Public Accounts committee  That's correct, sir.

Public Accounts committee  Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. I must say I'm delighted to be here to discuss chapter 10 of our 2008 status report, tabled in Parliament on March 6. As you mentioned, joining me at the table is Paul Morse, principal responsible for this chapter, and David Willey, lead direc

Environment committee  Before I ask Mary Anne Strong to comment, I'd like to say this. One of the frustrations in this chapter, Mr. McGuinty, as we look at what I think is a very important issue, is that departments have from time to time put in place management structures and systems to do these thing

Environment committee  I don't mean to hog the floor, but I would like to provide an overall comment on this report. I've been saying it outside the committee, and I'd better say it to the committee as well. To me, in this report of 14 chapters there are four basic messages. It's certainly not all bad

Environment committee  Thank you very much. Let me address the second one first and the first one second, if I may. In terms of the national sustainable development strategy, we talked about that a bit on Monday. What we've been encouraging, through our reports, is a federal government strategy, wh

Environment committee  Yes, that was on the aquatic invasive species.

Environment committee  Well, we've looked at a number of them. We've looked at 15 departments, Mr. McGuinty, in this particular chapter, chapter 9. Health, I'm told, is a good example of a department that did not do things well, and you would have expected them to.

Environment committee  Let me just jump in here, and I might get my colleague Mary Anne Strong to comment if she wishes. There are some good things that have happened in that area, on that file. It's not all bad, even though the system isn't working the way it should. There have been some courses dev

Environment committee  If I could respond to your second question, Mr. Watson, I think I mentioned earlier, departments have given quite specific responses, with timelines and whatnot, to the recommendations we made. That is a great thing. They're really trying to work with us to get some commitments,

Environment committee  I'll ask my colleague, Andrew Ferguson, who's responsible for that chapter, to comment in a minute. In that area, we found that the government has a sense of the threats to these areas, but it really hasn't monitored yet whether these threats are getting more severe or declining

Environment committee  Yes, Mr. Warawa, we are. We're going back, in some cases, to 1998. But mainly, it's over the past decade. The audits, the 14 re-audits, as we called them a minute ago, have been directed at issues, but they have not been directed at any one government or any one parliament.

Environment committee  That's correct.

Environment committee  Thank you very much for that question. Perhaps I'll ask my colleague, Richard Arseneault, who's responsible for that chapter and the other two in the first set, to respond.

Environment committee  Oh, for sure. Mr. Cullen, in the work we did and reported last week, no, we didn't look at that.

Environment committee  I'll perhaps have my colleague, Mr. Arseneault, add a word or two after a minute. But from what I can see, Mr. Cullen, there doesn't seem to be any kind of mechanism within the federal government to look at issues like climate change, and many other issues that are part of the en