward. The $34.5 million and the amounts t

Environment committee  For 2006-2007?

Environment committee  I'm looking at page 8-5 of the estimates, and here we have $803 million versus prior years of $835 million, so I'm not quite sure where the member came from with the $92 million.